Monday, February 8, 2010

Stress

Again I am reading in the book YOU CAN BE HAPPY NO MATTER WHAT  by Richard Carlson, Ph. D. ,the chapter I read today was about STRESS. I am feeling a lot of stress and so I am trying to figure out ONCE AGAIN how to control my thoughts. Here is is the what I RELEARNED tonight.

Stress is seen as a necessary part of achievement, relationships, careers, and life. The word has become a catch-all to describe, validate, and explain almost everything that is wrong in our lives. "If I weren't under so much stress, my life would be better" is a very common belief indeed.

Stress is a major cause of unrest in our lives, but we don't have to surrender our lives to it. If we understand where stress originates ( in our own minds ), and its relationship to our thinking, we can begin to eliminate it, regardless of our circumstances. Stress is not something that "happens to us," but rather something that develops from within our own thinking. From the inside out, we decide what is and is not going to be stressful. Gambling my be a thrill for one person, and for someone else the cause of a nervous breakdown. For one person, having children is the purpose of life, and for another is seems like too much responsibility. Each of these examples, as well as every other situation in life, is actually neutral, not inherently stressful.

The moment we define stress as coming from anywhere other than from within ourselves, we set ourselves up to experience it---and are too late to prevent it. Each time we describe stress as "out there", we validate it's existence. We then need to find ways to cope with, manage, or manipulate whatever it is that we believe is causing the stress.

You cannot effectively deal with something that, in reality, does not exist. Stress does not exit--other than in your own thinking. Your stressful thoughts are no more real than your non-stressful thoughts; they're still just thoughts. To rid yourself of the stress in your life, first understand that stress is your perception of the situation, not something inherent in it. There is not a "cause and effect" relationship between the events in your life and the feeling of stress.

Once you see there is no such thing as stress, only stressful thinking, you are on the road to immediate change and can take up responsibility for your own life. When you redefine stress as something you can control, it's  possible to maintain a positive feeling, even when circumstances are a great deal less than perfect.

"Second thoughts are ever wiser." ~ Euripides

"All that you achieve and all that you fail to achieve is the direct result of your own thoughts"  ~ James Allen

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