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

Jim was frequently called on to present material to the board of directors of the company for which he worked. All went well for his first year in the job. Then at one meeting he got confused by the questions being thrown at him and got his figures muddled up. In a lather of embarrassment he extricated himself as well as he could and went back to his office. From then on he felt thoroughly stressed and developed tension headaches during the days prior to a board meeting knowing that he ‘always got his figures muddled at board meetings’.

Deletion

Deletion is the second kind of individual filtering. In this you ignore certain things that happen and focus on others. You may ignore the good things and then feel stressed because you are aware of their absence.

Mrs G. had come to my office several times complaining of many health problems, all of which she attributed to stress, and largely to the stress of her marriage.

‘My husband no longer cares,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t care how I’m feeling and he thinks I’m stupid. He either ignores me or contradicts what I say and argues with me. I can’t cope with the children, he undermines my authority and I can’t keep going this way.’

Eventually I decided I needed to see them both together so she brought Mr G. in with her on her next visit. He sat in a chair beside her and rested his arm along the back of hers in a protective gesture. As he introduced himself he explained that he was worried about his wife’s health and willing to do anything he could to help.

For the first 10 minutes she spoke and I asked questions. Mr G. remained quiet but observed her and me closely with obvious concern for her showing on his face. Eventually Mrs G. said, ‘And I’ve had a headache every single day with the stress of it all.’

‘No, dear, you didn’t have a headache at the weekend, remember, we remarked on it.’

‘There you are,’ she said angrily, leaning towards me, ‘see what I mean, he doesn’t care and he contradicts me all the time.’

One look at Mr G.’s face showed his progression from happy optimism that she had been headache-free for the weekend to resignation at her outburst.

She had followed her habit of filtering out the care he was expressing by his body language and the 10 minutes during which he had listened to every word she said without a contradiction. Her filtering and her expectations were leading her to have the type of experience she expected to have. It was going to be another bad day.

Distortions

Distortions are probably the easiest type of filtering to describe. Your boss gives you a bunch of flowers, delighted with the work you have done and you think ‘what does he want from me now’. Or the children come home from school with a present for you and you wonder what crime they have committed. Perhaps you are invited to a party and think ‘they’ve only asked me because they feel they must’. Or perhaps you are not invited because they have only asked their friends who are interested in music. You’re not, and yet you choose to assume they don’t like you enough to want you.

There are more ways of distorting situations, remarks, looks and so forth than there are people. We all do it all the time; it is impossible not to. No-one can be totally objective; we are all biased by our past experiences.

Good and bad days 2

Think back to the good day and the bad day that started this section and we will see how filters could apply to them.

On the bad day you have woken up late, you’ve tripped getting out of bed, run the cold instead of the hot tap in the shower, burnt the toast and discovered the milk was sour. Expecting the rest of the day to be full of problems, you filtered out of your mind the green traffic lights through which you sailed and focused on the red ones that stopped you. You ignored the smiles on the faces of the happy people you met and focused on the people who were cross. You hurried past the friendly check-out girls in the first two shops and then were stressed when you were kept waiting by the slow girl in the shoe shop who was new at the job. The pleasant ‘good morning, have you time to come in for a coffee?’ from a usually quiet neighbour could have set you wondering what she wanted to complain about when all she wanted was to cheer you up a bit. You could then have gone home safe in the knowledge that the day had been as awful as you had known it would be from the start and spent the evening complaining of the stress you were under, saying: ‘I knew it was going to be a bad day from the start. All the traffic lights were red [generalization from a few], no-one smiled at me [deletion], the shop assistants were hopeless [deletion] and the neighbour probably wants me to baby-sit [distortion].’

On the other hand, consider the good day. The clothes you wanted to wear were all clean, the sun shone, you caught your bus and got to work exactly on time and decided that this was going to be a great day. In this case you would have ignored the office cross-patch [deletion] and enjoyed the humour of the new junior. You would have focused on all the things that went right [deletion of the problems] and been sufficiently relaxed that when the boss complained of errors in your work you showed your concern for the extra pressure he was under to make him so touchy [a distortion in your favour].

