power of your mind to change both the events and the situations in your life and your attitude to them and to yourself. By the end, if you go through the processes with real conviction and serious intent, you will be able to relegate stress to the position of a negligible problem in your life. Things that once stressed you will become positive challenges and learning experiences to help you develop further.
You will find one or more of the 10 points that we have discussed at the beginning of some of the chapters that follow. This is meant as a guide only. Many aspects of the 10 points itemized above will come up more than once throughout the book, to a greater or lesser degree. Having the major concept of the chapter at its head will help you to incorporate it into your thinking. Repetition, often in a different disguise, will help you to become familiar with these ideas and techniques and to make use of them more readily.
Part II: The physical aspects of stress
While most stress comes about as a result of your mental and emotional states there can also be physical contributing factors or causes. Thus it is wise to make sure that there are no physical health reasons for your feelings of stress. These physical factors may seem to be a direct and prime cause of your stress. Alternatively they may seem to be contributing factors that decrease your ability to handle the other stresses in your life. Either way you will need to deal both with the physical factors and with the emotional ones that result from them and may also have contributed to them.
It is the old chicken and the egg question. Which came first? The emotional stress which caused you to make excessive demands on your body and give it diminished care or the physical problem which led to your emotional stress and worry and which in turn led to the physical problem? The nice thing about chicken and egg situations is that you can begin to change things by working with both the chicken and the egg. So do both.
Clearly any physical health problem can cause you to feel stressed. Anything from a toothache to the knowledge that you have a fatal disease will stress you. However, there are some physical health problems that can, as part of their symptom picture, generate nervous, irritable and stressed emotional states. These include such health problems as allergies, candidiasis, hypoglycaemia, poor nutrition, poor immune function and the effect of toxins. If these problems are part of your experience then you can, by doing what is necessary to your lifestyle to improve your physical health, greatly reduce your stress at all levels, physical, emotional and mental.
Be warned, though, that it is all too easy to blame these possible physical causes exclusively for your stress and thus to avoid making the mental and emotional changes discussed in Part I. This is a mistake and leads you back into victim status, this time a victim to your body.
If you are not willing to make the necessary changes in your diet and lifestyle described in Part II you may at some subconscious level be showing your preference for hanging on to the physical problems as useful excuses for your emotional stress rather than facing up to the emotional and mental changes that are necessary. If this is the case then working through Part I is even more important for you.
It’s time now to focus attention on some of the physical health problems that may affect your ability to handle the outside (perceived) stressful events in your life. Some examples are outlined below and you may find it useful to consider if they could be affecting you in some way.
If you suffer from hypoglycaemia, a condition characterized by low blood-sugar levels, you will not feel relaxed and comfortable. Instead, following a large meal or an intake of sugar-rich foods, your blood-sugar level will first rise and then fall to disastrously low levels. When the level is low you will feel anxious, irritable, uptight, frightened and out of control. Under these circumstances any outside pressure at all is likely to have you complaining that you feel stressed. The slightest thing that happens will trigger off an emotional response and you will complain about the level of stress in your life.
It is not of paramount importance that you reduce the outside events that are perceived as stressful, nor is it of primary importance that you learn relaxation techniques and do deep breathing exercises. The answer is to deal with the physical problem of your hypoglycaemia. The way to do this is discussed in the relevant section in Part II.
Alternatively you may suffer from allergies. Eating certain foods may make you feel anxious or irritable. It is unlikely that you can recognize these foods yourself; they are usually masked food allergies. Fortunately, tests are available by which you can identify them. If allergies are part of your stress problem the answer is not to learn to relax but to have the appropriate tests done and change your diet accordingly.
You may suffer from a variety of infections, possibly only minor ones, that leave you feeling vulnerable and anxious. Again, the answer is not to learn to relax and deal with the stress, it is to take better care of your diet, take nutrient supplements if necessary and improve your immune function.
You may be suffering from vitamin or mineral deficiencies, or candidiasis or lacticacidosis (see Part II, pp. 319–22, 341). In all these situations and in many like them you will have a reduced tolerance for outside stresses. In addition, the physical health problem can generate its own stresses. Yet again, the answer is not for you to do deep breathing exercises, learn relaxation techniques, meditate or listen to tranquillizing music and sounds. The answer comes from dealing with the physiological problem that is stressing your body to such an extent that you have reduced emotional balance and reduced tolerance for external and perceived stresses.
Thus the first part of the book deals with your individual reaction to an outside event based on your past mental and emotional experiences and on what that event means to you at a subconscious level. It also includes the necessary background to the way you use your thoughts or the way in which you are at the mercy of your thoughts and how to control or change them to your own benefit. Techniques are included that will help you unravel your past and be more relaxed about the present and future.
The second part deals with any physical problems you may have that will reduce your tolerance to outside events and explains how these physiological problems can be remedied.
When you use the two approaches together you will have the tools needed to reduce your perceived stress levels to near zero.
Overall
In the course of researching this book I have asked a large number of people the same question, namely ‘What do you find stressful?’. The one outstanding result from this has been that no two people find the same things stressful. Things that stress one person are no bother to another. In fact, things that stress one individual may even be a positive pleasure to another. The conclusion from all this has been to bear out the hypothesis that there is no such thing as an independent entity called ‘a stress’ on which everyone can agree.
Rosemary H., already mentioned, found standing in supermarket queues thoroughly frustrating and she would mutter and fume at the slowness of the check-out girl and the customers in front of her. Another woman thought long queues were wonderful: they gave her time to stand quietly and think, an oasis of time in a busy day that seemed to be all rush and go.
One man, Peter L., felt very stressed when family members depended on him to know what to do and how to do it in any emergency. Tom D., on the other hand, loved being asked for help and thrived on the challenge of an emergency; but when nothing was happening and no-one needed him he then felt anxious and unwanted.
Denise H. could only complete a task when she had a definite deadline and knew it simply had to be done by then. Once she knew or set the deadline she could settle down and get on with the job. With no deadline she would potter around, getting nothing done, and feel thoroughly dissatisfied and stressed at the end of the day as a result of having achieved so little. In contrast Charles T. hated to be rushed or have deadlines.
