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.

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;

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkmOofAJbvs[/youtube]

You could say it was making and uploading a video for the first time .

Sorry for the delay, but getting to grips with a new technology is always filled with potholes. I would have liked to have made the video better, but I if I was to get anything out this week, it would have to be this.

The written version on what is stress is here and the audio version is here.