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

By returning to the starting phrase each time you will find you get much more interesting and useful information. You will get a truer window into your subconscious and into some of your hidden and buried memories.

Consider the above completions. This was the list Jennifer got by doing the process above, by running the phrase ‘I feel stressed because…’. At first they were logical and commonplace completions. They were the reasons many people give for feeling stressed. Many people feel they have too much to do. They worry that they will not get their various tasks done in the time available and that if this happens things will get on top of them and they won’t be able to cope. However, as Jennifer relaxed into the process, her subconscious came up with the last two, ‘They’ll think I’m stupid’ and ‘I am stupid, I can’t cope’.

When you get something useful and interesting like that it is worth exploring it. Jennifer was told to run the phrase ‘Being stupid means…’. When she did she came up again with several everyday things at the start such as not being clever, not being bright, not being able to do things. Then she found herself saying ‘… my husband won’t love me’.

As she said this she looked first surprised, and then as if the pennies were beginning to drop. During the discussion that ensued it soon became clear to her that she was afraid she would lose her husband if she could not keep up with him. He had started in a junior position in the company for which he worked but had been promoted several times and had a lot of responsibility. His work now involved some international travel and the responsibility of entertaining a number of clients. Jennifer felt he had had the chance to grow and expand his horizons while she had been cooped up at home with three children. If she couldn’t do all the tasks allotted to her then, how, she wondered subconsciously, could he expect her to go on being worthy of being his wife? Once she realized this she had the start in her plan to deal with the situation.

None of this had come up during logical discussion. It took this technique to unearth the deeper fear. Now you see what a useful tool this ‘running a phrase’ can be.

You may find you get several different bits of information. Keep going with the one phrase until you have a large number of responses. Then choose the one that seems a little disconnected, as we did above, shape a phrase around that and run it. You may then take one of these responses and run a third phrase, and so on.

When that is complete go back to another of the original completions. In Jennifer’s case we ran ‘Being stupid means…’ until we had milked it dry. We then followed up on ‘… I’ll be in trouble’ by running the phrase ‘Being in trouble means…’ and got a variety of phrases and then ‘… my husband will leave me’.

Clearly this was a major fear for Jennifer and dominated much of her thinking. She was encouraged to talk it over with him. When she did she found this was far from his thinking, that in fact he found his home with its quiet domesticity and basic values a relief and haven after corporate life.

One thing I can guarantee, provided that you relax completely into the process and allow your subconscious to speak, when you run a phrase you will be surprised at the results. They will certainly help you in your bid to become more relaxed and calm. They will almost certainly change your life for the better in other ways too as you learn more about yourself and your reactions.

We will consider another example. James was at university and finding the whole situation stressful. He ran the phrase ‘A reason university is stressful is …’ and got a number of completions such as ‘… there’s lots of new stuff I have to learn’, ‘… there are all those tests I have to swot for’, ‘… the other boys speak better than I do and they laugh at me’. All these were fairly standard reasons for feeling stressed. Then he came up with ‘… Dad resents me’.

He then ran the phrase ‘Dad resents me because …’ and got completions that included ‘… I’m not working’, ‘… he has to support me’, ‘… he thinks I’m not good enough’. It was this last one that really hit home. He said that he thought his father was proud of him going to university and impressed that he had got a place. Yet deep down there was this fear that his father thought he was not good enough, not good enough to pass his exams and obtain a degree. Eventually he recognized that this was, in fact, his Ultimate Negative Belief, discussed in the chapter on Affirmations.

Here is a clear example of the way your mind works. If you try to analyse the situation logically to find out why you are stressed you will almost certainly run into all the logical and practical reasons, the obvious ones. When you let the subconscious mind throw up the information it has you can learn a lot more.

Use this technique of running a phrase whenever you are asked to in this book. You can also use it at other times, times of your choice and under any circumstance. For instance, if you are getting angry in a particular situation run ‘The reason I’m angry is …’. ‘Another reason I’m angry is …’. Note the slight change in wording for the second and subsequent repeats of the original phrase.

Or you may be sitting around with friends enjoying a chat, then feel yourself getting anxious. Run the phrase ‘A reason I’m getting anxious is …’, ‘Another reason I’m getting anxious is …’.

Remember, as a wonderful book called the Course of Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace, 1975) says ‘You are never upset for the reason you think’. This technique of running a phrase is an excellent way of finding out the real reason you are upset. Use it at every possible opportunity.

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

THE Emotional Aspects of Stress (#u8493f708-823e-52a1-8faf-1c1e985c853d)

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_fb1f928d-dd2c-570d-a282-f960c676f44a)

Creative Thought (#ulink_fb1f928d-dd2c-570d-a282-f960c676f44a)

Your feelings of stress are a product of the way you think. When you think things are going to be bad, difficult and stressful then you experience fear, worry and stress. When you think they are going to be good, exciting and fruitful you feel happy, expectant and fortunate. These diametrically opposite results are the consequence of diametrically opposite ways of thinking. So let’s consider the way you think.

The title of this section, creative thought, may seem to imply that there is non-creative thought as well as creative thought – not so. All your thoughts are creative, one way or another, and your thoughts create your reality.

People think in different ways. Some people think only, or largely, in words, some people think only, or mainly, in pictures and others think only with their feelings. Most of us, however, think in all three modes, even if one mode does predominate, and the combination of all three gives you your total ‘thought’. For our present purposes we will use ‘thought’ to cover all three modes of experience.

If your thoughts create your reality and part of your reality is the experience of stress then it should be possible to change the experience of stress by changing your thoughts. This is the concept we are going to explore.

