Meditation is one stress reduction technique that I happened to focus on, but it’s true of any other tool that you care to choose.  It’s value is not in the technique itself, but in the fact that as you practice it you develop and strengthen a mental pattern.  This makes it easier and easier for you to use.  And you also become quicker and quicker at being able to get the result you wanted.  And when you reach a certain level of competence you can do it under pressure.  Psychologists have studied how people perform under pressure.  Essentially their findings were that those skilled and practised rose to a higher level under pressure, whilst those with less experienced crumbled.

So in the case of meditation, you begin by maybe sitting for 20 minutes without achieving a quietened mind.  But maybe after six months of practice you are able to sit in a busy Doctors surgery, full of lots of noise and activity and yet block it out and attain the quietness of mind that previously only came about after lengthy efforts.  What has changed is that you have developed the skill to quieten your mind, almost at will.  

photo credit: adactio

Now this next section is probably going to sound completely unrelated, but by the end it will help you understand this idea at a much deeper level.

Time is a purely human concept.  People talk of spiritual growth, development and attainment.  However Oneness is complete.  It is everything, together (at the same time in our words).  So there can be no spiritual growth.  There can only be the human experience that seems to occur in a sequence of time.  In other words we seem disconnected from Oneness and seemingly find our way back to it.

The nature of being physical is that everything is relative.  So the art of living, is really the art of how we relate to what is around us.  Therefore the critical skill in living as a human is the ability to manipulate time and space.

Sport is a great way to see this manipulation of time in space in real time.  

photo credit: Roby Ferrari

Now the only sport I really follow is football (Soccer) but the same applies to all sports.  The difference between a star player and a mediocre player is their ability to read situations and see what is coming, to control the ball, to see opportunities to pass, to score, to beat players and the speed to make that happen before their opponent can.  

The difference isn’t that a mediocre player can’t do these things.  Put them on a training ground and ask them to do all these things around posts and they could do them.  The difference is that they can’t do them quickly enough in a fast moving, crowded and pressurised game to beat their opponents.

What star performers in all fields have in common is the ability to do these things so fast, that to them relatively to the mediocre, it seems as if things are happening in slow motion.  They have the skills so ingrained that they can react so fast that the speed they are capable of operating at, is much faster paced than most people can cope with.

photo credit: ThisParticularGreg

A great example of this is in humour, flirting or with smart replies.  Most of us can think of a great reply, but we think of it when the moment has passed and it’s too late to use.  Some people though, have the speed of thought to sum up the situation and respond in what seems like a split second.

The difference is that most of us feel too crowded and pressurised to think through the process quickly enough.  The quick witted ones have the ability to mentally make space for themselves by not panicking and then think through the process much quicker.

A couple of years ago at one of the Majors, Tiger Woods pulled out of his shot spectacularly.  Almost at the point of impact he realised and was able to steer his club away from hitting the ball.  It amazed everyone watching because almost no-one else could change direction so late after commiting themselves.  He could because time works differently for him while he’s playing golf.

photo credit: brookscl

The same is true in tennis, basketball, baseball, ice hockey and any other sport you can think of.  In engineering, mechanics and crafts, most of us find things too awkward and fiddly, too hard to get at, but the great Craftsmen can easily make the space to do the detail work.  The great Speakers, Artists and Writer’s can create a tranquility that enables them to detach from life and express themselves, but in real time.   

photo credit: JohnHallAssociates

Analyse anyone skilled at a task and you’ll find that where others feel like they are too crowded, the skilled are able to make space for themselves.  Where others feel that things are passing by too fast, they are able to move so fast that, relatively to them, things seems to be moving slower.  And so a lower level game is boring because everything seems to be in slow motion.

Now to bring this discussion back relative to the topic of stress.  The only essential stress reduction technique is the ability to create for yourself the time and space to respond effectively to situations that seem stressful.  

Meditation and any other technique you use are only ways that help you to make space for yourself.  As you practice the skills to process the events of life and so manage stress, you are developing and strengthening mental patterns that speed up your ability to cope with stress.  As you get quicker and quicker at doing this, it is possible that you can eventually respond to life in real time.  In other words, you process life as it happens without dwelling in toxic emotions and so you don’t experience feeling stressed or overwhelmed as any more than a momentary sensation.

