Entries from July 2008 ↓

Continuing with 007’s comments.

Is it overwhelming to do all this for every issue?

Yes.  But you don’t need to do it most of the time.  What I am laying out is the process for overcoming an issue.  Maybe for a while you have to do this consciously for big issues, but as you do the process you lay down a neural pathway that makes it easier for each subsequent time.  So after a while it becomes an automatic response that you do without even realising it.  But of course like anything, there is a learning curve.

Will you be overwhelmed by doing it in little chunks?  Maybe.  If you can deal with it one big chunk, then do it in one big chunk.

But the idea behind the small chunks is that it makes a big decision more manageable.  In most cases people are stuck on making a decision because there are many other things they know are involved in the decision, but they can’t think of them all at the same time.  So making small decisions is easier.

It all depends on what’s right for you.  Stephen Hawking can calculate all his workings out in his head because that’s the way his brain has become structured.  But his Peers need boards and papers to map out their thoughts.  It just depends on what works best for you.

I’m not big on following processes and recipes.  I don’t think life is about consciously following templates.  I think you have to understand the basic process and then develop and refine it with your own individual stamp.  So what I have done is analyse how issues are successfully dealt with and then broken the process down to detailed steps for you to digest and then develop your own way of working with them.  It’s just a starting point so you have something to work with.

Which issues to tackle?

All of them.  If they are on your mind, process them so they move from your mind to resolved and forgotten.

You’re right that most of them will come to nothing.  Over time all stress passes.  It passes because the issue no longer becomes a big deal or because you change your perspective, beliefs and definitions that make it no longer relevant to you.  Or it will become so urgent that it becomes a priority to deal with it.  Emergencies are almost always only little things that blew up to crisis level. 

This process is about manipulating what naturally happens, so that you can make it happen faster.

Most of the time in life you’ll be off-balance.  This is all about getting back to a calmer, clearer state quicker.  Prolonged stress is costly, any way you measure it.  If you were only to look at it in terms of physical health, stress only starts to damage you, once it starts depleting your body.  The release of adrenalin that activates the ‘fight or flight’ response is a normal state.  But it’s when that state is maintained for a prolonged period that Cortisol is released and the body begins to destroy itself to fuel the readiness to act, that stress starts taking a toll on your health.

Again it depends on how much tolerance you have for drama and internal conflict and confusion in your life.  I have very little.  I like calmness, peace and stability.  I have great enthusiasm and passion for what I do.  I already have more plans than I will ever have time to complete.  Many people need great dramas to motivate them into action and give them a focus for action.

The key is not to sit there with your pen and paper ready permanently processing, but to get to zero stress and then catch issues as they crop up.  As you get better and better at doing this, you can do it quicker and more easily.  What holds people up is wanting perfection on every issue.  You can’t get that, you just have to either make a decision or put it aside to make a decision at a specific time. 

voice keeps telling me that we are missing something..

I think we are, but this is only a first draft.  It’s the best I could come up with to explain this now.  The key question for all of us, is what’s missing in this model?  What would make it smoother and easier for us all to implement in our lives?

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I don’t always get a chance to reply to comments, but I always read them as they come in.  As you are reading what I have written, I’m working on the next installment.  I’m developing new materials, planning ahead and going about my normal working and family life.

Sometimes, I don’t reply because my mind is focused on a different track and I know that if I get distracted it will take me a long time to get back to it.  Sometimes I’m too tired at the point I read the comments and sometimes I just don’t have anything to say, so I leave it till later.

Anyway over the last two or three days I’ve been catching up and replying to some comments that were long overdue a reply.  Here’s one that I felt was probably relevant to many people, so I’m making my reply into a post.

007 said;

Is freedom a double edged sword? A logical conclusion would be “not having a choice is better than having one”..no decision is required and so no stress..

