In difficult situations, do these three things to put it into proper perspective. Relax, breathe deeply, and observe without passing judgment.

It’s a threesome I’ve benefitted from frequently and especially during two trying nights in particular. Two nights out of the seven in my life when I was scheduled for next-day surgery.

But unlike the other five occasions, I was not in my home.

I was in a hospital, in pain, yet intent upon not pressing the button that would increase the morphine drip. With weights dangling from my toes and my leg strapped to a gurney to keep it aligned as I awaited my situation’s alphabet-soup solution.

To fix a J-fractured femur by screwing it to a metal rod, turning my upper leg into an impervious “I.”

While the mantra I said in my head that second night - “relax, breathe deeply, observe, don’t judge” - kept me clear-thinking and calm, sometime after that, I read such catchphrases are not as effective when expressed in the negative. Since then, I’ve replaced “don’t judge” with something I do each day, it seems, even more than I shift gears on a hilly ride.

“Look for links.”

While looking for links is good, finding them is better. Better still is that doing so helps you even when the connection is tenuous at best.

In fact - and to steal an E.L. Doctorow saying about writing - finding a link is like driving a car in fog. “You can only see as far as the headlights, but you can drive across the entire country that way.”

Another well-known American writer tells a story equally worthy of thievery. It’s about her running coach and the need to remind him - to keep to the Doctorow analogy - that his car has headlights.

When Natalie Goldberg started distance running, she enlisted the aid of a local coach who had trained runners for years. During a meeting to decide her next workouts, the coach confessed to wanting to become a writer - and having no idea how to get started.

Goldberg countered that he did since there really was no difference between starting as a writer and starting as a runner, something he had already helped dozens of people successfully do. All he had to do is look for the links between the two.

While you probably have no desire to be a novel writer, you’d probably like to improve your health in one way or another. One way to do so (and I bet you saw this coming) is to find links between feeling top notch and the things in life that either allow or prevent that.

Like sleep, or the lack there of. Or eating, whether it be healthy or, far more likely, a bit too much.

Prior Fitness Master articles have addressed the most likely reason eating too much takes place. Because the eater gets hooked to some degree on the added sugars and fat found in the 63% of the ultraprocessed foods that now make up, according to a Mayo Clinic estimate, the average American diet.

While these articles always mention the other problems inherent in UPFs, the most pressing fact is that the aforementioned add-ins when eaten in tandem are really addictive, as addictive as alcohol, according to research.

Research that published by BMJ online last October and cited in the last Fitness Master article about UPFs. This January - and how’s this for link finding? - Cell Metabolism published research online that further explains why, as Carolyn Crist contends in a WebMD article, the fat/sugar tandem is irresistible.

In short, and by using mice, this new research first establishes that the ingestion of either sugar and fat causes your body to release the neurotransmitter dopamine. Its release leads to such positive mental and emotional responses that it’s long been called the happiness hormone.

But the immediate happiness it produces when you eat a doughnut, for example, leads to eventual sadness if - to prolong that good feeling - you continually eat a second and maybe even a third. Using this doughnut scenario is oh-so appropriate because a typical glazed cruller contains close to equal amounts of both sugar and fat calorically.

And oh-so appropriate because of what research revealed next.

That combining sugar and fat in foods “supra-additively increases dopamine efflux and eating,” which creates a “subconscious drive” to consume both, which “may impede conscious dieting efforts.”

In other words, a glazed cruller to a white-collar worker on break elicits pretty close to the same response as honey to a bear just out of hibernation. Except bears hibernate because food is scarce, and white-collar workers pig out when it’s not.

And they do so in large part because the people who produce UPFs figured something out well before it became common knowledge.

That - because it affects your brain as much as your belly - eating bad food begets eating bad food.