Coming home you could have described the pleasant day you’d had and anticipated the chat you would have with the neighbour who had asked you to drop in, not realizing that she felt guilty for not including you in her recent dinner party [a distortion, again in your favour].

The person having the bad day would have been aware of all the problems in the office of the second, happy, person and the second person would have been aware of all the green traffic lights and smiling assistants in the day of the first, unhappy person. Same day, different people, different experiences, the final result depending on your expectations as to how the day would be. Your stress level depended on your expectations and on your filtering.

Your reality

In these examples several things are clear. The day doesn’t exist independently of you. Objectively it is neither a good nor a bad day. The day, in these examples, was what the person involved chose to make of it. The first person focused on so many of the things that weren’t perfect that she created for herself a great deal of stress and aggravation. No matter what happened during the day, good or bad, she had focused on the bad and was feeling thoroughly stressed and unhappy. Her neck muscles were tense and sore, the spasms in her blood vessels had created a headache and when she sat down to dinner she was so uptight she got indigestion. All these problems she put down to the stress in her life. When a friend told her to take up yoga or go to relaxation classes she glowered at him muttering that it was all very well for him, he didn’t have to deal with the stresses she had.

When a colleague phoned the woman who’d had the good day and talked about the office cross-patch and the boss who was never satisfied she would have been surprised to find that her friend had hardly noticed these and that she was still happy and relaxed and looking forward to a good dinner and an enjoyable evening.

Filters exist. If you can make them work in your favour rather than against you, you can have a happy and relaxed day instead of a tense and stressful day. It is your choice.

A friend who I’ll call Sara is a perenially happy optimist. Living in a different city I see her only occasionally but speak to her on the phone often. On one of our Christmas get-togethers she mentioned what a wonderful year it had been for her. I stared at her in surprise. She had her own business, a pleasant daytime restaurant, and it had suffered a major fire as a result of the faulty wiring about which she had several times complained to the landlord. Later burglars had broken into her house and stolen her TV, video machine and a lot of clothing. Her boyfriend of several years had left her and a car crash had left her unable to compete in the dancing competition for which she had been training.

Interested to see her reaction I listed all these things for her. She looked a little surprised and then reluctantly admitted that all those things had happened.

‘However,’ she said, ‘I felt good most of the year and lots of good things came out of it.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, look at the restaurant now. I may have lost three months of business but at least I had a bit of a holiday in that time. It is now newly decorated and looks fantastic and business is picking up again. I got insurance money for the things that were stolen so I now have a new model TV and video, and you know how I love to buy clothes and keep complaining that I have no room for them in the wardrobes. I miss Bob but I must admit I’m enjoying the freedom after five years with him and look at my lovely new car.’

‘What about the dancing that you had to give up?’

Here she had the grace to look a bit sheepish.

‘I think I was really glad of the excuse not to compete. I only really took it up for fun, then I got talked into competing. I suppose I was glad of the excuse to give it up, and look at all the free time it has given me for my painting.’

Can’t you just hear how someone else might have described the year? It could have gone something like this;

‘This has been a dreadful year, thank goodness it’s over. It’s been one stress after another. I lost a lot of money while the restaurant was closed, I had no money coming in and now it’s barely paying its way. Burglaries are so stressful, you feel as if you’ve been violated. All those lovely clothes I lost, I could never replace them. And as for Bob, it just shows, you can’t trust men, some little thing and they up and leave you. As for that idiot in the other car, because of him I’m scared every time I drive and I’ve missed out on dancing. I’ll bet I could have won the competition too, and now my social life is nothing at all.’

It was, or would have been, the same year for both people. The events didn’t change but the interpretation and focus did and so did the experience of stress. Whatever happens around you, your personal experience depends totally on the filters you apply and the attitude you choose to take through that day or year and into the next. This is what determines your level and feeling of stress.

Creating

Now, let’s go back to the beginning of this chapter. I suggested there were two possible reasons why an anticipated good day would follow expectations and an anticipated bad one would do the same. We have discussed the first possibility, the possibility of filtering, the possibility that you filter out all events that don’t fit in with your expectations of the way the day will be.