Yes.  I do think not having a choice can lead to less stress.  The Paradox of Choce and Stumbling on Happiness both talk about how choice can make us more stressed and less happy;

However I believe the ideal state is not in never being put in a stressful situation, which would only lead to boredom and stagnation, but in overcoming stress and using it as a springboard to a higher level of being. 

Anything can hurt you or help you.  Today we have so much more freedom and choice than our Ancestors, that it is overwhelming us.  It’s why so many people are feeling more stressed.  Because we have so many possibilities, but lack the skill to decide on issues at the level to really take advantage as we could. 

The old structures and barriers that once held us in our place, but also to some extent supported us, such as strong religious/moral codes, defined social class/roles, demographic identities such as nationality, cultural and so on are crumbling to make way for the new.  But we have not yet evolved to a state that allows us to function as effectively without the structure of rules and punishments.

Yet the old structures are close to breaking point.  The illusion of authority, be it temporal, spiritual or societal is the idea that it can control or manage anything.  It can’t.

Our world has become so fragmented and complex that it is beyond any group of people to monitor and plan for.  No Government or other body, however powerful or educated it’s thinkers are, can see and understand enough to control all aspects.  And so those who place their trust in such authority will increasingly be disappointed.

This millennium is about the birth of what a friend of mine has termed ‘the given self’.  It’s not about willing or visualizing yourself to be what you think you should be.  It’s about understanding the pattern of instincts, experiences, observations and personality that make you what you are and then living truly to that self.

Up till now people have always worked from the basis that they were designed or manufactured poorly.  And so they should mould themselves into something else that will fit into the Society they have built to control each other and so fix the poor job their Creator did in making them.

When I opened up this series on stress I said the critical skill for our times was the ability to define and decide who and what we are.  This is what I meant by that.

If you can’t cope with insecurity, ambiguity and choice from now on, you are going to struggle with life.  And there is no Government or Organisation that can help you to stop the flow of life. 

Yet on the other hand, if you do develop this skill, nothing can hold you back from having everything you ever wanted.

Part 2 tomorrow.

I started to write about the steps you need to take to move an issue from bothersome to dealt with, but it went past a reasonable level for one post, then two and I decided to put it into a report.

You can get the report by clicking the image below;

Don’t forget to ask any questions or share your thoughts below.

I started to reply to a comment on the last post and as usual it ended up as a sequel to War and Peace, so I decided it would be easier to make a new post.

It’s not about pros and cons. That’s the old way that someone makes a big decision. We’re looking for a fresh new solution.

We haven’t got up to making the decision yet. We’re indentifying the elements, the criteria that together will make up the big decision.

It’s taking an issue apart into it’s different cellular aspects. So it’s not one decision based on pros and cons, but many little decisions.

For example, someone might tell you that they had Heart disease or Arthritis and unless you have medical training you’d probably feel satisfied you understood what was wrong with them.

But a Doctor would want a lot more information before he/she would treat them. There are over 300 different types of Arthritis and many forms of Heart disease. Is it the arteries, the heart function, the oxygenation and so on?

The label is a broad category, but different clusters of individual symptoms make up the condition. And the minute differences in symptoms lead to different diagnosis, prognosis and treatment.

In the same way, the problem is the overview, but there are clusters of beliefs, wants and fears underlying the problem.

Think of it this way.

If you travelled the world you’d find that an overwhelming number of the population fervently wanted world peace.

Go to the Christians and they would say; ‘yes we want peace. If only everyone would live by God’s law’s as Jesus told them.’

Go to the Muslims and they would say; ‘yes we want peace. If only everyone would live according to the law of Allah as Mohammad shared them.’

Go to the Buddhists and they would say; ‘yes we want peace. If only everyone would live according to the laws as Buddha gave them.’

The problem isn’t at the level of wanting peace, or love, or freedom. People believe they are fighting for peace or love or freedom. No one ever recruits an army by telling them they can go and kill all they can for fun. They appeal to their patriotism, their righteousness, their desire to protect their kin.

