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

James Jeans in The Mysterious Universe (Macmillan, 1930) said ‘Today there is a wide measure of agreement ... that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.’

In these quotations we have the concept that different thoughts, or experiences of stress, can generate specific health problems, and the concept that you can use the power of your mind to alter the world around you, as well as your perception of that world, and thus your experience of stress.

This is not a necessary belief to have. You don’t have to believe that your mind has the power to change matter to be able to reduce your stress or to handle the ideas in the rest of the book. But if you are willing to consider the idea that your thoughts can have a physical effect it is worth considering the possibility of this way of reducing the stress you experience and it gives you another powerful tool with which to work.

Your thoughts are enormously powerful. Use this creative power to create a stress-free life rather than a stressful life.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_717ff7d3-ad65-582c-8d33-005b867bbd73)

More Thoughts (#ulink_717ff7d3-ad65-582c-8d33-005b867bbd73)

In the last chapter we considered the possibility that you create for yourself the type of life and experience that you expect to have. It was suggested that you may do this by the way you view what happens in your life and the ways in which you filter it by generalizations, deletions and distortions. We also considered the possibility that, by your words and actions, you influence the people and events around you as your words and deeds impact on them. Further, for the more adventurous, it was suggested that you may, by thought power alone, actually influence events.

These are interesting ideas and can have a lot to do with the way you manage stress. Let’s consider now some ways in which they can be put into practice.

What to do

If you consider the above ideas as theories but do nothing with them, they won’t help you to reduce your stress levels. You may say you believe in the ideas but that in your case there is nothing you can do. Your stresses are different, they are real, and all you can do is endure them. I have found, while seeing patients, that it takes courage to face these possibilities, the possibility that you are, in some way, contributing to your experience of stress. At the same time, I have found that when people do make the necessary changes, their lives can become exciting, wonderful and stress-free.

If you claim to believe and accept all that is said, yet say that your case is different and that the ideas wouldn’t work for you, it will be easy for you to do nothing, or to do so little that you remain stressed, thus further proving that these ideas do not and will not work for you. They do, they will and they can, but you must remain open-minded. You must also put the ideas into practice as actively and consistently as you can.

I recall a seminar in which I was to give the second of four two-hour talks on the power of thought in relation to health to a group of about 300 people who all had cancer. They were all well-read in the ideas that I was about to present regarding the ability of human beings to use the power of their minds to change their physical health. Furthermore, the previous speaker had given an excellent compilation of the many times in the medical health literature in which positive health outcomes had occurred in people with cancer who had a positive mental attitude and vice versa.

As I started I wondered how I could make my session interesting and not leave them feeling bored and claiming that they had heard all I had to say many times before and that I had given them nothing new or useful. Finally I decided to ask a few questions.

My question ‘Wasn’t the last speaker excellent?’ produced claps, cheers and positive acknowledgements.

My next question ‘How many of you believe the information he gave and do believe that by your own mental attitude you can change your life?’ brought such a huge show of hands that I asked the opposite question.

‘How many of you do not believe that your thoughts can make any difference?’ This brought a show of about three hands only.

My next question was ‘How many of you are currently leading a life that is exactly the way you want it?’ No hands went up. This was not surprising since they all had cancer or were accompanying someone with cancer.

I had made sure that everyone looked around at the responses to each question so it was easy to make my concluding remark.

‘I don’t believe you.’

After a suitable pause, during which time no-one said a word, I continued. ‘Either your life is the way you want it to be or you do not really believe that you can change your life and your state of health by the way that you think and behave.’ This had the effect of shaking them up. Some protested, others started to ask questions. It is certain that they listened to the talk with a more active and open mind than they would have done otherwise. I ask you to read the rest of this book in a similar way.

You may well be saying, at this point, that it is all very well for other people to be happy optimists, but you just don’t feel like that and you do feel stressed, and the world is a tough place, and indeed you cannot cope, nor can you change the way things are by plastering a false smile on your face. After all, if it was that easy you probably wouldn’t be reading this book at all. If this is what you feel then I suggest you should be willing to suspend your disbelief and come along with us to see where we’re going. After all, nothing else has worked for you, has it?

If you do not change the directions in which you are headed, you will land up where you are going.

Taking control of your life

It is now time to take a leap forward. Be willing to accept the following assumptions and come with me as we find out where they lead. You owe it to yourself don’t you? You’ve been feeling stressed for a long time. What if, just possibly, these ideas could be the basis by which you can find ways of eliminating stress from your life? Let’s go. Here are the assumptions.

1 By your thoughts you have created the experience you have each day.

You have generated the assumptions that lead you to believe people do or don’t like you, that your employees do or don’t respect you, that you can or can’t trust people, that your family does or doesn’t appreciate you or that you are a success or a failure.

