From Stress to Success: 10 Steps to a Relaxed and Happy Life: a unique mind and body plan

20 The Mental-Physical Connection

21 What Your Body Needs

22 Your 10-step Health Check and Stress-reducing Regime

Resources

List of Searchable Terms

Author Biography

About the Publisher

Preface (#u8493f708-823e-52a1-8faf-1c1e985c853d)

This is a book about choices. Stress is not necessary; it can be eliminated. It is yours if you choose to experience it; equally, by the choices you make, you can avoid and eliminate stress from your experience.

You are only stressed if you think you are. You are only helpless if you think you are. You are only trapped in a situation from which you cannot escape if you think you are. By altering the way you think, your attitudes and your expectations you can choose to have a stress-free existence. In this book you will learn how to accomplish this. The changes you make in your life as a result will enable you to change the way you think and feel and will also bring about unexpected changes in the people and events around you.

There is no such entity as a stress, out there, waiting to get you. What stresses you depends on your response and says more about you than about the external factors that trigger your stress response. Learn about yourself. By developing a better understanding of yourself and your reactions, by being willing to take control of your life and your thoughts, by coming to terms with yourself and by giving yourself the respect, trust and love that you give to other people you can turn a stressful and worrying existence into days of peace and pleasure.

The aim of this book is to empower you to re-create your life. The future is yours: it can be similar to the present with its anxieties, fears and stresses, or it can be positive and peaceful.

Stress or peace, the choice is yours. This book will give you the tools and help you to make the choice and create the peace.

The following concepts and strategies are covered in Part I:

1 Stress is your own experience. It is personal to you and generated by you. It is not directly to do with things outside yourself; they are only the triggers to a response from within you, a response that is individual to you.

2 Feeling stressed is your choice and you can choose to continue or to stop. There is no such thing as a universal stress.

3 You can use the awareness of what stresses you to learn more about yourself and then use this knowledge for change (of yourself).

4 Be willing to change what you are doing – if what you have been doing has not been working, be willing to do something different.

5 You are responsible for, and have had some input into, all that happens, and has happened, in your life. Be willing to assume that you are in total control. Be willing to give up victim status.

6 Get clear on your outcome – what are you really trying to achieve? Are you trying to prove someone else wrong, to force someone else to be different, to have something to complain about, to get sympathy or attention? Do you really want to reduce your stress?

7 Know you can cope. Avoid the stress caused by fear of the unknown. Imagine the worst possible scenario. Find out how you would deal with it. Then get on with handling the present.

8 Believe in a positive future, that whatever happens is, and will be, for the best, but do this without ceasing to care and without developing a laissez-faire attitude.

9 Much stress is caused by your fear of other people’s opinions of you and your deeds. Decide who you are and who you want to be. Get a clear statement of purpose, develop your own Life Plan. Keep this plan clearly in your mind, live by it and many of your stresses will dissipate.

10 You are terrific. Most stress comes from your feelings of inadequacy. Develop full confidence in yourself, be willing to like, love and approve of yourself. If you don’t, who will?

Introduction (#u8493f708-823e-52a1-8faf-1c1e985c853d)

Since this is a book about stress it is important, from the start, to establish what we mean by stress. Many people discuss stress as if it is some sort of external agent or event that has attacked them. In fact, stress is not something external that you can define, identify and measure. Stress is the disturbance created within you by your response to a situation or activity, be it internal or external.

Stresses can be pleasant, such as the excitement caused by an anticipated pleasurable event. They can also be unpleasant and cause you distress. It is these unpleasant stressful responses to situations that we will be discussing and dealing with here.

This book will show you how to handle these unpleasant stresses in your life by a new and positive method, one that helps you to get to the real heart of the problem and solve it. In this way you can rid yourself of all your responses to situations and people that currently cause you to feel worried, anxious, fearful, angry, resentful, guilty, dominated, out of control and many other unpleasant emotions.

You will learn how to eliminate the stress from your life, once and for all. You will learn how to discover the real causes of the way you feel and how to change so that your life is stress-free and positive. You will still have challenges but they will be of your own choosing and will not distress you. Stress in itself is not bad; it is part of the challenge and excitement of life. It is the stresses that cause distress that we are aiming to eliminate.

To eliminate this stress you will not be taught first aid techniques for handling it. Techniques such as deep breathing, relaxation, meditation, learning to count to ten and so forth may indeed help you to handle the stresses you have now, provided you practise them consistently, but they will not eliminate your stresses. They may even work against you. I recently spoke with someone who said they did their relaxation techniques so well before an exam that when it was time for them to write the paper they were too relaxed to put a lot of energy into it and as a result they failed.

The ideas described here are not designed to help you cope with stress. They are designed to reduce and even eliminate the times you feel stressed, the times you feel an unpleasant response to a situation.

Identifying the problem

Most people have problems and most people put these problems down to stress. The trouble with this is that it is not specific. The statement ‘I am stressed’ does not identify the problem and so it does not lead to the finding of a solution to the situation.

Over the years countless patients have come into my practice saying that they are suffering from stress, with no details as to precisely what they mean by that, as if the term alone explained everything. It sometimes even seems that they think of it as some sort of bug they have caught, for which they are not responsible. As they might expect, inappropriately, an antibiotic from a doctor for a cold, they seem to expect a few vitamin pills or herbs from a naturopath to give them the calm they desire.