These wars originate in exactly the same thought processes as the individual problems we all face. The devil (or conflict) is in the details.

The problem is in the detail of how conflicting beliefs get to co-exist peacefully. The route out of them is not through choosing one over another, but in forging a new path. Using your unique situation to come to a new level of understanding and so creating a unique solution.

I want to know something, but I don’t want to seem pushy is the impetus for a more evolved and refined means of communication.

This is the start of the decision stage.  It is only designed to create a more refined goal. A set of criteria that you want met by the solution. We’ll get to making an actual decision soon.

Let me know if this makes it any clearer. I don’t want to move on, if this stage isn’t clear yet.

Resolving stress is not as difficult as everyone seems to think.  You just have to make a decision about the issue.

If you look back on any stressful time, you’ll find that it stopped being stressful at the point where you decided one way or another.

Maybe something happened that made your decision for you. Or maybe you got so fed up that you jumped off the fence.

But you’ll find that the failure to make a decision is what keeps stress stuck in the treadmill of your mind.

In the last step, we talked about how to gain clarity and perspective on the issue by examining it from every angle, with no questions off limits.

That’s important, because once you can see the issue in greater clarity with all the facts and subtle nuances laid out before you, the decisions are so much easier.

If you’ve ever made business decisions in an organisation where the management information is clearly given to you, you’ll recognise that mostly the facts make the decision for you.

Here’s another example. Everyone who’s dealt with money knows that if you spend more than you have, you’re going to run into trouble.

Yet, many, many people struggle with debt. Here in the U.K, last year debt levels reached £1.35 trillion or about $2.7 trillion. That is more than the Gross Domestic Product. which is the value of everything made and sold in that year.

Sometimes you will see tv shows about people who have gotten into dire trouble and then they meet with an Advisor.  The first thing the Expert does is sit down and analyse the figures.  In almost all cases, there’s nothing the Individual couldn’t do themselves, but they kept running and hiding from the issue.

It’s exactly the same with resolving other areas that cause stress.  You just need the clarity to have all the different strands that make up the issue in front of you.  That was covered in step 2.

The first part of deciding is to set your criteria. So you take all the questions you asked in step 2 and answer them individually.

Now you have the issue broken down into many small chunks, you decide where you stand on each chunk. These become your criteria.

Usually people struggle to make decisions because they are trying to make a huge decision without considering all the aspects and elements that make up the surface issue.

A small, start up business might ask the question, ’shall we advertise?’ But that’s thinking at too broad a level to gain any worthwhile answer.

A successful company will ask, ‘how shall we allocate our advertising budget to tv, radio, print and internet?’

A really successful company will know the return they’ll get for every place they advertise. So the decision is made for them to advertise and where. There only question is ‘how much can we invest before it stops being profitable?’

You aren’t having to make one huge decision, just lots of little ones. This is how you refine what exactly it is that you want.

Let me give you a simple example.  I have a webcam hooked up to the computer to make these videos.  Now my two Daughters have been having great fun videoing themselves singing, dancing and generally shouting and doing stupid things and then rewatching the clips.

Now they’re having a great time with it, but it’s very loud.  So my wife and I are trying to talk, but we can’t hear ourselves.  If it were just a one-off it would be fine, but it happens quite frequently and so it becomes an issue that causes stress.

The basis of the stress is that we are torn.  On the one hand we want to be good parents, we want them to be free and be able to have fun.  Yet we also want to be able to sit and have a cup of tea and talk over our day.

So the stress comes from wanting two seemingly contradictory things and not seeing the underlying conflict.  Once we parcelled the chunks out and defined the real issue, our creativity could be unleashed and the problem resolved.

The webcam can easily be moved to my Daughter’s desk and laptop upstairs, where they can play about and downstairs doesn’t sound like a rock concert.

So for example, yes, I do want them to be able to have fun. No, I don’t want to live with constant shouting, screaming and fighting.

