factors that trigger your stress response. Learn about yourself. By developing a better understanding of yourself and your reactions, by being willing to take control of your life and your thoughts, by coming to terms with yourself and by giving yourself the respect, trust and love that you give to other people you can turn a stressful and worrying existence into days of peace and pleasure.
The aim of this book is to empower you to re-create your life. The future is yours: it can be similar to the present with its anxieties, fears and stresses, or it can be positive and peaceful.
Stress or peace, the choice is yours. This book will give you the tools and help you to make the choice and create the peace.
The following concepts and strategies are covered in Part I:
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.
2 Feeling stressed is your choice and you can choose to continue or to stop. There is no such thing as a universal stress.
3 You can use the awareness of what stresses you to learn more about yourself and then use this knowledge for change (of yourself).
4 Be willing to change what you are doing – if what you have been doing has not been working, be willing to do something different.
5 You are responsible for, and have had some input into, 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.
6 Get clear on your outcome – what are you really trying to achieve? Are you trying to prove someone else wrong, to force someone else to be different, to have something to complain about, to get sympathy or attention? Do you really want to reduce your stress?
7 Know you can cope. Avoid the stress caused by fear of the unknown. Imagine the worst possible scenario. Find out how you would deal with it. Then get on with handling the present.
8 Believe in a positive future, that whatever happens is, and will be, for the best, but do this without ceasing to care and without developing a laissez-faire attitude.
9 Much stress is caused by your fear of other people’s opinions of you and your deeds. Decide who you are and who you want to be. Get a clear statement of purpose, develop your own Life Plan. Keep this plan clearly in your mind, live by it and many of your stresses will dissipate.
10 You are terrific. Most stress comes from your feelings of inadequacy. Develop full confidence in yourself, be willing to like, love and approve of yourself. If you don’t, who will?
Since this is a book about stress it is important, from the start, to establish what we mean by stress. Many people discuss stress as if it is some sort of external agent or event that has attacked them. In fact, stress is not something external that you can define, identify and measure. Stress is the disturbance created within you by your response to a situation or activity, be it internal or external.
Stresses can be pleasant, such as the excitement caused by an anticipated pleasurable event. They can also be unpleasant and cause you distress. It is these unpleasant stressful responses to situations that we will be discussing and dealing with here.
This book will show you how to handle these unpleasant stresses in your life by a new and positive method, one that helps you to get to the real heart of the problem and solve it. In this way you can rid yourself of all your responses to situations and people that currently cause you to feel worried, anxious, fearful, angry, resentful, guilty, dominated, out of control and many other unpleasant emotions.
You will learn how to eliminate the stress from your life, once and for all. You will learn how to discover the real causes of the way you feel and how to change so that your life is stress-free and positive. You will still have challenges but they will be of your own choosing and will not distress you. Stress in itself is not bad; it is part of the challenge and excitement of life. It is the stresses that cause distress that we are aiming to eliminate.
To eliminate this stress you will not be taught first aid techniques for handling it. Techniques such as deep breathing, relaxation, meditation, learning to count to ten and so forth may indeed help you to handle the stresses you have now, provided you practise them consistently, but they will not eliminate your stresses. They may even work against you. I recently spoke with someone who said they did their relaxation techniques so well before an exam that when it was time for them to write the paper they were too relaxed to put a lot of energy into it and as a result they failed.
The ideas described here are not designed to help you cope with stress. They are designed to reduce and even eliminate the times you feel stressed, the times you feel an unpleasant response to a situation.
Identifying the problem
Most people have problems and most people put these problems down to stress. The trouble with this is that it is not specific. The statement ‘I am stressed’ does not identify the problem and so it does not lead to the finding of a solution to the situation.
Over the years countless patients have come into my practice saying that they are suffering from stress, with no details as to precisely what they mean by that, as if the term alone explained everything. It sometimes even seems that they think of it as some sort of bug they have caught, for which they are not responsible. As they might expect, inappropriately, an antibiotic from a doctor for a cold, they seem to expect a few vitamin pills or herbs from a naturopath to give them the calm they desire.
The really troublesome aspect of their approach is that their argument seems to go like this:
My life is not working at the moment, there are problems. I have too much to do, too little money, too many responsibilities, too little time. I’m not loved enough by people I love, my friends let me down, the boss is impossible, the children are a worry, the news is always bad, times are tough. If only the recession would lift, the children would behave, the boss would retire, my marriage could be the way it was in the beginning, people would expect less of me, then I would be happy.
In other words, if those outside situations changed then they would be happy. There is rarely a recognition that they could change and thus improve the situation.
There are always many seemingly rational explanations for the fact that your life is not exactly the way you want it to be. It is all too easy to assume that the solution lies outside yourself, in the world at large. The problem is that you cannot force all these external factors to change in the way you would like them to. The next assumption is that since you cannot change these external factors, you are helpless to improve your situation.
The comforting thing about this assumption and this attitude is that the problems are not your responsibility, they are not of your own making and you cannot be blamed for them. The trouble with this view is that since, for things to get better in your life, things outside your direct control have to change, you are helpless and the best you can do is to try to make the best of things and learn tolerance and acceptance.
This attitude means that the solution to your present stress must come from improving your ability to handle your present, apparently unchangeable, stresses. Thus you do relaxation exercises, deep-breathing exercises and go to classes on other stress-handling techniques, all aimed at increasing your ability to cope.
