From Stress to Success: 10 Steps to a Relaxed and Happy Life: a unique mind and body plan. Xandria Williams
Читать онлайн книгу.
the large family you want. The stress of not being invited to a party is reduced when you know your career is of prime importance to you.
Having a clear idea as to exactly who you are, who you want to be and the type of life you want to have leaves you much less vulnerable to other people’s opinions and criticisms than when your goal is to please everybody else at all times, an impossible task, and when their opinion is of paramount importance to you.
10 You are terrific. Most stress comes from your feelings of inadequacy. Develop full confidence in yourself, be willing to like, love and approve of yourself. If you don’t, who will?
You grew up in a world where, under the disguise of modesty, you were taught to put yourself down. You were taught, under the guise of generosity and caring for others, to put other people first, to put others ahead of you, to give them the biggest slice of the cake, to let them go first, to praise them before praising yourself.
This is fine as far as it goes, but sadly it is all too easy for it to have negative repercussions. For most people, having been taught, as children, to put other people first has resulted in a diminished respect for themselves and their own achievements. In clinic work, in workshops and in life in general I have found that most people have a poor opinion of themselves. Even the boasts and bombasts, under all the external cover-up, have, deep down, the fear that they are not good enough, not clever enough, not loving enough, not helpful enough, not successful enough, not sufficiently worthwhile.
Learning to love yourself, like yourself, approve of yourself and be comfortable with yourself and the way you are is a major way to reduce the stress in your life. This does not mean you should be aggressively telling everyone else how wonderful you are, boasting, hogging the limelight or telling everyone else you are better than them. It does mean having the inner certainty that you are OK. You are perfect just the way you are, for this moment in time.
This attitude does not mean that you do not recognize things about yourself that you wish to change. We are, hopefully, all on a path of growth, change and development. It does mean becoming content with yourself, being willing to give yourself the unconditional love and acceptance that you give to other people to whom you are close.
It is a sad comment on the way we bring up our children and that you were probably brought up as a child, that for most people this is one of the hardest steps to make in reducing stress. Learning to give yourself full love and approval may be the most difficult step to take; at the same time it is also one of the most powerful.
These and many other similar concepts are discussed in detail with practical examples throughout the first part of this book. These ideas follow on from the ideas developed in two earlier books, Choosing Health Intentionally and Choosing Weight Intentionally. In these, attention was focused on the way that thoughts, emotions and past experiences affect an individual’s health and weight. Here these ideas have been developed further and applied, specifically, to the stresses in your life.
There are other topics covered in the first part. You are given tools that will help you to understand yourself better and to learn more about past problems and past experiences that you are letting, often subconsciously, contribute to your present stresses. You are given tools with which you can unearth some of the subconscious reasons why particular situations stress you. One such technique is Running a Phrase. You are told how to go back into the past in ways that will help you to unearth buried memories, memories that may have been suppressed yet may be the cause of much of your stress. You are shown how to take the remembered trauma out of past stressful situations and to reduce the impact of these situations on your present stress. You are encouraged, and shown how, to have positive beliefs about yourself instead of being self-critical.
In these and other ways you will be able to understand and remove the stresses in your life. Having recognized old triggers and old sensitivities, you can reassess present situations and will, almost certainly, decide to view them in a new light.
You will learn to be proactive and to create your own life, just the way you want it, rather than being reactively jerked around on the strings of other people’s opinions and emotions. You will spend time assessing just exactly who you are and who you want to be, which values are important to you and which aren’t, and therefore which criticisms are relevant and may assist in your growth and which aren’t. You will learn a lot of wonderful things about yourself that, so far, may have gone unrecognized.
You will also be encouraged to use the amazing power of your mind to change both the events and the situations in your life and your attitude to them and to yourself. By the end, if you go through the processes with real conviction and serious intent, you will be able to relegate stress to the position of a negligible problem in your life. Things that once stressed you will become positive challenges and learning experiences to help you develop further.
You will find one or more of the 10 points that we have discussed at the beginning of some of the chapters that follow. This is meant as a guide only. Many aspects of the 10 points itemized above will come up more than once throughout the book, to a greater or lesser degree. Having the major concept of the chapter at its head will help you to incorporate it into your thinking. Repetition, often in a different disguise, will help you to become familiar with these ideas and techniques and to make use of them more readily.
Part II: The physical aspects of stress
While most stress comes about as a result of your mental and emotional states there can also be physical contributing factors or causes. Thus it is wise to make sure that there are no physical health reasons for your feelings of stress. These physical factors may seem to be a direct and prime cause of your stress. Alternatively they may seem to be contributing factors that decrease your ability to handle the other stresses in your life. Either way you will need to deal both with the physical factors and with the emotional ones that result from them and may also have contributed to them.
It is the old chicken and the egg question. Which came first? The emotional stress which caused you to make excessive demands on your body and give it diminished care or the physical problem which led to your emotional stress and worry and which in turn led to the physical problem? The nice thing about chicken and egg situations is that you can begin to change things by working with both the chicken and the egg. So do both.
Clearly any physical health problem can cause you to feel stressed. Anything from a toothache to the knowledge that you have a fatal disease will stress you. However, there are some physical health problems that can, as part of their symptom picture, generate nervous, irritable and stressed emotional states. These include such health problems as allergies, candidiasis, hypoglycaemia, poor nutrition, poor immune function and the effect of toxins. If these problems are part of your experience then you can, by doing what is necessary to your lifestyle to improve your physical health, greatly reduce your stress at all levels, physical, emotional and mental.
Be warned, though, that it is all too easy to blame these possible physical causes exclusively for your stress and thus to avoid making the mental and emotional changes discussed in Part I. This is a mistake and leads you back into victim status, this time a victim to your body.
If you are not willing to make the necessary changes in your diet and lifestyle described in Part II you may at some subconscious level be showing your preference for hanging on to the physical problems as useful excuses for your emotional stress rather than facing up to the emotional and mental changes that are necessary. If this is the case then working through Part I is even more important for you.
It’s time now to focus attention on some of the physical health problems that may affect your ability to handle the outside (perceived) stressful events in your life. Some examples are outlined below and you may find it useful to consider if they could be affecting you in some way.
If you suffer from hypoglycaemia, a condition characterized by low blood-sugar levels, you will not feel relaxed and comfortable. Instead, following a large meal or an intake of sugar-rich foods, your blood-sugar level will first rise and then fall to disastrously low levels. When the level is low you will feel anxious, irritable, uptight, frightened and out of control. Under these circumstances any outside pressure at all is likely