The best solution, therefore has to be one that matches up both needs, or as many as possible. Before you can identify the best solution though, you need to have identified your criteria. Answering the detailed questions gives you, your criteria. This is the first part of stage 3.

There’s no video yet, due to technical problems.

Ok so we’re up to the 2^nd step in our 7 Steps to Zero Stress.

Step 1 was to List everything on your mind.

Step 2 is to clarify exactly what the issue is.

Video 1 - How To Deal With Stress

Video 2 - The Key To Overcoming Stress

Video 3 - Diane’s Case Study

Most people try to resolve issues at too general and too broad a scale. For example, say someone has just lost their Parent. If you asked them how they felt about it, they might snap at you, ‘How do you think I feel?’

Underpinning their answer is a common assumption, that everyone feels the same way about things, but actually they vary enormously. I used to Volunteer for the Samaritans. As part of that I took many calls from bereaved people. There was a huge variety of responses, from upset to relieved to delighted. Essentially what the Samaritans do is provide an anonymous place where people can say the stuff they really feel that they couldn’t ever say to someone they knew.

So before you can resolve something, you have to accurately pinpoint the cause.

Somewhere I worked once had a Maintenance Man who was legendary for fixing everything with his hammer. The bigger the problem, the harder he’d hit it. I joked once that I hoped no-one ever asked him to fix the lights, because he’d hit it. I got the reply, ‘It’s funny you should say that because…’

To be a great hunter, engineer, sports person or whatever depends upon greater accuracy. And to be a great processor of life, you have to become more and more accurate at seeing the paths that have led to this situation.

Whatever situation that you are currently experiencing, it didn’t just pop out of the sky. You have been travelling a path to it. It is a conflict between two or more elements.

You have to be here and here.

You have to do this, but you don’t have enough time.

You want this type of relationship, but not with this person.

And usually in a problem situation, there are multiple paths that converge at the point you notice the problem.

Think of a problem as being like a car crash. All the cars involved have travelled from different origins and converged at the point of impact. If any one of them had taken a different turn-off they would not have the crash.

That’s why awareness is so important. The more sensitive your level of awareness is, the earlier you can notice problems. And so you can become sensitive and aware enough to resolve issues before they become problems. Metaphorically, you take a turn off that helps you avoid the car crash.

So you want to identify the strands of the issue, then you want to know where these issues started from. It’s all about breaking everything down into manageable chunks that you can then make decisions on.

I asked for examples I could use to demonstrate this and Diane kindly supplied some. Diane hit me with both barrels. She has many issues to deal with. I’m just going to use three of the issues because otherwise it’s going to seem too repetitive.

Before I get into that though I want to make a point. I’m not great on being empathic or sympathetic, it’s not a strength of mine, and sometimes I can seem hard and insensitive. What I can do well is strip away everything that isn’t relevent and get back to the bare core issues.

The extent to which you can do this is equal to the degree of openness and honesty to which you can be. It’s your mind that’s clouding the issue. So you have to be willing to ask any question and truly examine how you feel about the issue.

Issue – no connection with husband

What does that mean?

What do you want?

In a perfect world, how would that connection look like?

What is the cause (s) of that lack of connection?

Has it always been like that?

What is it that most bothers you?

If he died tomorrow, what would you feel, regret or miss?

If you left him, how would you feel?

When you first got together what attracted you to him?

What aspects of him do you like?

How would it feel to have that connection back?

What would it mean to you?

List the possible ways you could start to get that connection back?

Issues - moved to Florida and son not adjusting well and wants to move back to NY.

In which ways is he not adjusting well?

What exactly is happening that tells you this?

Could you have handled the move differently that would have helped him accept the move and so adjust better?

Is there a possibility of him moving back, you all moving back?

Is his not adjusting well because he thinks he can get you to move back?

Is his trouble adjusting because he is sulking at the move?

If he accepted the move, do you think he would adjust better?

