Listen to Al as you read along
Stress !!!!
Question: I am experiencing a great deal of stress with all of my responsibilities. I am married with 3 children, have a professional career and concerned about how my life is turning out. Do you have any suggestions to help me reduce the stress in my life?
All of us feel stress at times. Adult life causes us to pile up responsibilities and with them comes the pressure to perform. It is easy to imagine ourselves coming up short and doing a less than stellar performance in certain areas. The only way to reduce the pressures of life is to reduce responsibilities, which is seldom a realistic option for us, but we can reduce the stress we feel when meeting our obligations. Let’s define stress and then examine some strategies that we can adopt that will reduce the feeling of stress.
What is stress? Stress is actually anxiety and worry. Anxiety is experienced as distress or uneasiness of mind caused by fear of danger or misfortune. As we imagine the outcomes of our efforts, our tendency is to visualize negative results. It is easy for us to imagine failure or results that are less than we desire. With negative results we begin to further imagine other negative outcomes based on our failures. If we don’t check this process, we can see ourselves losing that which is important to us. Our tendency is to write negative novels with imagined outcomes of loss evoking criticism from others.
Stress is the uneasy or worried feeling we get from imagining negative outcomes. It is caused by what we are saying to ourselves and what we are picturing in our minds. When we tell our minds that we might fail or see images of possible failure, it causes us to feel uneasy and worried. The answer to stress is to change the way we imagine our outcomes.
Before we discuss specific strategies, we need to talk about how or minds work to form thoughts. By using the mind’s common mechanisms, we can learn to control what we say and see within our minds.
The human mind forms thoughts in 2 primary ways. We verbalize by talking to ourselves and we visualize by forming images of what we are thinking about. Verbalizing is called inner dialogue and is the conversation that we all hold with our self. Everyone talks within their self every day, all day long. It is simply the way the mind forms thoughts. Everyone also visualizes every day all day long, making pictures of what we are thinking. These sayings and pictures control how we feel inside and how we behave on the outside. We feel and do what we tell our self inside. We also use the mechanisms of verbalizing and visualizing to imagine where our efforts will take us and what our efforts will achieve for us. These inner mechanisms function automatically, without conscious thought, they run on autopilot. When we allow them to run on autopilot, our tendency is to say and see the negative, causing anxiety, stress and hindering our efforts to succeed.
To summarize, stress is really anxiety and worry that comes from imagining negative outcomes in our life. We use the God given inner mechanism of saying and seeing within our self to imagine a negative script of failure and loss, creating anxiety and stress. To reduce our stress, we must take control of these inner functions and not allow them to run on autopilot. Let’s look at a few strategies for reducing stress that I have used to help clients in my counseling practice.
First, we must practice an awareness of what is going on inside of our minds, moment to moment. As a counselor, I have helped depressed clients change their desire to commit suicide by changing what they were saying inside their selves. They first had to begin paying attention to what they were saying and visualizing inside their minds. When they focused within, they began to hear their inner dialogue and understand why they felt so bad. They were depressed simply because they were saying horrible lies within, telling themselves they were a failure, worthless, unredeemable, unlovable, undesirable and so on. The content of their inner processing was very self critical and therefore made them feel hopeless and depressed. Every one of the clients I helped were amazed at how harsh they were toward their own self, when they began to listen to what they were saying within. This new awareness they practiced opened a door of opportunity to practice another strategy, the making of changes to what they were saying.
Action Strategy: Begin to listen and pay close attention to the inner voices and images that you are using inside. Practice awareness and monitor your inner life.
Second, once we become aware of what we are processing within, we can evaluate the content. Is what we are saying and seeing helping us or hurting us? Is it true or false, right or wrong, giving us courage or creating fear, etc? When we listen, we discover that our tendency is to say and see that which makes us afraid and causes us to stumble or fail. Our natural bent is to sabotage our selves by telling lies inside that make us anxious, afraid and depressed. We use our past failures as evidence against us to imagine future failures and tell our selves that it is true. This action of saying the negative within creates our anxiety and the feelings of stress. Hearing our self opens a door of opportunity for change.
When you discover your inner talk that is creating stress, you can confront what you are saying and call it the lie that it is. You don’t have to believe the negative things you say inside. You can choose to reject the negative ideas and stop saying these hurtful ideas. When depressed clients learn that their self defeating voices are not true and that they can tell them to go away, they find hope for the first time in a long time. They discover that they can take charge of their own soul and decide exactly what they want to say to themselves.
Action Strategy: When you hear yourself say negative, hurtful, angry and self deprecating ideas to your self that make you feel anxious, confront these wrong ideas and refuse to accept them as true. Visualize the negative thoughts as a person and tell the person to stop saying those hurtful things and never say them again. Tell them with absolute conviction and when the negative thoughts come back (they will for a while) tell them all over again until they stop. When you confront these ideas, they will stop if you will persist and not give up.
Third, as you make the negative voices and images stop saying hurtful things, you need to replace the negative with something positive and truthful. Tell yourself something good, positive and helpful that will cause you to be hopeful and confident. Believe it or not, you get to choose what you will say to yourself and what you will picture in your mind. For reasons beyond this discussion, we naturally choose the negative side when we operate unconsciously. When we become conscious of what is going on inside of our minds, we can choose to reject the negative and replace it with whatever we want. We get to decide what we say to our self and how we want to feel inside. It is important though that what we choose to say and see have some basis in truth and fact. Wild fanatical ideas won’t work because or mind knows they are not true and won’t accept them. This leads us to the next action strategy.
Action Strategy: Write down positive affirmative statements about your self that describe all of your positive qualities. When the negative voices come back, confront them, tell them to leave and replace them with statements from your list. Tell yourself and imagine your positive qualities in action, seeing yourself at your best, telling yourself that this is who you really are. When you take this action step, you will stop feeling so anxious and begin to feel confident and certain about what you can do.
Pressure comes from responsibility and those obligations that you have chosen are usually things you want and love. We marry and take on the obligations of being a husband or wife. We have children and take on the responsibilities of being a father or a mother. We choose a career and with it come the pressures to perform so that we can advance to the level of our potential. We cannot escape the pressures of adult life but we can learn to stop creating our own stress and learn to empower our hearts with truthful statements about our self. We can learn to live with reduced stress.
Finally, the last action strategy that can reduce stress in or lives is physical exercise. A regular exercise program that keeps you in good physical shape will enable your body to handle the pressures of daily responsibilities. As we age, we get fatigued easier and find that we feel more tired all the time than when we were young. A regular exercise program can maintain a higher energy level so that you can feel able to handle your obligations. When you feel tired often, it erodes your confidence in your ability to perform like you expect. Also, strenuous exercise can free your body of stored stress from a day at the office or from dealing with conflicts. Make exercise a part of your weekly routine and you will be well served by the reduction of stress.
My final suggestion is one that I use in my own life to keep me on a positive track. I believe in God and trust what God has said in the bible to help me see a positive future. If you have found God for yourself or think it is time for you to make things right with God, there are links in this website that discuss how to go about entering a relationship with God. My prayers will be with you.
top
|
