No More Stress…..

Most people will always find something to stress them out – their job, their boss, their financial situation, their husband, their wife, their boyfriend or girlfriend, their teenage children, their health, their golf, their holidays! I have one client who telephoned my one day a few years back to tell me that he was stressed out. When I enquired what the perceived problem might be, he told me “I’m stressed out because I’ve nothing to be stressed out about!” Seriously! We never have to look far for something to whip up our adrenalin – and, if we can find nothing, we’ll make it up.

In fact, if you are suffering or have suffered from stress, that’s exactly what you’re doing – making it up. Because the one thing that you can be absolutely sure of is that your stress has got absolutely nothing to do with what’s going on or who’s doing what to you. Your stress is caused by how you react to what you think is going on or what you think someone is doing to you. If you’re confused, read the last sentence again – because there are two steps involved in the creation of your stress – your perception of what’s happening and your automatic reaction – these two steps are two steps in the wrong direction – away from reality.

You perceive what you think is happening based on what psychologists call “top down information” – let’s see how it works. Someone at work asks you to do a simple task that’ll take perhaps fifteen minutes. When they ask, their voice is raw data to your ears – or “bottom up information”. You make sense of that raw data by using your top down information – which is “stored knowledge” the main framework for which was established during your childhood formative years. The key point to realize at this stage is that this “knowledge” is of little or no relevance to the situation in which you are currently involved. Be that as it may, you will automatically use your stored knowledge to make sense of your ears’ raw data – and, in the process, make nonsense of it. As a result, you might think that Joe (the guy who has asked you to do the task!) has it in for you and is deliberately trying to ruin your day – this may be the farthest thing from the truth but this doesn’t matter to what your subconscious mind does next.