Living smoothly and joyfully, is much like driving a car.  

photo credit: mroach

If you imagine the reverse gear to be negative emotions, lower gears to be less positive and the higher gears to be the more blissful states.  Initially and when you run into dead ends and get stuck you need the reverse gear.  In busy and built up places or in traffic jams you need the lower gears.  For the most part though, you can move through these quickly and spend most of your time sailing along in top gear.   

This is how life should also be lived.

Likewise when I start to write just a short response, my mind jumps in with more questions and more gaps in what I have written and so eventually a couple of lines turns into a page.  I was starting to reply to Ruth’s comments on the Problem of Living Up to Our Ideals  when I realised that I should make this into a post of it’s own.

Meditation And Stress

Probably the most popular stress management technique recommended is to meditate.  Now I think that’s an excellent tool to manage stress.  But as Tim pointed out, techniques are only a temporary expedient to the end result.  This is the problem I see with most stress management advice.  That it is based on an assumption that the world is a hostile, dangerous place, that is too treacherous to cope with without putting your life on hold while you deal with it.

Imagine you are settled in front of your TV to watch a gripping thriller.  As the plot unfolds your heart pumps faster with every twist and turn.  You fidget to mimic the character’s actions.  As you identify with the characters and get more involved with the storyline you feel the emotions that they feel.  Then the phone rings and you have to pause the film.  Still you are caught up in the emotions caused by the film.  But as you respond to the mundane details on the phone call your emotional state returns to a more normal level.  

Were you to now stop and consider the film plot in great detail, it would not have nearly as tight a grip of your emotions.  Some of the scenes might seem unbelievable.  In fact if you did this long enough, you might not want to see the end of the film because without being on the rollercoaster of scenes and emotions, it’s just not that exciting.

photo credit: Soulrider222

Meditation is like the phone call in the middle of the film.  It’s a temporary state of sanctuary, putting the events of life on hold, calming the emotional state and then looking at the events without the raging emotions.  When your emotional response is too intense and so far from your (seeming) control, then obviously meditation is a great tool.

Ultimately though, you want the rollercoaster ride from the negative into the positive.  Doesn’t a good thriller rescue victory from the depths of despair?  And would that victory be as thrilling when all is calm?

If you ever play video or computer or arcade games aren’t the best ones, those with the most dramatic scenarios?  

They put you in the middle of World War 2 or fighting off killer Zombies or rescuing the world.  The deeper the dips, the more exhilarating the ride.  

Life is the ultimate video game.  The events around you are the context of the game, designed to be enthralling, frightening and even desperate.  But you have the controls to manouevre through the scenes and ultimately your decisions and actions determine whether you end up devoured by the game or triumphing over all.

photo credit: mattymatt

Dealing with stress is a little like changing gear from reverse to first in your car.  At first you might go from reverse to neutral.  But with time as you become more skilled as a Driver, you can then switch direct from reverse to first.  It saves you time and speeds up your experience of life.  And the key to life is really about how much we experience.  That’s really the goal of being here that drives everything we do, wanting to experience as much as we can.

So to meditate is great whilst stuff seems too much to handle.  But just like driving the key is really how quickly we can move from A to B.  Instead we are moving from very negative emotions to less negative emotions and then to positive and onwards to more and more positive emotions. 

Everything in life has value in it’s place.  For a full life. you need to have the full range of emotional experiences.  Depression, anger, frustration and all the others are necessary for a happy and fulfilled life.  

The key is how quickly you move through them.  Get stuck in any of them and life seems to suck, but move through all of them quickly as an experienced Driver can move through the gears and life will flow for you.

When people are in a troubling situation, they have almost always been travelling along a certain path that is causing a problem.  In other words, people don’t wake up one morning three stone heavier.  The weight has been slowly gaining, but within the boundaries of their comfort zone so they never paid attention to it.  Someone, more sensitive to their size, would have acted much quicker and so the problem would have been easier to tackle in the first place.

photo credit: JasonRogers

Emotionally the same dynamics apply.  What happens is that people continue in their habitual way until it becomes such a big problem that they are aware of it.  Now they are in pain and also battling against their familiar habits of behaviour.  So it’s a much harder problem to deal with.  Let’s use a physical analogy to make the point clearer.

