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	Stress It's All in Our Minds by John Edmonds
Astrology, Tarot, and Self Improvement for the New Age.

Stress
It's All in Our Minds
by John Edmonds

There are a lot of people world-wide trying to deal with the stress issue. On one side of the coin, there seems to be a plague of stress around the globe, with a significant number of people suffering, feeling depressed, anxious and full of worry. Statistics show that around one in five people suffer from some form of depression and between 60% and 90% of all visits to General Practitioners are connected to stress.

Stress is fast becoming one of the biggest problems on the planet, particularly as recent sophisticated technological advances pour more pressures on us to deal with mobile telephones, emails and texting etc. There's no escape any more. People can even get to us when we are sat on the toilet.

Stress is costing industry and the public service billions of pounds world-wide through absenteeism, lost work hours, lost or lowered productivity, and in some places such as the Scandinavian countries with the added burden of long dark Winters, up to 20% of the workforce are on medium to long term paid stress leave.

On the other side of the coin, there is a multitude of people professing that they possess solutions to stress, with stress management programmes sprouting up all over the world; many of them believing that stress is an external causation rather than a state of mind - so they teach us how to 'manage stress' and to 'punch our pillows' rather than find the root causes of stress, and putting a stop to it. They tell us that we must learn to rectify and change the world outside our heads, when in fact, most of what we need to do is simply look in the mirror.

Sadly, there are few people trying to find out the root cause of stress, where it comes from, and how to stop stress before it even starts. I propose here, to leave you with some thoughts and options that might not have occurred to you before.

The UK Chartered Institute for Personnel Development (CIPD) says three very significant things on their web site:-

• Stress is a state, not an illness,
• There is a significant difference between pressure and stress, and
• Dealing with the issue of stress is now one of the major challenges faced by both the public and private sector in the beginning of the twenty first century.

In number 1 above, it is necessary to recognise that stress is a state of mind. If we pretend for a moment, to take personal responsibility for our own feelings of stress, then it raises the question, "If I am responsible for the stress I am feeling, then what can I do about it?" and some of the things we can do are:-

• Find 'mechanisms' to reduce the impact of our perceived stress, or
• Find ways to alter our responses to perceived stressful situations, or
• Change the structure of our work, or
• Ask for our work structures to be changed, or
• Find another job if they do not make the changes.

Trust me, there is no stress out there in the world. Stress is caused by the way we react and respond to the world outside of our head, and how we get 'sucked into' other people's panic modes, and how much we allow people to hand over their monkey to us. (Read the book "The One Minute Manager Meets The Monkey.)

There is no stress at work either. Sure, there may be people shouting at us to work harder and faster and achieve more results than we feel capable of. Often, some of these shouters are allowing themselves to respond to what they perceive as external stress factors, and they are just passing the panic down the line to us. (Sometimes, of course, they are just bullies, and if that is the case, there are now legal avenues we can pursue to put them straight. I would be happy to provide information on bullying outside of this article, as it is another of my interests.)

Have you noticed how different people react differently to the same situations? Stress is a state of mind, not an illness - just as the CIPD states. You see, there are two mental states, and you'll no doubt have heard of half glass full or half glass empty states. One person stuck in traffic will shout and curse and bang on the horn, whilst another winds up the window, blocks out the traffic noise by turning up the music, and then watches the clouds go by peacefully until the traffic jam subsides. When we can accept that WE are responsible for how we respond to the world, then we will start to see stress subside.

As the CIPD states, there is a huge difference between pressure and stress. Let's get one thing straight - pressure at work is actually good for us. It helps challenge us and we all need challenges in our work and social life to help us grow and learn and feel fulfilled. However, when pressure becomes excessive, and we start to suffer, worry and become anxious, and our mind becomes agitated, then the pressure turns into stress.

In 1908, the psychologists Yerkes and Dodson created a law which states that people who experience work pressure will be more productive - but only to a point. Once that point is passed, then productivity drops rapidly. We now know that Yerkes and Dodson might have added that once that point was passed, then stress starts to occur and it is the stress that leads to a drop-off in productivity.

If ever there was a place to look for the birth of stress, this is it - the point where pressure turns into stress, not unlike water turning into steam when it reaches 100 degrees. So the CIPD is correct again. There is a significant difference between pressure and stress. Pressure is good for us. Stress is not good for us. Just recognising this is highly important if we are to examine and handle stress.

With stress being a state of mind, then it follows that if we find ways to control our minds and they way we think, then we may be able to control, reduce or even eliminate our feelings of stress. Also, if we can identify the source of stress, we may have an opportunity to stop it from starting. For example, consider a foul smell in your house caused by a dead rat in your wall cavity. Even if you sprayed perfumes, scents and air fresheners from dawn to dusk, the smell isn't going to go away. You have to remove the dead rat. So it is with stress. If we locate the source, then we have the chance of removing it so that stress vanishes.

Another place where stress is born is in our desires. Did you know that most mental agitation and mental stress in the world arises from desires? The stress occurs when we have unfulfilled desires. We desire something but cannot get it. It could be the desire to own something, a desire to be in a different place from where we are now, a desire that others should change the way they behave, a desire for our job to be different from what it is, a desire to experience something, a desire to win a challenge, or a desire to have lots of money. The more we desire something and the more it is unfulfilled, the higher our stress and suffering.

