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;

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