Minute to minute stress responses

Are you aware of the minute to minute stress responses that you experience, the little things that you do and feel as a stress response.

There are many seemingly little reaction that we grow accustomed to, so we don’t usually even notice them.

The racing heart rate,

Jittery stomach,

Nervousness,

Getting sweaty

Muscle tenseness,

Racing thoughts

Getting stuck on specific thoughts,

Heightened sensitivity to things and other people

Short temper,

Attitude more sour

Any and all of these can be associated with stress.

If you are perceptive, you can look at them as warning signs, letting you know that stress has been triggered and that you are reacting to them.

By making yourself aware of these short-term responses you can notice what you are responding to and assess for yourself why you are reacting as you do.

Then, you can think about other more appropriate non-stressful ways of looking at these things and adjust your reactions.

The first step to changing your responses is to notice them. You can’t make any changes to something you aren’t aware of.

Most of us are not accustomed to thinking about how we think, we just let it all happen as it may without any thought about managing it.

If there is anything that affects your life negatively from your automatic thought, it is stress response.

Paying attention to what you think and why you think as you do is a learned behavior. You will need to train yourself to do this if you want to get a handle on how you feel.

There is no question that you have the ability to do this — ALL humans do!

Just because you have not been aware of your thinking does not mean you don’t have the ability to do so.

You have the ability to take command of your thinking and behavior, you have the right to do so, you are worthy of doing so, your past has no bearing on your ability, in fact, doing so is what separates you from all other creatures. This is the key to all personal growth and development, the real power of being human.

Just because you have, up to this point allowed your existing programming to run the show unchecked, you can develop the habit of noticing how you think and choose to think in ways that support the life you want.

The reason I’m going over this point so much is that it is so very important that you develop the self-aware ability if you want to make any changes for yourself.

Changing your stress responses to something more positive is a two sided process. Both addressing your responses to specific triggers, plus adjusting the ways that you generally think about life in general and what goes on around you.

I will be giving you some ways to address both aspects of your thinking.

You can both – change the way you look at things and, adjust your exposure to certain triggers.

But, the first step is learning to be aware of your thinking, your perceptions and your reactions.

John

“The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power

of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.” — Aristotle

“What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness

of himself.” — Abraham H. Maslow

“I think self-awareness is probably the most important thing

towards being a champion.” — Billie Jean King

What it takes to change the level and kind of stress

What is it going to take to change the level and kind of stress you experience?

When taking a look at how to do something about your stress, you have basically two choices.

You can manage it or you can reduce it.

Managing stress is learning to better cope with the stress. Essentially, how you look at it and why you react as you do.

And reducing it is when you change what precipitates the stress.

Can you remove yourself from the offending situation, or reduce your involvement?

In order to do anything about managing or reducing stress you must have substantial motivation.

You need to have a compelling reason or reasons to have things be different than they have been.

Your motivation needs to be strong enough to help you overcome the natural tendency to allow things to remain as they are.

This is similar to changing anything in your life, the motivation for the new or different thought and action must be more compelling than the way it now is.

Knowing your motivation for anything is key to changing it.

There is nothing you do without a reason. Everything has a reason even if you’re not aware of it.

When you see and understand why you think or do something, you have the real root of the behavior.

You may not be able to make sense out of why you think as you do because you did not consciously decide to do so. It may be something that your mind came up with as a way of understanding, dealing or coping with something.

In you mind, some justification for it had some relevance at one point in your life.

When you can identify the reason, you can then more easily develop reasons for not doing it that are opposite to the reasons for doing it.

It will take some effort, maybe some great effort, to change from what you are accustomed to doing habitually. This is why the strong reasons for something new is so important.

This will entail doing things you are not use to doing, and setting the time out to do them.

It will take doing something out of the ordinary in order to develop new thinking and behavior.

The way to stay stuck is to keep doing what you have always done and expect different results.