Is his trouble adjusting, your responsibility?

Why is this bothering you?

Do you feel some guilt at his having to move?

Issues - 81-year-old father 2 hours away and needs help because wife came down with dementia. He is going to die soon taking care of her.

Could he move nearer to you?

Could you move nearer to him?

Could you get help for him?

How does he feel about it?

Would She be better in a home?

Are there other ways you could help, such as do their shopping and bills online?

If there is nothing practical you can do, can you support him emotionally?

What are your feelings?

What do you most want to do?

Once you then get all this information, which will probably be easier for you to lay out on paper, you’ll be able to identify the strands of the issue. The next step is to identify the underlying conflict.

What is the underlying conflict for these situations. I don’t know the answers to the questions so I have to make a guess. The first issue is too broad to be worth guessing at. But I’d say the second isssue was based on guilt at the son having to move.

The conflict would be something like;

1. Wanting to be a good parent and wanting the Son to be happy.
2. Needing to move house.

I’d guess that behind the situation with Diane’s father is also a guilt that She feels responsible for caring for him. Yet circumstances hold her back from being able to.

As in most cases stress comes from the conflict of wanting two mutually exclusive things. To be here and here at the same time. To do this and this at the same time.

Once you understand the conflict, you’re ready to move to the next stage. Step 3 will be about making your decision.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to comment or vote on the last post. I’m glad that most people want to continue because we’re about to get to the meat of the topic. I have pretty much ready the next installment of how to process the information, but before you read that I have a mission for you… should you choose to accept it. First, let me set the stage a little.

People get all hung up and paralysed when they are stressed. But 99.9% of the time it passes. Their Boss quits and work becomes much less of a problem, their money problems pass, they stop worrying about their ex and start a new relationship or whatever.

We always worry about stuff that’s temporal, which means that what we worry about always changes and so passes. Sometimes our worries come to life and then we deal with them. Sometimes they bring new worries and so we just get new sources of stress. But the individual things that we were worrying about always move to a place where they stop bothering us.

So what we are looking to do is get to the end goal, move from stressed to resolved about an issue, quicker, so it causes us less discomfort. By speeding up the natural process, we avoid or minimise the discomfort.

So today, I’m asking for your help.

You have a whole databank filled with years of experiences of successfully overcoming stress and observing other people deal or not deal with situations.

You may never have thought of it that way. You might just have thought ‘time heals’ or ‘it just became unimportant’. But there’s a sequence of changes in your mind that happened so that the event no longer causes you stress or emotional pain.

So if you could, please add your experiences, or those you’ve observed, as many as you can and in as much detail as you can. Then I’ll try to gather them together, analyse and figure out the many different ways that caused people to process events and how we can use these natural processes to get rid of stresses quicker.

The reason I want to get this from you now, is because after the next post, you might start looking at the situation differently. I want your raw experiences, to see if there is something I have missed.

Then on Monday, I’ll post the next instalment. Meanwhile I’ll be sifting through your experiences for more ideas.

You can add your comments below. But in case you only want to share them with me, for the purposes of research, without them ever being shared, you can send them to me here.

Please detail the situation, what happened and the end result.

Looking back on it, what has changed?

How do you/they feel differently about the situation?

You know how sometimes you’ll be at a social function and you’ll get talking to someone and they’ll drone on and on endlessly about whatever they like talking about.

It might be moaning about their Spouse, their work or telling you about their latest model plane.  And everytime you try to change the subject, they just dismiss what you have to say and continue their droning.

Well, I’m a little concerned that I might be that droning bore.

Since I started the stress series, there have been far less comments and less questions.  I’m not sure if that’s because you’re bored of the topic, because you don’t understand what I mean, because people are busy during with holidays etc or for some other reason.

So I was thinking maybe I should work quietly on the Stress series by myself and let you know when it’s finshed?

Let me know what you think by taking the poll below and/or commenting below.

