Stress as a Choice - Part 5 (closing statements)

The most common form of laziness is staying busy.

What we think about expands.

A thought is eternal until it is unthought.

Remember that the human mind works better moving toward something rather than away from something.

Doing out of love energizes us while doing out of fear depletes us

Stress as a Choice: Part 4

Still on the subject of stress! (Is that stressing you out??)

Again, stress is a choice and it is created.

When someone fears losing their job, they are concerned about their sense of power or security being threatened. This co-dependant approach to your work is loved by the employer, but is not so healthy for you.

The cool thing about that is the power.

If you created it, you have the power to un-create it.

If you did not create it and are only a victim to it, then there is nothing you can do about it – except manage it. Why manage rather than eliminate? Know that when you feel stress you can change your mind.

Example: You catch yourself with your shoulder shrugging up, your heart beating a bit faster, you are breathing in the upper part of your chest, and just plain hurried. I am using the body responses because our mind will play tricks on us but our body never lies.
Remember the second greatest urge? Anyway, now what to do? I myself go back to the day I came back to work after my dad’s death. You will need to do a thorough self-examination to know what your hooks are. They probably came early in life and have great risk to give up.

Stress as a Choice: Part 3

How many of you are confused about stress and fear? Excellent! Just try it on. You have to leave this present moment and go to the future to experience fear. That is why I use the acronym False Evidence Appearing Real for fear.

Let me ask you, “do you have everything you need right now?” You have shelter, you are not starving? What else do you really need right now? If you are truthful I think you will agree that we have all we need right now. How do you feel knowing you have everything you need right now?

Back to my main point. Stress is a choice. There is no stress “out there”.

Just like there is no anxiety out there to attack you. It is something you make a decision on based on what you have learned, how you perceive things, your experience, everything! Again, the feeling of stress is fear. A thoughts proceeds a feeling. A thought first occurs. The feeling follows.

For example: If I lose my job, how will I pay the mortgage? Then comes the feeling of fear. Then comes tachycardia. Then more stomach acid. Then the blood pressure. All this happened because a thought occurred, one that jumped to the future, and caused a response.

Why? Why do you that to yourselves? As I said, I’m perspicacious, meaning observant, thoughtful, insightful or my definition “getting to the heart of the matter”. I could tell you all the nuances of this or I could cut through all the rhetoric and give you what really happens after its boiled down to the final element. You, like me, will want to observe the following statements for sometime so you can take it on as a belief system of your own. This will penetrate to the heart of your stress. I observed this for a long time and still have not found any reason to refute it. Believe me I wanted to because I fought it the moment I heard it. It is this:

The boiled down bottom line of men’s problems comes down to power.

The boiled down bottom line of women’s problems comes down to security.

Stress as a Choice: Part 2


I want to share a story with you. Back in 1989 I found my father dead in his bed. It was a shock since he was only 58 years old. I went through the grief, the funeral arrangements, the financials, the details of his apartment and furniture, dealing with my family, and all that comes with something like this. But it was also a spiritual experience.

It’s a long story so I’ll have to share that some other time. The moral of the story is that I came back to work as a project manager and I stood in amazement at the craziness all around me. People were all stressed out, meeting deadlines (Why is it called a dead line anyway?)… After having seen the whole picture, that none of us are gett’in out here alive, it seemed such a waste to be stressed out over such “small” stuff.

I'm not going to lay on my death bed and say, "I wish I would have been more stressed out." Success really is in the journey as well as the destination.

I saw the whole office stressed and I could never go back to that state of frantic. I could not, after stepping out of the fear, go back to it.

When calm in the midst of a workday, someone once asked me, “Aren’t you afraid of losing your job?” NO. What will happen if you lose your job? GET A NEW ONE. "You can't really mean that?" ACTUALLY I DO. They also thought because I did not stress out and act crazy that I didn’t care. There is a risk in letting go of stress.

Actually I was more productive than ever. Management finally saw this (with my help) but it was a long process. Bottom line is significance overtook material success. Substance overtook fear. I made a choice not to go back to a stress-based lifestyle. I was tired of living in fear. I considered life too short to be based on fear.

Fear is the feeling of stress.

It is the bodily response to the thoughts we think AND fear is only experienced in the future. Just as sadness is about loss which is the past.

For example: A tiger walks in the room and you feel what? FEAR. Why? Isn’t that in the future? Maybe he isn’t hungry, maybe just been fed and a tame tiger. Regardless, anytime we feel fear we are jumping to the future. You can plan for the future, but don’t live there.

I consider living in the future as neurotic since the future does not exist. If it does not exist, it is a fantasy. Wouldn’t that be neurotic – living in a fantasy?

What is even more incredible is that when we live in our own developed fantasy, why do we choose a negative one instead of a positive one? We could dream of how healthy and successful we are going to be instead of wondering how we are going to pay the mortgage, the bills, worrying about health problems not yet surfaced, etc., etc.

Stress: Problem or Symptom?

My first post is my first post because of the importance of the topic.

STRESS!

Stress as a Choice - Part One

I’d like you to know the root cause of stress -- to be able to treat the problem, and not just the symptoms. I’ll address a number of stress-reduction techniques on another post, but I want to focus on the idea of stress itself.

Stress is a choice and you create it because it serves you in some way.

Let me repeat that. Stress is a choice and you create it because it serves you in some way. Now this may be a hard pill to swallow for anyone.

In the vein of treating the problem rather than only the symptoms, I have come to treating stress, ‘the problem’ rather than only the symptoms. Coming to accepting stress as a choice will be hard to believe for someone who wants to hold on to their stress, for someone who subconsciously wants their stress. If you give it a chance, if you step away from yourself and become an observer you will give yourself a chance to not only believe this idea of stress as a choice, but you will experience it. There is a gap as large as the Grand Canyon between believing and knowing. We see this in people’s faith as well. Believers’ struggle with their spiritual values and those who KNOW have a passion for theirs.

So what I am asking today is that you suspend your beliefs while reading my thoughts on stress. This is not hard to do, it is something you have done before. You go to a movie and suspend your belief for that period of time – you aren’t thinking this is a two-dimensional illumination of light on a screen. You feel the feelings, you cry, your heart races. After the movie, you re-enter your old belief system and go to your car. You can do that here too, though I hope that you will test my theories to see if they are true, rather than spending your energy defending your old belief system.

Remember that rationalization is the second greatest urge for a human being. (No, sex is not the first, it’s survival.) You will automatically want to maintain your status quo. It is human nature to rationalize the way we are and to defend and protect that belief system, but I ask you to take a chance.

What I propose is that instead of managing stress you eliminate it.

Live a life that does not have stress, but instead has peace and calm.
Stress is not a problem - it is a symptom.

Thoughts are the problem – change your thoughts and you change your stress. The stress I speak of is internal stress. I am not speaking of earthquakes, volcanoes, and even gravity. They are external stresses. You may think a death in the family is an external stress. Not really, it is how we react to the death. I’m not saying you shouldn’t feel sad and grieve. Just know the difference between internal and external stress.

It’s not so much what happens to us but what we do with what happens to us.