Indian gurus and swamis have known this for centuries. Maybe you have noticed people on the television in some of the poorest countries with huge smiles on their faces. They may not have much in their lives but they also do not desire much either. In the western world we think that happiness comes from having stuff, and that is our biggest mistake. Happiness comes from within, not from without. Maybe the reason the poorest people in the world might have the happiest faces is because of their lack of desire to own things.

You see, the minute we desire something and don't get it, we suffer. If we stop desiring things, the stress and suffering vanishes instantly. It's one of nature's laws. Next time you find yourself suffering stress, maybe one of the questions you might ask yourself is, "What is it that I am desiring?" and then try to minimise the desire or change the nature of the stress by taking one of the five avenues of action mentioned near the beginning of this article. To simply worry and moan about stress and not do anything will never solve the problem.

This principle applies in our social and family life, too. If we feel stressed or angry, then we have two choices: 1. Do something about it if we have the power to do so by taking one of the five avenues of action above, or 2. accept it with peace knowing that's just how life is sometimes. To let thoughts and desires rattle around our head without any positive plan of action attached is futile and will only cause us suffering.

Another one of the ways we can control our mind and avoid suffering from stress is to perform some sort of simple non-religious meditative technique.

Recently, scientists have discovered three very important things:

• That the human mind cannot think of more than one thing at once. We think we can, but all we are doing is rapidly moving between thoughts.

• That if we can focus our attention on one single thought to the exclusion of any other thoughts, then the brain actually gets a rest. (It doesn't rest when we sleep because it is sorting out the previous days activities in your head.)

• If we concentrate on one single thought related to something peaceful and calm for a period of ten minutes only, then the human body produces small amounts of nitric oxide sufficient enough to counteract the harmful stress hormones that have built up, resulting in a feeling of being de-stressed and renewed.

People who practice meditation, relaxation and stress reduction techniques know this. They know that if we occupy our mind with one single peaceful thought and gently sweep aside any intruding thoughts, our stress will almost certainly feel as if it has disappeared. Because our brain actually gets a rest, then we come out of the other end feeling refreshed and a lot more motivated than when we started the technique. This leads to productivity being maintained, and the avoidance of the productivity drop-off mentioned by Yerkes and Dodson when we reach the point where pressure turns into stress.

Of course, thought techniques such as this can only ever be temporary, because the chemical changes caused by the nitric oxide effect will wear off in a few hours. Therefore, we need to repeat the technique at regular intervals to maintain the correct chemical balance in our body, BUT we also need to be thinking about the root cause of our stress and what actions we can take to stop stress in the first place. We have to find ways to either change the world outside our head or change the way we respond to the world, as previously stated.

So what kind of single peaceful thought could we hold for ten minutes?

Well, it could be reading poetry, knitting, or watching a natural peaceful environment on a ten minute video. Whatever we choose, we must make sure that it is something peaceful and something we will enjoy doing. After the ten minutes are up, it is amazing at how things don't look as serious as we thought they were. There's a phrase I like which goes, "I worried about having holes in my shoes, until I met a man with no feet."

The human mind, left uncontrolled, can devastate us. Most of the stuff that enters our mind which causes stress and suffering is subjective unsubstantiated garbage based upon other people's bias, gossip, imagination, dreams, fear and concepts that someone has made up. Little of what we listen to is real, factual or objective.

Swami Parthasarathy illustrates the balance of our minds by imagining a cone. Put the cone on its point and it will fall over. Put it on its side and it will roll about from side to side. The only stable position for a cone is when it is stood on its base. Abraham Maslow might have called this stable position self actualisation, where we see things for what they really are rather than what we imagine them to be.

We must take responsibility for how we feel and peacefully challenge anything which makes us feel stressed. We must take affirmative objective actions. We must get things changed or accept them with a peaceful heart

Another way to look at stress is to learn to 'live in the Now' and BE in the present moment, rather than allow our mind to wander through illusions of regrets and worries of the Past which can never be changed, or drift into the illusions of desires and expectations of things yet to come called Future. The Past is dead. It's gone. It can never be changed. The Future has not arrived yet. It is an illusion, a dream, until it arrives. Anything more than one second ago is the Past. Anything more than one second from now is the Future. Both are illusions.

We must try to stay in this present moment. That's all we have. It was the present moment at 2 pm yesterday. It is the present moment now as you read these words. It will be the present moment at 9 am tomorrow morning. That's all we have - the present moment. Live it to the fullest with simple respect to the illusions of Past and Future.

Finally, another mind control trick is to imagine that everything we ever experienced in our life was put in front of us by some mysterious force way out there in the universe far beyond our imaginations, to test us and to see how we handled it. Our challenge is to solve the puzzle - to solve what it is that is causing us suffering. Not to moan and whine about it. As stupid as it sounds, imagine that someone would pay you a million pounds in cash if you could find solutions to your stress. Would this make a difference to how you see things?

You see, as humans, we learn from the way we handle things, and stumble and fail, and learn, and fall again, and then pick ourselves up. There's a great phrase I love which says, "The person who never made a mistake, never made anything." So when you are confronted by feelings of stress, imagine dealing with it as a challenge, a game, something to overcome and change rather than something to be feared.

Stress IS in the mind, and how we respond to the world with our thinking patterns is the secret to stress reduction and, with significant efforts, we can get rid of the dead rat in the wall cavity, and eliminate stress forever.

(c) 2009 John Edmonds, All rights reserved.

Stress Gone in 10 Minutes

Go to: Alternative Health, Sleep and Stress Management, Stress Management

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Last updated February 25th, 2009

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