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