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 ...’
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.
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
