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

You can deal with specific emotions more easily than with unidentified ‘stress’. Finding the root cause of the problem will enable you to solve the problem rather than just deal with it. Here we will be working together to find the specific cause of your feelings of stress and then to resolve the issues involved.

Once you have done this you no longer have to deal with stress, you no longer need to feel stressed, and it is easy. The solution, once you have grasped it, is not something that you have to work at remembering to do. You do not have to be disciplined and force yourself to deal with the problems in the new way. The new way, once you fully grasp it, becomes the obvious, easy and most satisfactory way of dealing with the challenges in your life. It is like walking through a peaceful and newly discovered mountain pass rather than having to struggle to climb the rugged and dangerous mountain. Just as you do not have to discipline yourself not to struggle over the rugged mountain to get to the next valley, once you have discovered the easy pass, so it is with this new way of dealing with the situations that arise in your life. It is much easier than the old approach.

This book is divided into two parts involving respectively your emotions and your physical health. Before you start on your journey it is important for you to consider whether or not there is a physical basis for any of the stress you are feeling. A number of physical health problems can lead to you feeling stressed, uptight, easily irritated, depressed or anxious.

The first, and major, part of the book covers your own internal emotional and intellectual responses to situations and the ways in which these can be changed. The second part covers the physical health problems that can generate feelings of stress. If you think there is a physical health problem to be solved then take a quick look at Part II. After all, there is little point in working through Part I and searching for problems in your apparently happy childhood when the real cause of your present situation is the tension caused by consuming a food to which you are allergic, the jitters caused by hypoglycaemia or the emotional disturbances resulting from an excess of Candida albicans in your system.

You may indeed have unresolved issues resulting from your parents’ divorce or your feelings of being second best as a child, but focusing on these will be of only partial help if you neglect your nutrition and suffer physical ill-health as a result. Most people will find that both parts of the book are important and helpful.

Do not be misled by the fact that the second part is the shorter of the two. It is meant as a guideline, to point you in the direction in which you need to go for better physical health. The first part is the longer of the two, as here we explore the emotional aspects of stress in greater detail than the physical ones. It offers some new concepts on ways to deal with stress, concepts that have been used extensively with patients and workshop participants and produced exciting results, concepts that, therefore, warrant a more extensive explanation and discussion.

It is now time to outline the various components of the book in greater detail.

Part I: The emotional aspects of stress

Your first challenge starts right here. The following 10 points are fundamental to the method of dealing with stress presented in this book. Read these 10 points before you read the rest of the book and as you do so, become aware of your own reactions to them and, more importantly, write these down.

You will almost certainly feel like arguing with some, if not most, of the points listed. You may want to claim that things are not your fault, that you cannot change things but are stuck in a highly stressful situation. You may argue that there is nothing to be done about the stresses in your life or that if there is then someone else should be doing it. You may insist that things are so bad there is no way out and the future can only be worse. Write these thoughts down.

You may protest that the ideas expressed are familiar to you, that you have read or heard them before, that you have done the things that are suggested and yet you still feel stressed. Write these comments down.

Keep these notes handy. Read the book and do the (mental) exercises suggested. Make the changes that seem appropriate to you. Then, when you have completed the book, read this section again with your original notes beside you and discover how much you have changed.

Once you have done this you will realize fully how much less stressed you are, how much better you are at handling your life and how much more in control and happy you are.

Having said all that, it is worth pointing out that, like the instruction to write down your goals, 95 per cent of you won’t do it, 5 per cent of you will. If you do you will get far more out of this book than if you don’t. I am assuming that you are one of the five per cent who will.

There is one further task for you to do before you start. Make a list now of all the things that stress you in your life and the reasons why you find these things stressful. Include all the big stresses in your life but also all the small stresses, the little things that cause you problems. Some of them may seem too small to mention but write them all down now. You will then be able to use this list as you go through the book. Any time you have an insight into one of your stresses you will be able to check it off as something you can now deal with in a different and more peaceful and productive way.

Stop reading now. Follow the above suggestions. Write this list down before you read on. This is essentially a practical book, not a book to be read through fast and taken in passively. The method works, if you do. Make your list and then read on.

You are in for an exciting journey in personal growth and development. If you follow through with the things you will read about you will also find that life is a lot less stressful for you in the future.

