From Stress to Success: 10 Steps to a Relaxed and Happy Life: a unique mind and body plan. Xandria Williams
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per cent of you won’t do it, 5 per cent of you will. If you do you will get far more out of this book than if you don’t. I am assuming that you are one of the five per cent who will.
There is one further task for you to do before you start. Make a list now of all the things that stress you in your life and the reasons why you find these things stressful. Include all the big stresses in your life but also all the small stresses, the little things that cause you problems. Some of them may seem too small to mention but write them all down now. You will then be able to use this list as you go through the book. Any time you have an insight into one of your stresses you will be able to check it off as something you can now deal with in a different and more peaceful and productive way.
Stop reading now. Follow the above suggestions. Write this list down before you read on. This is essentially a practical book, not a book to be read through fast and taken in passively. The method works, if you do. Make your list and then read on.
You are in for an exciting journey in personal growth and development. If you follow through with the things you will read about you will also find that life is a lot less stressful for you in the future.
Dealing with external stressors
• If you can change the external stressors in your life then do so. If you feel cold, put on more clothes. If you hate your house and can move, do so. If a divorce is really essential then get on with it.
• If you cannot change the external stressors, then working with the following points will help you to reduce your feelings of stress. Even if you can change the external factors, working with the following points will help you to create a stress-free future faster than you could otherwise do.
Here we go.
1 Stress is your own experience; it is personal to you and generated by you. It is not directly to do with things outside yourself; they are only the triggers to a response from within you, a response that is individual to you. There is no such thing as a universal stress.
This covers a controversial and, at the same time, exciting approach to stress. The controversial hypothesis presented here is that there is no such thing as stress. There is only your own, individual, response to situations. This may set you thinking and even protesting. Yet we will persist with the idea. According to this hypothesis there is no such thing as a universal stress ‘out there’ that comes to ‘get you’. There is only you as an individual and your response to a situation.
Most people find speaking in public to be a highly traumatic experience. A few people love doing it and thrive on it. Many people find a cocktail party or a similar social gathering to be a high point in their social calendar. Some people find this a highly stressful experience. They are frightened of what people will think, unsure of what they will say or do and delighted when the evening is over. Most people love a chance to lie on a sunny beach and soak up the sun as they let the tensions ooze out of their life. A few people find this a highly stressful situation, feeling frustrated at the lack of things to do and accomplish. Most people hate wars and fighting. A few people look for wars and are only happy when in highly dangerous situations. Some people find routine jobs boring and stressful, other people love them for their predictability and their routine. Some people feel stressed by challenge. Others respond to and thrive on it.
There is no single thing that is a universal stress. There is only your response to the outside world and the situations it provides. These you will either enjoy and respond to positively or will dread and fear. When you fully understand this you have made the first step in recognizing and then reducing the stress in your life. The next step is up to you.
2 Feeling stressed is your choice and you can choose to continue or to stop. It is up to you to make the changes.
Since stress is an individual thing experienced by you in response to both external factors and your own inner interpretation of them, you can be in control. If you are willing to change your response you can reduce or eliminate your feelings of stress.
Will you continue on your present path or are you willing to learn more about yourself? Are you willing to change yourself so that you do not respond to the outside events with all the reactions that you now group together under the heading of stress?
Your immediate answer may well be, yes, of course I am willing to change, I do not want to go on feeling stressed. However, a surprising number of people are not willing to be the ones to change. They think other people should change first. Others insist they are willing to change yet they do not do so. Others change a little and then stop. Perhaps they think that other people should now change too. Perhaps they think that there has not been sufficient benefit from the changes they have made. Just a few people are willing to change, and keep on changing and developing, until their life is just the way they want it and their stress is negligible.
3 You can use the awareness of what stresses you to learn more about yourself and then use this knowledge for change.
Finding out what causes you to feel stressed tells you more about yourself than about the stress. Some people like responsibility, some don’t. Your response says more about you than about the responsibility. Some people like solitude, other people don’t. Your response says more about you than about solitude.
The next step is for you to find out why a perceived stress in your life is indeed stressful for you, and why it makes you feel uncomfortable. The causes behind your response almost certainly lie somewhere in your past. After all, they can hardly come from the future, and the present is but a fleeting moment. You may have to search back to infancy and childhood. You may only have to go back to times in your earlier adult life.
One woman, Rosemary H., felt stressed every time her queue in the supermarket was not the fastest. By using various techniques that are described later in this book, she came to realize that this reaction stemmed from a feeling that if she was served last she was not getting the attention she deserved, and this in turn meant that she was not good or important enough. This came from a childhood where she was the youngest of four and her older siblings were always calling her stupid simply because she, being three years younger than the youngest of them, could not keep up.
When she understood this and realized how many things she had achieved in her life, she was able to develop the assurance she needed to be ready to drop the belief that she was not good enough. Her feelings of stress in queues then evaporated. Instead she spent the time usefully in thought and contemplation, or took something to read with her so the time in the queue wasn’t wasted.
Another woman felt stressed every time she thought about the fact that her husband, a senior executive laid off in the recession, was no longer supporting her. The money was not the issue – they had reserve assets and his golden handshake. Her problem was a subconscious belief that if he didn’t make the effort to go out and look for another job, hard to get at his age, and if he didn’t actively work to support her, he didn’t care, if he didn’t care then he didn’t love her, if he didn’t love her she was no longer part of the loving and nurturing relationship that she craved.
Her stress came from the underlying fear of not being loved and nurtured, not from the more obvious cause of having a non-working husband. The stress she felt both caused her direct distress and led to overeating. This increased her weight which in turn made her feel more stressed, inadequate and unlovable. Once she identified the real problem she was able to discuss it with her husband.
The solution was not for him to go out and work again but rather for him to show her how much he loved her. Even more importantly, she had to develop her own sense of self-worth since, without that, all the loving he gave her would be insufficient for her to feel secure in that love. Resolving her beliefs about being inadequate and unlovable helped her to deal with the situation and reduce her experience of stress. She was then able to enjoy the free time her husband had and they started to share a number of hobbies. In the long run her recognition of the underlying problem brought them closer together.
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