Five Powerful Stress Busters - Charles J Givens

The normal state of the human mind and body is not of tension and anxiety, but of total health and relaxation.

Much of the stress we experience is self-created and self-perpetuated, through the misuse of our minds and emotions. The good news is that this type of stress can be controlled.

Over the years, I’ve discovered many stress-busting strategies. They are simple and practical. Used on a continuing basis, they will keep your system in tip-top shape.

Here are five of these powerful stress busters. The first, a physical one, will sound familiar, but it is too often overlooked. The four mental strategies will probably surprise you.

1. Exercise for 20 minutes to one hour every other day. Exercise induces your muscles to go through alternating cycles of tension and relaxation. Both muscle tension and fatigue are stress-related symptoms that can affect the entire body. Forcing your muscles from an abnormal state of tension into a more normal state of relaxation helps alleviate the stress. Your muscles operate as they were designed to operate, not as a repository for stress. Because it stimulates your entire system and reduces built-up stress, exercise creates far more energy than it uses.

2. Continuously affirm to yourself, "It’s just an event." Your life each day can be viewed as a stream of connected events — some positive and some not. The negative events can cause great stress, but they have only the stress-producing power over you that you assign to them.

Separate your perceptions, opinions and value judgments of a negative event from the event. Affirm to yourself, "It’s just an event," and you will avoid triggering stress reactions. You have total power to choose how you will respond or react to the event, thereby influencing succeeding events and out-comes.

Probably 80% of your stress is created solely by your mind. Learn to use your mind correctly, and your stress level will be reduced. Stop reacting mentally and emotionally to what is going on around you, perceive each new situation as a neutral event. Then you can choose unemotionally what response to make. Your life stays under your control.

The more challenges you accept and the more goals you set, the greater your potential for stress. Yet, you can control your stress level almost totally.

3. Don’t make value judgments about people or events. A value judgment occurs when you inject strong opinions, beliefs or feelings into, or about, an event. Value judgments include: Good or bad, just or unjust, right or wrong, pleasant or sickening. None of these value judgments exists in the event itself, but only in how your mind chooses to perceive the event. The moment you begin to inject negative opinions, feelings or beliefs into the event, you stir up negative stress-producing emotions. Make a negative value judgment and you become upset and full of stress.

Stress can be measured in a bio-feedback laboratory with a device called an electromyograph. One interesting stress intensity test is to ask a subject connected to the electromyography to put a finger in an empty light socket that is not plugged in. Consciously, the subject knows that there is absolutely no danger. But there’s a program in the subconscious mind that associates light sockets with electricity.

The moment the subject puts a finger in that light socket, the needles of the electro-myograph go off the scale-total stress. It will take five or ten minutes for the needle to go back down. It is cause and effect. When you make a value judgment about an event, that value judgment will cause undetected stress just as surely as the predictable light-socket experiment.

4. Disconnect your emotions from the outcome of events. Another way to guarantee stress is to tie your emotions to the outcome of an event. Let’s say your goal has been to buy your dream home. You finally find the house, and you apply for a loan. You begin to hang your emotions on the outcome of your loan application. How? By saying to yourself, "If I get this loan, then I’ll be happy." If then statements set up a dependency program in your mind. When you state, "If I get this loan, then I’ll be happy", you have also programmed your mind to believe. If I don’t get the loan, I’ll be miserable."

The if-then connection also causes another emotional reaction. Until the event occurs, you have programmed yourself to experience a high level of stress. When you say to yourself, "If the event happens, I will be happy" you have automatically said to yourself, "I will not allow myself to be happy until the event occurs." You have taken a neutral event and made it into a big emotional deal.

On the other hand, disconnecting your emotions from the outcome of an event creates a win-win situation. If the outcome is positive, your emotional reactions will be positive, undiminished by any residue of stress or negativity. If the outcome is negative, it may be a temporary setback, but you will have an undiminished store of energy, self-confidence and positive emotions that will propel you to find or create opportunities and experiences that will turn out in your favor and take you in the direction you want to go.

5. State preferences instead of expectations or demands. It’s all in the way you use your mind. The winning mindset is, "I prefer to get the loan. But, if the answer is no, I’ll choose another alternative." Simply using the word "prefer" allows you to drop the if-then emotional connection to the outcome.

This powerful stress buster is the best way to keep your emotions in balance. You have said to your mind. "My first choice would be to get the loan. But, if I don’t, no problem. I will simply assess my alternatives and—without emotion, disappointment or self-criticism—choose another."

Remember, all events are neutral. From now on, when you catch yourself thinking, I’ll be happy if…, I’ll be happy when…., They’d better…. Or They’d better not .., change the demands or expectations to preferences. Like events, preferences are neutral. Unmet preferences trigger unemotional desire to find alternatives.

Stress is an unnatural condition, one you cause. Pick up a rubber band. Put it around your fingers, but apply no pressure. Notice that the rubber band is in a state of balance or equilibrium. However, if you pull your fingers apart using the force of your muscles, you stretch the rubber band. It is under stress and no longer in equilibrium. But the rubber band is also pulling against your fingers, exerting pressure and keeping the muscles in your hands and arms tense.

Your mind and body work like a rubber band. In their normal state, there is a lack of stress and tension. To create stress and tension, you must not only pull your mind/body system away from its normal state, you must also continue to apply pressure to hold it there.

Unwanted, prolonged stress is the result of the continual misuse and misunder-standing of your mind/body system. Therefore, getting rid of stress is as much a process of what you stop doing as it is what you start doing. Without thoughts and actions that continually produce stress, the system will move toward balance.

Reducing your level of stress will give you increased energy and clarity of thought, adding to your ability to operate effectively. Exercise. Eliminate negativity from your life. Don’t make value judgments. Don’t hang your emotions on the outcome of any event. These stress-busting strategies will speed up your progress toward achieving your dreams and goals. 

© "East and West Series" (July, 2002) published by East and West Series, 10, Sadhu Vaswani Path, Pune 411 001. Reprinted with permission.

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