The fact that you have identified something that you want to be different indicates you are ready to make changes to it.

So, the first steps to doing something about living with too much stress are:

1) Notice that there is something you want to be different in your life.

2) Discover what your reasons or motivation is for doing what you do.

3) Decide how you DO want to think and act in that situation.

4) Come up with some compelling reasons why you want the new way.

Be prepared that it may be difficult to get to the reason why you feel the stress in a particular situation. Your mind may be blocking this from your view.

Sometimes your mind will attempt to protect you from something uncomfortable or it wants to protect things the way they are.

Keep asking yourself the question, WHY, and eventually with persistence you will get the answer.

Remember, the easy way is to leave everything alone, and the harder way is to make changes.

But you will not progress and grow in your life without change.

Change is the growth activity that many of us feel we should not have to do – it adds work to our life.

Really, change is life — without it you are stagnant.

Yes, change takes effort, but it is worth it.

Addressing your stress and changing its affect on you is a major growth step and you will gain huge benefits in all areas of your life for doing it.

Changing is not an overnight thing, it will likely take time and effort, which is why powerful compelling reasons for the new way are so important. You must have motivation to get yourself to stick with your change efforts.

John

“You can’t understand the world and how you respond to it until you

first know yourself. You can’t change the things you don’t like about

yourself until you search out the things that influence you and motivate

you and hurt you.” — Stedman Graham

“Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself

and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own

life.” — Herbert A. Otto

“What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness

of himself.” — Abraham H. Maslow

Altering your stress

Continuing with more about stress here is more about understanding where it comes from and what you can do about it.

In order to be able to alter your stress and how it affects you, I think it’s important to get a clear understanding about how stress comes about, your beliefs and perceptions about it.

Seeing something in a new and different angle provides you with new insight and allows you more ability to work with it.

Stress comes from the way you think about something, not the thing happening.

The common notion is that stress is something that happens to you because of something occurring. But actually, stress is of your making.

It’s our reaction to a mental bind that we put ourselves in based on how we are interpreting something.

Usually this reaction includes our decision that something is not to our liking for some reason. It may be that we don’t want it to occur or that we’re unhappy that it’s occurring.

What I call the ‘mental bind’ is when your mind doesn’t know what to do about something.

It’s when you want something to be different than it is and you are either unsure of how to change it or you think you can’t do anything about it.

Another way to describe it is, any interference that disturbs the way we want things to be and that we would rather avoid.

You could use the common phrase, “between a rock and a hard place” to describe the place where stress

originates.

The stress comes out of the gap between your thoughts and feelings of what is, or might be, and what you want. It’s this difference that you react to.

Think about it, if you could snap your fingers and have anything and everything exactly the way you wanted, would you feel any stress?

Wayne Dyer says something that is appropriate to stress-

“When you change the way you look at things, the way you look at things will change.”

Most of us think that if only the things happening around us and people would change, that we would then look at things differently, not the case.

We can easily get stuck thinking this because there appears to be logic that supports this idea. For example, if no one ever fired anyone from a job, you would not need to worry and get stressed about it for yourself.

If no one ever got mad at you, you would not have to react to it.

But the problem with this logic is that things will continue to show up in your life for you to deal with and people will continue to be people. You and I can’t totally arrange our world in such a way that nothing not to our liking will occur. It’s our task to learn ways of handling these things

Sure, there are many things you can do to set up your life to be more of your liking and this will help in reducing your potential stress, but you still need to take a look at how you perceive things and then react to them if you want to live a low or no stress life.

The key here is to first realize that stress is of your making. You can change your reactions to things, you can change your interpretations of things and how you perceive them.

You can do something about it, It’s your choice to take command of your thinking and decide how you will look at things and react, or to continue allowing your existing programming to keep going as it will.

Look at yourself, your stress and seek to reveal it’s real source.

What specific thinking is behind it?

The seed of your stress is in your thinking.

John