The really troublesome aspect of their approach is that their argument seems to go like this:

My life is not working at the moment, there are problems. I have too much to do, too little money, too many responsibilities, too little time. I’m not loved enough by people I love, my friends let me down, the boss is impossible, the children are a worry, the news is always bad, times are tough. If only the recession would lift, the children would behave, the boss would retire, my marriage could be the way it was in the beginning, people would expect less of me, then I would be happy.

In other words, if those outside situations changed then they would be happy. There is rarely a recognition that they could change and thus improve the situation.

There are always many seemingly rational explanations for the fact that your life is not exactly the way you want it to be. It is all too easy to assume that the solution lies outside yourself, in the world at large. The problem is that you cannot force all these external factors to change in the way you would like them to. The next assumption is that since you cannot change these external factors, you are helpless to improve your situation.

The comforting thing about this assumption and this attitude is that the problems are not your responsibility, they are not of your own making and you cannot be blamed for them. The trouble with this view is that since, for things to get better in your life, things outside your direct control have to change, you are helpless and the best you can do is to try to make the best of things and learn tolerance and acceptance.

This attitude means that the solution to your present stress must come from improving your ability to handle your present, apparently unchangeable, stresses. Thus you do relaxation exercises, deep-breathing exercises and go to classes on other stress-handling techniques, all aimed at increasing your ability to cope. Sadly, these are largely quick fixes and rarely work on a long-term and permanent basis to make your life happier and more stress-free.

The alternative method is to believe that you are indeed, in some way, responsible for the way you feel. You may not be able to control the recession, but you can control your own finances and the way you think about them. You may not be able to force the children to behave differently, but you can change the way you treat them and the way in which you respond to their behaviour. You can assume that a way does exist to create a more comfortable relationship with your boss and you can then work on discovering it.

While this approach takes away the comfort of blaming outside factors for your situation and stops you being a victim who deserves sympathy, it does give you a powerful tool in return. It encourages you to make the positive changes that will indeed lower the amount of stress you experience. So let’s explore this approach further.

The concept of stress

Stress is not a new or rare concept. Almost everyone, at some time or another, thinks they are stressed. The overworked, overworried, unhappy person knows they are stressed all the time. Worse still, they will claim their problem is (non-specific) stress rather than concern over a specific issue. Even the happiest of people will almost certainly claim to feel stressed occasionally. There are few people who have not, at one time or another, said they were stressed. Most people feel stressed, and say so, at some point. People you know do. You do, don’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this book.

It may surprise you to know that stress, as an entity, is a new concept, a concept of the past 40 or so years. Our grandparents did not grow up with stress as a familiar word. They might have said they were worried, afraid, tired or had too much to do, but they probably didn’t lump it all together and call it stress. Today, however, everyone is familiar with the concept of stress. You probably think of stress as anything difficult, troublesome, painful, challenging or harmful in your life. You may blame stress for the way you feel and the way you behave. You probably blame stress for everything that goes wrong in your life, much that goes wrong with your body and most of the things with which you cannot cope. You may then blame these problems, in turn, for making you feel even more stressed. You may even think that if you had a totally stressfree existence your life would be perfect.

If you read the papers, magazines and books and listen to the media, you will have realized that you are constantly being exposed to the idea that you should reduce the stress in your life, you should learn to cope with stress, you should overcome stress and not let it get you down. You may indeed have tried the old and hackneyed so-called remedies for stress, but the stress and your feelings of tension and diminished health have continued. You may even be feeling more stressed by your inability to profit from the books on relaxation and meditation and your inability to conquer your stress.

All too often the problem of stress can become overwhelming. When you are under great strain it is easy to lose the ability to view yourself and the situation from a realistic perspective. You may then make a number of rash decisions, based on erroneous premises and create more stress for yourself, thus generating a vicious circle.

The pace of life is faster in the 21st century than it has ever been before. In the past we spoke to our friends face to face or wrote letters; later we used the phone; now we are supposed to be able to master computers, mobile communications, the internet, IT, WAP and a multitude of technologies. In the past we walked from place to place; now we are supposed to be able to handle with equanimity crowded trains on unreliable timetables, road chaos and traffic jams or near misses in the sky. In the past we lived close to the earth with space to move and breathe freely, space to be alone or with friends; now we live in crowded towns and cities, rarely exposed to the peace of the open countryside. When some of us grew up we had a full expectation of getting a job and finding full employment for our whole working life; that is no longer the case. We used to live in a relatively unpolluted world; now we consume or are exposed to thousands of toxins, many of which affect our emotional state and mental clarity. No wonder so many people feel that stress is on the increase.

Where other books on stress tell people how to relax, how to meditate, how to do deep breathing exercises, in this book you will be taken back to the ultimate source of your stress and given assistance in identifying the specific problem. ‘Stress’, as a word on its own, is, as we have seen, too vague and non-specific. It is an amorphous monster waiting to attack and forever evading defeat. If you say you are stressed, there may seem to be little you can do about it. On the other hand, if you say you are frightened, you can identify the object of your fear and deal with it. If you say you are angry, you can identify the cause of your anger and do something about it. If you say you feel guilty, you can identify the cause of your guilt and do what is appropriate to assuage it. In phrasing the problem you also identify the area of your life with which you have to deal. By putting the problem into a large miscellaneous basket labelled ‘stress’, it loses its identity and becomes some overwhelming ogre that you cannot fight.

There are, however, several levels in this self-exploration. At the first level you may say you feel stressed. At the second level you may identify the major problem in your life as worries about money. In turn this may worry you because it may mean you cannot provide for those you love. At an even deeper level you may fear that if you cannot provide for them they will leave you, or they will think badly of you. Thus you will, in time, get down to the ultimate problem, your own insecurity about yourself.