From Stress to Success: 10 Steps to a Relaxed and Happy Life: a unique mind and body plan. Xandria Williams
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As human beings we filter out much that is going on around us. We have ears to hear, it is true, yet they can only hear certain sounds. Dog whistles are tuned to a frequency that can be heard by a dog yet is outside the range of the human ear. Many other animals hear at a frequency that is inaudible to human beings. The same is true of vision. Some animals can see in the dark while we as human beings are blind. Our sense of smell is minimal when compared to that of many animals, and thus we filter out many major olfactory experiences that are part of the daily life of other species. We filter out the radio waves that pass through us and our environment every day, likewise the television waves, the electrical and magnetic frequencies and so forth. All these things pass us by because we do not have the sense organs to perceive them; they are filtered out by the details of our make-up as a species.
This means that you are only consciously aware of part of your environment. It also demonstrates that something doesn’t fail to exist simply because it is not detected by your senses, a point that is well worth bearing in mind.
This filtering also means that there could be a number of stressful things happening but because you are not aware of them you do not feel stressed. For instance, sounds that fall outside your auditory range will not frighten you, smells that your nose doesn’t detect will not trouble you.
Cultural filters
Secondly you learn to filter as part of your upbringing. Some things stress you because they are not what you are used to or what you consider to be normal. These same things that you find stressful could leave someone else totally calm because they fit in normally with their expectations as to the way their life would be.
Consider, for instance, the wearing of the correct clothes and shoes. John and Susan were going to visit Susan’s parents. John, who had met and lived with Susan in Australia, hadn’t yet met her parents who lived in central London and this first meeting was to be at a dinner party in their honour. Since it was the middle of a summer heatwave and they had been told that the occasion was not formal John wore a beautiful Batik shirt, smart light-coloured linen trousers and beautifully tooled leather sandals, an outfit that would have been perfect at a similar dinner had it occurred in the Australian township where he grew up.
Susan’s parents were mortified when he appeared in sandals and without socks on. They considered the evening ruined and endured it in an embarrassment of wondering what their friends would think of him. John, unaware of the social rules he was flouting, had a wonderful evening and expressed himself delighted with them as he drove home with Susan. Susan, used to John’s choices of clothing, was unsure of the reasons for her parents’ distress yet felt stressed by the tension in the air all evening. As her mother said afterwards, the shirt and light trousers were bad enough, but no-one, absolutely no-one, went to a dinner party in sandals.
Consider, however, what would have been happening had Susan been Japanese and taken John home to visit her Japanese parents. They would have felt stressed and mortified if he had worn shoes at all.
Many times when you feel stressed it is the result of things and events that are occurring in a way that does not fit in with your upbringing and expectations. If you can change these filters, change the way you view things, you can change your experience of stress.
Had Susan’s parents acknowledged that the man was more important than his clothes and had they assumed that their friends would have understood that what he wore was correct within John’s world and that he was not belittling them by dressing down, they need not have felt stressed and could have had a wonderful evening.
A western woman of conventional upbringing, used to covering her breasts at all times, could feel highly stressed when taken to a topless beach by her latest boyfriend. Yet had she been brought up in any one of many other cultures where it was perfectly natural for her to bare her breasts, such exposure could have seemed perfectly normal to her.
If events fall within your expectations of what is right, normal and safe, based on your culture and your upbringing, they probably don’t stress you. If they fall outside those expectations you probably do find them stressful.
Individual filters
The third type of filtering is done on an individual basis and there are at least three sub-filters in this group, namely, generalization, deletion and distortion.
Generalizing
The filters you apply through generalizing involve taking one experience that is bad and assuming that all such similar experiences will be bad. This then causes you to feel stressed.
Martha was a strong woman who helped her husband in the hardware store they owned. Her delight in the evenings was to take their large and strong labrador, Chappie, for a walk. When her city-bred sister, Jennifer, came to stay there was more work to be done so she asked Jennifer to walk the dog. All went well for the first week. Then on the eighth day Chappie found a smell that excited him and he took off with the lightly-built Jennifer clinging to his lead and desperately trying to keep up. Eventually she had to let go and returned home, after searching high and low, shaken and embarrassed, without him. Chappie, needless to say, was waiting quietly at the front door. From then on Jennifer refused to walk him at all saying: ‘He always runs away when I take him, I’m not strong enough to hold him.’
In this way she generalized from the one event that stressed her, ignoring the previous seven successful walks, to create a feeling of stress whenever she was faced with a large dog.
Jim was frequently called on to present material to the board of directors of the company for which he worked. All went well for his first year in the job. Then at one meeting he got confused by the questions being thrown at him and got his figures muddled up. In a lather of embarrassment he extricated himself as well as he could and went back to his office. From then on he felt thoroughly stressed and developed tension headaches during the days prior to a board meeting knowing that he ‘always got his figures muddled at board meetings’.
Deletion
Deletion is the second kind of individual filtering. In this you ignore certain things that happen and focus on others. You may ignore the good things and then feel stressed because you are aware of their absence.
Mrs G. had come to my office several times complaining of many health problems, all of which she attributed to stress, and largely to the stress of her marriage.
‘My husband no longer cares,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t care how I’m feeling and he thinks I’m stupid. He either ignores me or contradicts what I say and argues with me. I can’t cope with the children, he undermines my authority and I can’t keep going this way.’
Eventually I decided I needed to see them both together so she brought Mr G. in with her on her next visit. He sat in a chair beside her and rested his arm along the back of hers in a protective gesture. As he introduced himself he explained that he was worried about his wife’s health and willing to do anything he could to help.
For the first 10 minutes she spoke and I asked questions. Mr G. remained quiet but observed her and me closely with obvious concern for her showing on his face. Eventually Mrs G. said, ‘And I’ve had a headache every single day with the stress of it all.’
‘No, dear, you didn’t have a headache at the weekend, remember, we remarked on it.’
‘There you are,’ she said angrily, leaning towards me, ‘see what I mean, he doesn’t care and he contradicts me all the time.’
One look at Mr G.’s face showed his progression from happy optimism that she had been headache-free for the weekend to resignation at her outburst.
She had followed her habit of filtering out the care he was expressing by his body language and the 10 minutes during which he had listened to every word she said without a contradiction. Her filtering and her expectations were leading her to have the type of experience she expected to have. It was going to be another bad day.
Distortions
Distortions are probably the easiest type of filtering