Have You Conquered Stress?

You can…if you want to!

Mike George offers some practical advice on how to find freedom from stress

It beats sixty to ninety times every minute, about 100,000 times every day and around 3 million times every month? The human heart is the most efficient pump in the world. Try opening and closing your fist seventy five times per minute and see how long you can keep it up. Almost unheard of only a century ago, heart attacks were a medical curiosity for training doctors. Today, hundreds of thousands of hearts breakdown every year.

It is well known that the risk of a heart attack is greater if you smoke, have high levels of cholesterol in your blood, or high blood pressure. We also now know that a healthier diet and more exercise are important ingredients in avoiding such a demise. Suggested antidotes traditionally range from jogging in the park to a course in multi-vitamins, from weekend retreats to a regular bubble bath, from regular medical checks to an array of alternative therapies. Unfortunately none of these help you to know how to respond more effectively to the circumstances, situations and events which trigger the stress experience - and that can be anything from missing a train, a bad day with the family or constant money worries.

With the rapid increase in concern about the affects of stress, the most risky forms have now been determined. For example, it's not simply having a heavy workload that hurts your health. It's the way you handle your obligations that is important, and if you have certain personality traits, you may experience dangerous stress regardless of your lifestyle. There are seven main categories of stress that have been linked to a greater likelihood of heart disease. Once you have discovered the source of your stress you can learn to reduce it without having to radically change yourself or your lifestyle simply by learning to respond in a different and more relaxing way.

1 Multiple and Conflicting roles.

In a recent survey conducted by a National University, nurses who often had to choose between their job and their family had a greater rate of heart disease than those who had fewer conflicts. In an age in which there is more emphasis on doing and less time to just 'be' these findings certainly apply to people in other professions. Split between family, profession and the community there are a variety of roles which consume time and energy, and easily invoke the feeling of pressure.

The following suggestions may help you to make your life easier to manage. Make a list of your duties according to your roles. If the list is too long allow yourself to postpone - or even disregard-the less important tasks. Then try dissolving the boundaries between your roles. Also, mingle your roles. Let your husband or wife meet your boss; get to know your children's teachers. People with multiple roles experience less stress if their life is integrated rather than being comprised of separate chunks. At the same time try to play your roles like an actor. When finished one scene, perhaps at work, consciously leave your role behind when you leave the office, and fully play your role as parent or spouse when you get home. It's fatal to play the wrong role in the wrong scene.

2. The Excessive Work Load

Extensive research has shown that people whose work lives involve an excessive number of demands and little control - such as secretaries, assembly line workers and those running their own business in fluctuating economic times - are at a greater risk for high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes. If you're overwhelmed at work or home, look for ways to give yourself more autonomy. Delegate more or hire in some help. Prioritise your tasks each day, and do only what you can – one task fully completed is better than six half done. Be ruthless and make sure you put aside some time to relax at weekends. Enlightened time management means you put your own well being at the top of your to do list.

3 Social Isolation

If you don't have anyone on whom you can call on for support, you may have a different kind of' stress. A recent study found that unmarried heart patients who reported they had no one to confide in had three times the death rate of those who had someone to turn to. Talking about your problems is a good way to de-stress. This is how we used to alleviate our emotional stresses before the passive activity in front of our televisions and computers began to kill our conversations. It also explains the rapid increase of therapists who are essentially professional friends being paid to lend us an ear. Talking things through lowers the blood pressure. Find someone to confide in, and encourage your work colleagues and family members to express their frustrations as they happen, avoiding the build up of steam and the explosion that normally follows.

4 The Anger Factor

We all have to cope with noisy neighbours, a slow driver ahead or a person who always seems to push the wrong buttons within us. While minor inconveniences are not a health hazard for most of us, they could be heart damaging for the 15 to 20 per cent of us whose blood boils at the smallest annoyance. They are the so called ‘hostile personalities’. People who have this kind of personality don't always have a lot of external pressures from their environment. Their stress is almost entirely generated internally.