2 What you choose to think about yourself becomes the truth. Your truth is your world view. It has little to do with an (impossible) objective reality.

If you dress up and feel terrific you go to the party and have a ball, feeling glamorous and admired. Even if you go home and realize your petticoat was showing and you had a ladder in your tights it didn’t spoil the fun you had at the time.

On the other hand, if you were convinced that your white underclothes were showing through your black dress in the strobe lighting you would have had a ghastly time, even if, afterwards, you realized they weren’t. I’m sure you can think of examples of such situations in your life.

3 Your present situation is the result of your own thoughts and actions and the decisions you have made in the past. You are the creator of your present situation.

You may argue that much that has happened to you has been outside your control. Maybe that seems true. However, at every step you did have other options. They may have been totally unacceptable options, but you did have them. You may have wanted one career but bowed to parental pressures and gone into another one. You may have wanted to travel but been unwilling to give up your job. You may not have wanted to move to the country when your husband was transferred but preferred to go rather than separate. You may not have wanted to marry your girlfriend when she got pregnant but preferred to do so than to incur your parents’ wrath. Whatever the situation there were other options. The one you followed was, ultimately, your choice.

If you hold to this belief it leaves you in a position of power. It leaves you secure in the belief that you have control of your life, you had control in the past and, best of all, you have control of your future. In turn it leaves you in control of your stresses and tells you quite clearly that you can alter them.

Having said this, you may still be unconvinced and want to argue that you are not in control so let me ask you a question. Can you be absolutely sure that you are not in control of your life? Can you be certain that, no matter what you do, the good and bad things that are going to happen to you will happen anyway?

If you are not sure either way, not sure that you are in control and yet not absolutely sure that you are not in control, you have a decision to make. If you cannot be sure either way you could be wrong whichever option you choose. For most people, believing that they do have control of their lives is a positive belief system, believing that they don’t have control is a negative belief system and leaves them powerless. Wouldn’t it be better to be wrong in choosing a positive belief than to be wrong in choosing a negative belief system?

If indeed we are not in total control of our lives then you can either believe that, in which case the outlook for positive change to your stress levels is indeed grim, or you can disbelieve it. If you refuse to believe that you are not in control you will at least feel more positive and optimistic as you try to take charge of things and mould them your way.

On the other hand, if you are in fact in control and you believe this you can act positively, whereas if you choose not to believe it you will miss out on a lot of positive changes you could have made.

Since this may be a little complicated to grasp let me put it another way. There are four options:

1 If the truth is that you are not in control and you believe it then there is little you can do to change your stress levels and you might as well give up right now.

2 If the truth is that you are in control and you believe this then you can change your stress levels, starting right now. It is the two other options that are important.

3 If you are not in control but choose to believe you are, you are in a much better situation than either 1 or 4 (below).

4 If you choose to believe that you are not in control when in fact you are, you will as a result miss out on a lot of the positive decisions you could have made and benefits you could have achieved.

In other words, the most useful belief system is the one that says you are, in fact, in control of your life, of your thoughts, of all that occurs around you and of the amount of stress that you choose to experience. Since this is the most useful belief system to have, let’s hold to it and work with it, particularly since there is much evidence to support it.

If you feel you cannot do this I suggest you be willing to work with the ideas for the duration of this book and act ‘as if’ it were true and see where this leads you. The alternative is to give up at this point, stop reading and say that you can do nothing about the amount of stress you are experiencing.

Limiting thoughts

Everyone has some negative thoughts about themselves, at least some of the time. You may believe you are not good enough, not attractive enough, not unselfish enough. You may think you are too tall, too fat, too stupid, too slow, too impatient. You may think you can’t sing, can’t draw, aren’t artistic, aren’t intelligent, aren’t capable. You may think you handle money badly, handle people badly, make decisions badly and so forth.

Underlying all these surface negative beliefs that you have about yourself there will be one that is the biggest, worst and most painful to contemplate. We will call this your Ultimate Negative Belief or UNB. The irony is that this Ultimate Negative Belief you have is never true. It is a belief that you have built for yourself based on past experiences, yet in an outward objective sense it is not true. Isn’t that nice to know? After many years of working with patients in this way I have not yet found one whose UNB was based on fact. They have all been based on inappropriate but understandable interpretations made by people in response to situations that arose earlier in their life.

One of your tasks, in reducing the stress in your life, is to identify your own UNB. We will do this fully a little later on. For now consider what limiting or negative beliefs you have. They may be thoughts about yourself, they may be thoughts about other people, outside events, objects or the world around you. Stop reading right now, find a pen and paper and make a list of all the limiting or negative thoughts you have about yourself and about your life. They may include any or all of the following:

• I’m not good enough.

• People always let me down.

• I could never do so and so.