The second possibility is that, by the very conviction of your expectations, you somehow actually create the type of day you expect to have. Let’s assume both days were your days.

On the anticipated bad day you were already in a bad mood when you left home. When you scowl at shop assistants they tend to scowl back at you. When you show a newcomer to the job that you are cross and impatient they are likely to get more confused and take even longer to get their job done. By the time you stomped into your neighbour’s house for coffee you could have been such poor company that her behaviour to you would have been affected and she might indeed have brought up the problem of the noise your children were making just to show you that she too had stresses to deal with.

On the anticipated good day you would have smiled at everyone you met, been pleasant to the people in the office and generally created good humour around you. Even a cross boss responds positively to a happy smiling member of his staff and is likely to have been less cross than he would have been had you been grumbling about the stresses in your life.

Martin is a typical example of the way your attitude can create your outcome. He had a good position in the city, in the head office of the company. Then he was asked to go to an industrial area and head up a section of the company that was in trouble. He hated it. The position was beneath him, he missed the acknowledgement of his peers, the whole organization was sluggish, his staff were suspicious of him, corning in from outside with new ideas, and they took his appointment as a criticism from head office.

As a result Martin started to complain of the stress he was under. He became cross in the office and barked at the staff when they were too slow. Although excellent in his technical area he had trouble motivating the people in the plant and the outside contractors. Each day he was met with resistance.

‘It’s no good,’ Martin thought. ‘None of them like me, and I don’t like them much.’ So he settled down to endure and make the best of it, getting an ulcer in the process.

Then he noticed a new man in administration. Each time they met the man smiled at him and hoped he was having a good day. Tentatively Martin started to smile back. Then he started to smile at other people, and they smiled back. Gradually he became more optimistic about the future until one day he realized how much more supportive his staff were and how much more relaxed he felt.

As his own behaviour and expectations had changed so had the world around him. He had significantly lowered his experience of stress by his change of attitude and the results this change had produced. Again he is an example of the way your thoughts and your attitudes can change your experience and thereby change your stress level.

Can your thoughts change the world?

For the adventurous, who like to explore further, there is yet another possibility to consider. Your thoughts may, as we have seen, influence other people and events by the way you look, speak and behave and the impact this has on others. It is also possible that there are other more subtle effects. We talk of vibes. You can probably think of a time when you picked up on what someone else was thinking. Perhaps you were about to phone them when they rang you. Perhaps you were about to invite them to stay when they phoned and said they were coming to town and could you spare a room for the night. Perhaps, with your thoughts, you can actually change the world, change your experiences and thus further create or reduce the stress in your life.

Before you retort that this is a bit far-fetched consider the following. Many of today’s atomic physicists and related scientists are coming to the belief that thought has an effect on the way sub-atomic particles function (e.g. Fritjof Capra in The Turning Point, Flamingo, 1983). If this is so then thought also has an effect on atoms and the way they function. These in turn affect the way whole molecules function and molecules can affect the way your tissue and thus your body, including your brain, functions. Therefore it is possible that your thoughts can affect the physical substances of your body, other people’s bodies and the objects in the world around you.

This in turn means it is possible that your thoughts can indeed affect objects as well as people and, by your thoughts, you can change what occurs in your life and therefore your stress levels. Indeed some atomic physicists have suggested that matter is the lowest form of consciousness.

Remember too that, with the work of Einstein, we know that energy and matter are interchangeable. If this is taken to its logical conclusion then it is indeed possible that by the energy of your thoughts you can affect physical matter and the way it behaves. As far back as 1935 this seemingly modern concept was expressed thus by Dr Alexis Carrel in his book Man, The Unknown. ‘The mind is hidden within the living matter … completely neglected by physiologists and economists, almost unnoticed by physicians. Yet it is the most colossal power of this world.’ He also wrote ‘Each state of consciousness probably has a corresponding organic expression ... Thought can generate organic lesions ...’