When you get perturbed, try asking yourself the following questions. Is it important enough to stay angry? Is my anger justified? Is there anything I can do to remedy the situation ? If you answer yes to all of these questions, resolve to take action. If your answer to any of them is no, you should try to deflect angry emotions by saying "Stop" or 'Calm Down'! to yourself every time you exhale. You can also try to break the response pattern by doing something different every time your anger arises. If you still have difficulty dealing with your anger, develop the practice of observing yourself as soon as you become angry. This separates you from the power of the negative emotion which arises, and it then subsides a lot faster. Levels of inner anger tend increase if we do not do something about it. Book yourself on an anger management course before your angers do you some internal emotional and physical damage.

5 The Type A Response

It is now well known that when the hard driving competitive Type A personalities rush through their daily activities, they release hormones that deplete levels of HDL cholesterol (the heart healthy kind). While Type A's find it harder to change their personality, they do have some immediate control over their bodies biological response to stress. If you are a Type A introduce yourself to some relaxation techniques, such as yoga, or doing slow rhythmic breathing while visualising being in pleasant, calm surroundings. Setting aside 15 minutes a day for a silent walk or quiet meditation will almost certainly keep stress hormones at bay. In fact these methods are the most effective whenever you are stressed, whatever the cause.

6 Perfectionism

Everyone has expectations of themselves. Some of us have such high expectations that anything short of perfection is a huge disappointment, and source of frustration which can easily turn to anger and rage. If it becomes a regular occurance, as it must in an imperfect world, we heamorrage self confidence and beat ourselves up. Even worse, we expect others to be perfect too, and when they are not we enter into the blame game and withdraw our trust. There are three possible solutions once we see that our stress is totally self inflicted. First lower your standards to a lesser but acceptable level. When you paint the wardrobe deliberately leave those parts which are only seen when it is moved. Get comfy and accustomed to not doing the whole thing when it does not have to be done. Second, change your perception of the world. It is an imperfect place with imperfect people and yet everything is just fine. Third, start to congratulate, praise and appreciate others for what they do, for their effort, regardless of the outcome. Deliberate appreciation of others loosens our rigid attachment to the way we think things ‘have’ to be!

7 That Difficult Person

We all have a ‘difficult person’ in our life. What we forget is that it is we who have decided to label them difficult. It is as if we have given them a certificate which labels them a ‘difficult person’! They then feel they have to live up to it. This can become so twisted that if they know we think they are difficult, they will deliberately act in a way that allows us to say, “See I told you they were difficult”, and in a perverse way making us feel right about them and thereby gaining our approval by default!

So what is a difficult person. They are someone who always does what we don’t want them to do, and who don’t do what we want them to do, and then we don’t know what to do about them! What we are trying to do is control them, even if it’s only in our own mind. And that is impossible. So our stress is not coming from them, it’s coming from our perception of them and our futile efforts in trying to control what we cannot control. The outcome is always going to be frustration and failure. It we cannot see and understand it, then anger will be the emotional sign that we are self-destructing. Solution, stop trying to control others. Let go and let be. You will be surprised at how much more influential you are when you stop trying to fix, manipulate and control.

And finally. If you don’t want stress what do you want? Peace, contentment, perhaps happiness? What are you prepared to do to create it? It won’t arrive in the morning post. Perhaps you can see its time to stop complaining and being paralysed by what you see are the causes of your stress and do something about creating a life free of stress. For thousands of years the sages and the saints have been trying to tell us that all stress is self inflicted by an unenlightened mindset. It is how we are perceiving the world around us that is making us respond in emotionally stressful ways. Change your perception and you change both the way you respond and the result of your response. If we can follow their advice and give ourselves the time and space to pursue a more enlightened way of seeing and living we would be able to respond without stress to anything and everything that happens in our life.

The methods for this are meditation, visualisation and challenging and changing your beliefs, perceptions and attitudes. We only have to be humble enough to go back to school and become a student of life. If we don’t, nothing changes, stress will be our companion forever, we will not see how we are the creators of our own stress and it will eventually kill us. But then perhaps you like a bit of stress! Yes? It’s good to get upset sometimes isn’t it? Is it? Or is that a lazy mind at work? Only you can decide. Perhaps the pain is not yet strong enough for you to realise the adrenaline rush, the rage, the moments of high and low anxiety are all symptoms and signs that you are well on your way to a successful suicide mission. It’s your choice. It’s always your choice. No one and nothing can make you feel stressed without your permission!

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