When it feels like the birds are out to get you! 🦅

And what to do when they crap on your car ...

Imagine you’ve just had your car cleaned  - and it looks amazing!

An hour later you return from the shops to find there’s bird poo all over it. 

How do you react?

• I can’t believe they’ve done this to my car - and it’s only just been washed!

• Those ###ing seagulls!

• Just my luck - this sort of thing always happens to me.

If you have an angry reaction it can lead to the release of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. As we’ve seen in previous blogs, it’s your body’s way of responding as it feels like it’s been attacked, and thinks it needs to be ready to fight, or run away from the threat - even if it’s just a perceived danger created by a thought.

The sympathetic nervous system kicks in, your heart rate increases, sends blood to the vital organs, and your breath becomes shallower and faster. Adrenaline is released which could also stimulate your sweat glands - not fun for anyone. 

With a mind-created story of “Why did those damn birds crap on my car?”, the body thinks you’re in trouble, even though you were never actually under attack. Just the thought of the threat is enough to stimulate the stress response.

We create the drama ourselves, in our minds, which has a physiological result. “Why did they do this to me?” is enough of a narrative to get you wound up (and btw they didn’t do anything to you) .

The mind loves the drama. Why wouldn’t it, things are more exciting that way. But with the fight or flight response sending stress hormones around your body as a result, and increasing your heart rate, it just makes everything more stressful. 

To reduce the stress, you need to first become aware that you’re creating an unnecessary narrative. If you strip away the drama from the situation, what remains is just the facts of what happened. In this case, a bird messed on your car. That’s it. The rest of the narrative about ‘why have those ### birds done that!?’ or ‘what a disaster, I’ve just had it cleaned!’, is just an additional storyline your mind has decided is important. It isn’t.

This extra narrative isn’t needed, and it’s not helpful. To make matters worse, driving with adrenaline pumping through your veins can have very negative ramifications, and the distraction of your mind running over the story in your head again and again, can be a risk too. 

So next time something happens that makes you angry, and that in the scheme of things is not really significant, see if you can notice you’re having these thoughts. Then try and just accept the facts of the situation ( eg there’s bird poo on the car) and don’t get caught up in the extra layers of drama you could add on. 

Your mind thinks it’s helping, by getting ready for an imminent attack, but when it’s just unnecessary hormones pulsing through your blood, it can create major problems.

If you can step away from the unhelpful thoughts for a moment, even once, it will help. 

Let those thoughts go. You don’t need them.