A few years ago, I took my kids to the park.  It was stacked out and all the parking spaces were taken and so cars had started to park up on the grass.  Like a good little sheep, I followed suit and we got out played and fed the ducks.  

Then we got in the car and realised I hadn’t considered how much it had recently rained.  The car wouldn’t reverse.  It just kept kicking up mud.  But I could go forward, so I did hoping I could turn around.  I couldn’t.  In the end, we wound up in the middle of the park.  Further than where we started and worse off.  The more I revved, the bigger the rut I dug for myself.

photo credit: Kentfield

And that is how many people find themselves emotionally.

Now I got so stuck, that I ran out of ideas and hope.  It was getting dark and we were far from home.  I ended up ringing the RAC to get towed out.  But they sent a normal van and I was embarrassed at how easily he negotiated his way out driving my car.  

Now when people start to read a book or articles about stress, they are often stuck in an emotional rut.  And so reading it would be a little like the RAC Man talking to me on the phone.  He knew instinctively what to do when he saw the situation, but on the phone he would only be able to give me vague, general advice.  And as I had so little knowledge on the subject, I couldn’t give him a clear picture of what the situation was.  So he had to adjust as he judged the lay of the land. 

Likewise, when someone writes a book or an article, they are not speaking to your specific situation.  As an example, if I was writing a letter to you and knew the full details I would phrase it differently, put it in different imagery or talk about very different concepts.  But what often happens is that someone tries to apply every idea they come across to a situation they haven’t really understood yet.  It’s a bit like wanting a magic wand without developing any skill.

That’s why self help books are so popular.  Because they promise the magic pill, the silver bullet to solve all problems.

photo credit: VirtualErn

Yet the truth is these will work in some situations at some times.  But to think that one book, one course or one methodology is the key to every situation would be much like a Doctor giving out one pill to every single Patient.  It will work 1 or 3 per cent of the time because in those cases, it fits the exact illness and profile that it works for.  But it’s only through luck.

More certainty in getting results takes practice and expertise.  It takes training, just as a Doctor needs training to diagnose and prescribe a course of treatment.  If you are in a hole that you really need to get out quickly then you either need to undergo intensive training or pay someone such as a Coach or a Therapist who has put in the hours, to guide you to restructure your thoughts as a temporary measure, until you can do it for yourself.

People fall for the sales pitches and the hyped nonsense of books and courses that are framed and designed for their ability to maximise the Author’s wealth.  You can’t read Rich Dad, Poor Dad and be transformed into a Magnate any more than reading Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus will make your relationships perfect.  

A good book or course will give you one main message or idea.  It’s one tool.  To think that will then equip you for all the possible situations life can throw at you is the equivalent of a Carpenter thinking all he needs is a hammer.

photo credit: Micah Sittig

The truth is that it takes training and practice to get proficient at anything.  And because you do have a lot of experience, with conscious focused training, you can pick these skills up quicker than medical training or computer programming.  But it isn’t a natural ability.

It reminds me of my time running a gym.  You’d get people who’d never exercised in 20 or 30 years and were surprised that they were weak and unfit.  It works the same way emotionally.  If you have never really devoted much time to minimising stress, developing close relationships and finding out what you’re about then it is going to take a period of adjustment and training.

I’ve just finished reading a fantastic book called Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell.  In it he demolishes the myth of natural brilliance and discusses how research shows that genius level performance takes 10,000 hours in any field.

Now you don’t need 10,000 hours of stress management training to live peacefully, (for enlightenment maybe) but you do need enough to alter the structure of your brain.  Then it becomes automatic and natural.  But the hardest part is always the initial steps.  Every subject seems boring until you know enough to be interested in it.  And the more you know about it, the more passionate you will become about a topic.

And the topic of living with less stress or the topic of relating to others are like eating and exercising.  You don’t really have a choice.  You can remain ignorant of the many delights of the art of bee-keeping with little ill effect.  But if you don’t learn to look after yourself physically and emotionally, you’re in for a tough time.  Sure you can eat all the junk you want and never exercise, but you’ll pay for it in lack of mobility and physical discomfort.  

photo credit: Raúl A.

Likewise, if you don’t learn how to handle stress and how to get along well with others your life will be in continual turmoil and emotional discomfort.

Key Point 1: It takes training to be better able to cope with stress

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?

You can get the report by clicking the image below;

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

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.

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.