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I wanted to try to move this series onto a more practical level. So I have made up a hypothetical Character, Tom and shown three diary entries.

The idea was to demonstrate the need to deal with things quickly to move them from bothering you to being resolved in your mind as quickly as you can.

It quite often happens that a number of bad events happen in clusters. So if you take too long resolving them they pile up one on another.

I know it might sound like I’m glossing over the seriousness of these events as if they are just minor details. I’m not. I understand that they are not simple things to clear in your mind. But the fact is that unless you do, you’ll suffer more stress and be at greater risk of becoming overwhelmed.

Here are the three diary entries.

Not resolving your mind of a worry is like a Runner in a hurdle race having the first hurdle added to the second, then the first and second added to the third. Once you have a second worry it’s going to be harder to deal with the first.

The more worries, things you have to do and unresolved or undeveloped ideas you have on your mind, the less mental horsepower you have to devote to it.

Stress is not a problem of not being able to cope. Stress is the result of not dealing with things as they crop up. It’s not breaking a big thing into it’s separate elements.

Focused attention has so much more power than diffused attention. Why so many people are stressed today is because they are trying to do too many things, so they are doing them with diffused attention.

Whatever your goal might be, whether it’s to achieve success, to live a more balanced life, to grow spiritually or to develop a better relationship, the grreatest step you can take towards achieving that goal is through gaining clarity and peace of mind. A scattered and agitated mind can do nothing.

So here’s the best thing you can do to achieve that.

Get a piece of paper and pen and list or draw everything that crosses your mind. Capture every thought or word that crops up without any judgement or analysis.

If you have a thought or a feeling, it is there for a good reason. And if you fail to recognise that reason it will recur and increase in intensity until you do and act on it. So just make a note of it, regardless of how inane it might seem.

Do this for five minutes or even ten, until you run out of steam. Here’s an example start of such a list.

In the next post we’ll talk about how to process these.

It might be easier to understand how to process thoughts if we have some real life examples. So if you want to share some from your list or even a hypothetical situation, post it in the comments box below and I’ll do my best to share how I’d process such a situation.

In part one of this series we talked about what stress is. My definition was that stress is the conscious awareness of a thought.  Today we’ll start to talk about managing stress.

Most people don’t define themselves as being stressed until they reach a point somewhere close to meltdown. Yet there’s a range that begins with the with conscious thought and builds up pressure until you reach the tipping point that causes a breakdown.

Becoming more skilled at dealing with stress means getting an awareness that you are on the road to being stressed earlier and earlier. As you develop your awareness and speed with which you can process the details of life, you free up more brainpower and clarity to deal with the situations and problems in your life. Also the quicker you deal with these aspects, the less chance there is of fear and strong emotions biasing and distorting your thought processes.

What happens when you are slower to deal with problems and thoughts is that your brain gets pulled in many different directions. It starts to work on one issue, then you feel a pang of fear about some impending situation and so that becomes your priority.

The result is that you start down one journey and change direction before reaching the end. And you keep doing this until you reach the end of the day and realize you haven’t finished any, but you’re completely exhausted. And in the morning you have to start again only with more being added.

If you could focus your full attention on one thought, you’d have your full brainpower focused on it and so you could process it quicker.

There is an almost perfect analogy to stress.

Housekeeping.

I know this because neither my Wife, nor I, like housework. And so it’s something that we’ve had to work hard to consciously keep under control.

If you let things slip in your house, if you take a couple of days and slack off, you wake up the next morning to a mess. There’s a whole backlog of tasks that have to be done just to get to a blank slate.

Then there are continually going to be more mess created, more jobs that need doing as you go through the day. And it is much harder to get a house tidy than it is to keep it tidy.

This is true also of the mind. We’re always producing and encountering problems, conflicts and cognitive loose ends. In time these almost always will be resolved, but when you have them in your head simultaneously, they cause your brain to split into too many different directions.

Part Two to follow;