Dealing with external stressors

• If you can change the external stressors in your life then do so. If you feel cold, put on more clothes. If you hate your house and can move, do so. If a divorce is really essential then get on with it.

• If you cannot change the external stressors, then working with the following points will help you to reduce your feelings of stress. Even if you can change the external factors, working with the following points will help you to create a stress-free future faster than you could otherwise do.

Here we go.

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. There is no such thing as a universal stress.

This covers a controversial and, at the same time, exciting approach to stress. The controversial hypothesis presented here is that there is no such thing as stress. There is only your own, individual, response to situations. This may set you thinking and even protesting. Yet we will persist with the idea. According to this hypothesis there is no such thing as a universal stress ‘out there’ that comes to ‘get you’. There is only you as an individual and your response to a situation.

Most people find speaking in public to be a highly traumatic experience. A few people love doing it and thrive on it. Many people find a cocktail party or a similar social gathering to be a high point in their social calendar. Some people find this a highly stressful experience. They are frightened of what people will think, unsure of what they will say or do and delighted when the evening is over. Most people love a chance to lie on a sunny beach and soak up the sun as they let the tensions ooze out of their life. A few people find this a highly stressful situation, feeling frustrated at the lack of things to do and accomplish. Most people hate wars and fighting. A few people look for wars and are only happy when in highly dangerous situations. Some people find routine jobs boring and stressful, other people love them for their predictability and their routine. Some people feel stressed by challenge. Others respond to and thrive on it.

There is no single thing that is a universal stress. There is only your response to the outside world and the situations it provides. These you will either enjoy and respond to positively or will dread and fear. When you fully understand this you have made the first step in recognizing and then reducing the stress in your life. The next step is up to you.

2 Feeling stressed is your choice and you can choose to continue or to stop. It is up to you to make the changes.

Since stress is an individual thing experienced by you in response to both external factors and your own inner interpretation of them, you can be in control. If you are willing to change your response you can reduce or eliminate your feelings of stress.

Will you continue on your present path or are you willing to learn more about yourself? Are you willing to change yourself so that you do not respond to the outside events with all the reactions that you now group together under the heading of stress?

Your immediate answer may well be, yes, of course I am willing to change, I do not want to go on feeling stressed. However, a surprising number of people are not willing to be the ones to change. They think other people should change first. Others insist they are willing to change yet they do not do so. Others change a little and then stop. Perhaps they think that other people should now change too. Perhaps they think that there has not been sufficient benefit from the changes they have made. Just a few people are willing to change, and keep on changing and developing, until their life is just the way they want it and their stress is negligible.

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

Finding out what causes you to feel stressed tells you more about yourself than about the stress. Some people like responsibility, some don’t. Your response says more about you than about the responsibility. Some people like solitude, other people don’t. Your response says more about you than about solitude.

The next step is for you to find out why a perceived stress in your life is indeed stressful for you, and why it makes you feel uncomfortable. The causes behind your response almost certainly lie somewhere in your past. After all, they can hardly come from the future, and the present is but a fleeting moment. You may have to search back to infancy and childhood. You may only have to go back to times in your earlier adult life.

One woman, Rosemary H., felt stressed every time her queue in the supermarket was not the fastest. By using various techniques that are described later in this book, she came to realize that this reaction stemmed from a feeling that if she was served last she was not getting the attention she deserved, and this in turn meant that she was not good or important enough. This came from a childhood where she was the youngest of four and her older siblings were always calling her stupid simply because she, being three years younger than the youngest of them, could not keep up.

When she understood this and realized how many things she had achieved in her life, she was able to develop the assurance she needed to be ready to drop the belief that she was not good enough. Her feelings of stress in queues then evaporated. Instead she spent the time usefully in thought and contemplation, or took something to read with her so the time in the queue wasn’t wasted.

Another woman felt stressed every time she thought about the fact that her husband, a senior executive laid off in the recession, was no longer supporting her. The money was not the issue – they had reserve assets and his golden handshake. Her problem was a subconscious belief that if he didn’t make the effort to go out and look for another job, hard to get at his age, and if he didn’t actively work to support her, he didn’t care, if he didn’t care then he didn’t love her, if he didn’t love her she was no longer part of the loving and nurturing relationship that she craved.

Her stress came from the underlying fear of not being loved and nurtured, not from the more obvious cause of having a non-working husband. The stress she felt both caused her direct distress and led to overeating. This increased her weight which in turn made her feel more stressed, inadequate and unlovable. Once she identified the real problem she was able to discuss it with her husband.