Good and bad days

Consider some of the good and bad days you have had. On a bad day you might wake up late, you trip getting out of bed, run the cold instead of the hot tap in the shower, burn the toast, find the milk is sour and mutter to yourself that this is going to be an awful day. After that it probably will be.

On a good day you may find everything goes right. The clothes you want to wear are all clean, the sun shines, you catch your bus and get to work exactly on time and decide that this is going to be a great day. And it probably will be.

How does this come about? There are two possibilities. Either you focus your attention on the things that fall within your expectations and, consciously and subconsciously, ignore or filter out those that don’t, or, by your focus of attention and expectation, by the subtle messages you give out, maybe even by the sheer power of your thoughts, you actually change the way things happen.

Filtering

The first of these two possibilities involves filtering the input you receive from the world around you and the events happening in your life. In this way if you expect it to be a good day you will focus your attention on the good and positive things that happen; if you expect it to be a bad day you will focus on the problems and setbacks that occur.

You may insist you do not filter, that you see the world rationally and objectively, as it is. However, if you are willing to open your mind and see past your normal mode of thinking you may be in for some surprises.

You filter the world in which you live in a number of ways and the ways in which you do this can have a great bearing on the amount of stress you experience.

Species filters

As human beings we filter out much that is going on around us. We have ears to hear, it is true, yet they can only hear certain sounds. Dog whistles are tuned to a frequency that can be heard by a dog yet is outside the range of the human ear. Many other animals hear at a frequency that is inaudible to human beings. The same is true of vision. Some animals can see in the dark while we as human beings are blind. Our sense of smell is minimal when compared to that of many animals, and thus we filter out many major olfactory experiences that are part of the daily life of other species. We filter out the radio waves that pass through us and our environment every day, likewise the television waves, the electrical and magnetic frequencies and so forth. All these things pass us by because we do not have the sense organs to perceive them; they are filtered out by the details of our make-up as a species.

This means that you are only consciously aware of part of your environment. It also demonstrates that something doesn’t fail to exist simply because it is not detected by your senses, a point that is well worth bearing in mind.

This filtering also means that there could be a number of stressful things happening but because you are not aware of them you do not feel stressed. For instance, sounds that fall outside your auditory range will not frighten you, smells that your nose doesn’t detect will not trouble you.

Cultural filters

Secondly you learn to filter as part of your upbringing. Some things stress you because they are not what you are used to or what you consider to be normal. These same things that you find stressful could leave someone else totally calm because they fit in normally with their expectations as to the way their life would be.

Consider, for instance, the wearing of the correct clothes and shoes. John and Susan were going to visit Susan’s parents. John, who had met and lived with Susan in Australia, hadn’t yet met her parents who lived in central London and this first meeting was to be at a dinner party in their honour. Since it was the middle of a summer heatwave and they had been told that the occasion was not formal John wore a beautiful Batik shirt, smart light-coloured linen trousers and beautifully tooled leather sandals, an outfit that would have been perfect at a similar dinner had it occurred in the Australian township where he grew up.

Susan’s parents were mortified when he appeared in sandals and without socks on. They considered the evening ruined and endured it in an embarrassment of wondering what their friends would think of him. John, unaware of the social rules he was flouting, had a wonderful evening and expressed himself delighted with them as he drove home with Susan. Susan, used to John’s choices of clothing, was unsure of the reasons for her parents’ distress yet felt stressed by the tension in the air all evening. As her mother said afterwards, the shirt and light trousers were bad enough, but no-one, absolutely no-one, went to a dinner party in sandals.

Consider, however, what would have been happening had Susan been Japanese and taken John home to visit her Japanese parents. They would have felt stressed and mortified if he had worn shoes at all.

Many times when you feel stressed it is the result of things and events that are occurring in a way that does not fit in with your upbringing and expectations. If you can change these filters, change the way you view things, you can change your experience of stress.

Had Susan’s parents acknowledged that the man was more important than his clothes and had they assumed that their friends would have understood that what he wore was correct within John’s world and that he was not belittling them by dressing down, they need not have felt stressed and could have had a wonderful evening.

A western woman of conventional upbringing, used to covering her breasts at all times, could feel highly stressed when taken to a topless beach by her latest boyfriend. Yet had she been brought up in any one of many other cultures where it was perfectly natural for her to bare her breasts, such exposure could have seemed perfectly normal to her.

If events fall within your expectations of what is right, normal and safe, based on your culture and your upbringing, they probably don’t stress you. If they fall outside those expectations you probably do find them stressful.

Individual filters

The third type of filtering is done on an individual basis and there are at least three sub-filters in this group, namely, generalization, deletion and distortion.

Generalizing

The filters you apply through generalizing involve taking one experience that is bad and assuming that all such similar experiences will be bad. This then causes you to feel stressed.

Martha was a strong woman who helped her husband in the hardware store they owned. Her delight in the evenings was to take their large and strong labrador, Chappie, for a walk. When her city-bred sister, Jennifer, came to stay there was more work to be done so she asked Jennifer to walk the dog. All went well for the first week. Then on the eighth day Chappie found a smell that excited him and he took off with the lightly-built Jennifer clinging to his lead and desperately trying to keep up. Eventually she had to let go and returned home, after searching high and low, shaken and embarrassed, without him. Chappie, needless to say, was waiting quietly at the front door. From then on Jennifer refused to walk him at all saying: ‘He always runs away when I take him, I’m not strong enough to hold him.’

In this way she generalized from the one event that stressed her, ignoring the previous seven successful walks, to create a feeling of stress whenever she was faced with a large dog.