quick fixes and rarely work on a long-term and permanent basis to make your life happier and more stress-free.
The alternative method is to believe that you are indeed, in some way, responsible for the way you feel. You may not be able to control the recession, but you can control your own finances and the way you think about them. You may not be able to force the children to behave differently, but you can change the way you treat them and the way in which you respond to their behaviour. You can assume that a way does exist to create a more comfortable relationship with your boss and you can then work on discovering it.
While this approach takes away the comfort of blaming outside factors for your situation and stops you being a victim who deserves sympathy, it does give you a powerful tool in return. It encourages you to make the positive changes that will indeed lower the amount of stress you experience. So let’s explore this approach further.
The concept of stress
Stress is not a new or rare concept. Almost everyone, at some time or another, thinks they are stressed. The overworked, overworried, unhappy person knows they are stressed all the time. Worse still, they will claim their problem is (non-specific) stress rather than concern over a specific issue. Even the happiest of people will almost certainly claim to feel stressed occasionally. There are few people who have not, at one time or another, said they were stressed. Most people feel stressed, and say so, at some point. People you know do. You do, don’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this book.
It may surprise you to know that stress, as an entity, is a new concept, a concept of the past 40 or so years. Our grandparents did not grow up with stress as a familiar word. They might have said they were worried, afraid, tired or had too much to do, but they probably didn’t lump it all together and call it stress. Today, however, everyone is familiar with the concept of stress. You probably think of stress as anything difficult, troublesome, painful, challenging or harmful in your life. You may blame stress for the way you feel and the way you behave. You probably blame stress for everything that goes wrong in your life, much that goes wrong with your body and most of the things with which you cannot cope. You may then blame these problems, in turn, for making you feel even more stressed. You may even think that if you had a totally stressfree existence your life would be perfect.
If you read the papers, magazines and books and listen to the media, you will have realized that you are constantly being exposed to the idea that you should reduce the stress in your life, you should learn to cope with stress, you should overcome stress and not let it get you down. You may indeed have tried the old and hackneyed so-called remedies for stress, but the stress and your feelings of tension and diminished health have continued. You may even be feeling more stressed by your inability to profit from the books on relaxation and meditation and your inability to conquer your stress.
All too often the problem of stress can become overwhelming. When you are under great strain it is easy to lose the ability to view yourself and the situation from a realistic perspective. You may then make a number of rash decisions, based on erroneous premises and create more stress for yourself, thus generating a vicious circle.
The pace of life is faster in the 21st century than it has ever been before. In the past we spoke to our friends face to face or wrote letters; later we used the phone; now we are supposed to be able to master computers, mobile communications, the internet, IT, WAP and a multitude of technologies. In the past we walked from place to place; now we are supposed to be able to handle with equanimity crowded trains on unreliable timetables, road chaos and traffic jams or near misses in the sky. In the past we lived close to the earth with space to move and breathe freely, space to be alone or with friends; now we live in crowded towns and cities, rarely exposed to the peace of the open countryside. When some of us grew up we had a full expectation of getting a job and finding full employment for our whole working life; that is no longer the case. We used to live in a relatively unpolluted world; now we consume or are exposed to thousands of toxins, many of which affect our emotional state and mental clarity. No wonder so many people feel that stress is on the increase.
Where other books on stress tell people how to relax, how to meditate, how to do deep breathing exercises, in this book you will be taken back to the ultimate source of your stress and given assistance in identifying the specific problem. ‘Stress’, as a word on its own, is, as we have seen, too vague and non-specific. It is an amorphous monster waiting to attack and forever evading defeat. If you say you are stressed, there may seem to be little you can do about it. On the other hand, if you say you are frightened, you can identify the object of your fear and deal with it. If you say you are angry, you can identify the cause of your anger and do something about it. If you say you feel guilty, you can identify the cause of your guilt and do what is appropriate to assuage it. In phrasing the problem you also identify the area of your life with which you have to deal. By putting the problem into a large miscellaneous basket labelled ‘stress’, it loses its identity and becomes some overwhelming ogre that you cannot fight.
There are, however, several levels in this self-exploration. At the first level you may say you feel stressed. At the second level you may identify the major problem in your life as worries about money. In turn this may worry you because it may mean you cannot provide for those you love. At an even deeper level you may fear that if you cannot provide for them they will leave you, or they will think badly of you. Thus you will, in time, get down to the ultimate problem, your own insecurity about yourself.
You can deal with specific emotions more easily than with unidentified ‘stress’. Finding the root cause of the problem will enable you to solve the problem rather than just deal with it. Here we will be working together to find the specific cause of your feelings of stress and then to resolve the issues involved.
Once you have done this you no longer have to deal with stress, you no longer need to feel stressed, and it is easy. The solution, once you have grasped it, is not something that you have to work at remembering to do. You do not have to be disciplined and force yourself to deal with the problems in the new way. The new way, once you fully grasp it, becomes the obvious, easy and most satisfactory way of dealing with the challenges in your life. It is like walking through a peaceful and newly discovered mountain pass rather than having to struggle to climb the rugged and dangerous mountain. Just as you do not have to discipline yourself not to struggle over the rugged mountain to get to the next valley, once you have discovered the easy pass, so it is with this new way of dealing with the situations that arise in your life. It is much easier than the old approach.
This book is divided into two parts involving respectively your emotions and your physical health. Before you start on your journey it is important for you to consider whether or not there is a physical basis for any of the stress you are feeling. A number of physical health problems can lead to you feeling stressed, uptight, easily irritated, depressed or anxious.
The first, and major, part of the book covers your own internal emotional and intellectual responses to situations and the ways in which these can be changed. The second part covers the physical health problems that can generate feelings of stress. If you think there is a physical health problem to be solved then take a quick look at Part II. After all, there is little point in working through Part I and searching for problems in your apparently happy childhood when the real cause of your present situation is the tension caused by consuming a food to which you are allergic, the jitters caused by hypoglycaemia or the emotional disturbances resulting from an excess of Candida albicans in your system.
You may indeed have unresolved issues resulting from your parents’ divorce or your feelings of being second best as a child, but focusing on these will be of only partial help if you neglect your nutrition and suffer physical ill-health as a result. Most people will find that both parts of the book are important and helpful.
Do not be misled by the fact that the second part is the shorter of the two. It is meant as a guideline, to point you in the direction in which