The solution was not for him to go out and work again but rather for him to show her how much he loved her. Even more importantly, she had to develop her own sense of self-worth since, without that, all the loving he gave her would be insufficient for her to feel secure in that love. Resolving her beliefs about being inadequate and unlovable helped her to deal with the situation and reduce her experience of stress. She was then able to enjoy the free time her husband had and they started to share a number of hobbies. In the long run her recognition of the underlying problem brought them closer together.

Learning how to look at the subconscious beliefs that make you respond to outside events and experiences in a manner that you label ‘feeling stressed’ can lead you to a number of positive results. Provided you act on what you learn, are willing to change and to put the information to good use, it can take the stress out of your life, increase your self-respect and self-confidence, increase your positive plans and improve the outlook for the future.

4 Be willing to change what you are doing if what you are doing is not working and has not been generating the desired result.

Have you ever seen anyone beating their head against a brick wall? Unless they are mentally ill, if they beat their head against a brick wall and it hurts they will soon stop doing it. Yet at the emotional level this is what many people do for much of their lives and it leads to enormous stress. They continue in behaviour patterns that result in rows, in disappointment, in irritation and frustration, in boredom, in being let down. Sometimes they even realize what they are doing yet refuse to change; more often they don’t.

Harold sat across from me telling me about his ulcers and how stressed he felt every day. He ran a small retail business, a delicatessen and a takeaway food bar with lunch-time catering. He was very successful but at great cost to his health. The work was intense all morning as the staff got the food bar ready for the lunch-time crowd and for the regular orders to be delivered to nearby offices. Then came the lunch-hour rush when everyone wanted their sandwiches or take-away food in a hurry. Once or twice a week there would be a sudden phone call during the morning for a rush order of 50 sandwiches to be delivered by one o’clock to an office that was not on the regular list, or for a double order to be delivered to one of the regular customers. This upset Harold’s routine and caused him enormous stress. So much so that he blamed the stress of his job for everything else that went wrong in his life and for his ulcer.

‘There is nothing I can do. How can I stop feeling stressed? I shout at the staff and tell them to work harder but they won’t. They don’t seem to care, and it all comes back to me.’

Was he willing to put on more staff? No, that cost too much money. Was he willing to look for better staff? No, that took too much time, he worked non-stop as it was. Was he willing to tell people their orders had to be in by nine o’clock? No, he might lose customers. Was he willing to sell up and find a more routine business? No, this was not the time to sell. He had just built the business up and started to make good money.

Harold was not willing to change. As I asked him to consider other options all he could focus on was the reasons why there was no alternative to his present actions.

Stop beating your head against a brick wall and be willing to change. If you are not, then you must ask yourself why you are not, what benefit you are getting from your present course of action. Harold was not willing to change. Ultimately that is an individual’s right, but it does not lead to a reduction in stress.

Christina’s problems were with her boss and her family and the demands that, she felt, they each made on her time. Her boss kept giving her work to do at the end of the day with the result that she stayed back to complete it, missed her express bus home and got in too late to cook dinner for a tired and irate husband who had arrived home an hour earlier and for two teenage children who were no help around the house. She told me that her job was stressful, so was the boss, so was the travelling, so was her husband who expected her to do all the housework as well as her job and so were the children who wouldn’t help. She had plenty to say, to me, to her boss, to her husband, to the children and to anyone who would listen about the problems they and other people caused in her life. But what she was saying and what she was doing weren’t working. Her words and her deeds did not change the amount of stress she experienced.

She had told her boss repeatedly that she had to have the last letters before three o’clock so she could get them typed and finished and get the express bus home. She had told her husband she couldn’t help being late, it was the boss’s fault. She had told the children over and over again that it was time they did some of the chores round the house. She kept talking. It wasn’t working. But she kept doing it.

What she really wanted was for them to change. The real solution was for her to change. She could either change her job or change her reactions or change the way she handled things. If she didn’t she could continue as she was and complain and feel stressed. Until she was ready to change she would feel stressed, no matter what changes occurred externally. Like Harold, she had to be willing to change. In addition, she had to be willing to take responsibility for the way things were and not to blame everything on the other people involved.

We will follow Harold and Christina’s stories as we move to the next point.

5 You are responsible for 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.