More smiling, less worrying. More compassion, less judgment. More blessed, less stressed. More love, less hate.
The theistic philosopher has a tendency to devalue insufficient worldviews, ideologies, and quite often common sense for the greater good, and in such cases, one should not be discouraged when seen as a bad guy. If he stresses over man's perception of a righteous heart, then he has given his heart to man.
Never justify someones wrong action, without them apologizing first & admitting their wrongs. If you do. You are not making them better, but you are making them worse on the bad things they do.
If you have influence on other people. Dont be influenced by their hate, money, jealousy, anger and popularity .
I dont celebrate any friendship that was build on hate, because we share the common enemy.
Children are no longer being parented, but are raised. Thats why they don't have morals, ethics,humanity and manners, because their parents neglected them. We now live in a society that doesnt care about right or wrong.
When people support you when you have done something wrong. It doesnt mean you are right, but it means those people are promoting their hate , bad behavior or living their bad lives through you.
At such times, the heart of man turns instictively towards his Maker. In prosperity, and whenever there is nothing to injure or make him afraid, he remembers Him not, and is ready to defy Him; but place him in the midst of dangers, cut him off from human aid, let the grave open before him, then it is, in the time of his tribulation, that the scoffer and unbelieving man turns to God for help, feeling there is no other hope, or refuge, or safety, save in his protecting arm.
I believe there are only three businesses: my business, other people's business, and God's business.
I believe I will not not die a minute too early or a minute too late, but exactly when I am supposed to.
In my experience, stress is the cause of all injury and pain.
No beating yourself up. That’s not allowed. Be patient with yourself. It took you years to form the bad habits of thought that you no longer want. It will take a littletime to form new and better ones. But I promise you this: Even a slight move in this direction will bring you some peace. The more effort you apply to it, the faster you’ll find your bliss, but you’ll experience rewards immediately.
The most important reason for your “no” is that you need your downtime so you won’t behave like a jerk because you’re depleted. And you don’t want to battle an appetite spiked by the stress of overcommitment. But that’s your secret; others don’t need that information. So just smile, say no, thank you, and keep moving.
Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.How would that be? Just how would that be?
I believe in not trying to control things that are out of my control or none of my business.
A premature death does not only rob one of the countless instances where one would have experienced pleasure, it also saves one from the innumerable instances where one would have experienced pain.
We all have problems. Or rather, everyone has at least one thing that they regard as a problem.
Before you worry about the beauty of your body, worry about the health of your body.
APPLY WITHINYou once told meYou wanted to findYourself in the world -And I told you toFirst apply within,To discover the worldwithin you.You once told meYou wanted to saveThe world from all its wars -And I told you toFirst save yourselfFrom the world,And all the warsYou put yourselfThrough.APPLY WITHIN by Suzy Kassem
I began my studies with eagerness. Before me I saw a new world opening in beauty and light, and I felt within me the capacity to know all things. In the wonderland of Mind I should be as free as another [with sight and hearing]. Its people, scenery, manners, joys, and tragedies should be living tangible interpreters of the real world. The lecture halls seemed filled with the spirit of the great and wise, and I thought the professors were the embodiment of wisdom... But I soon discovered that college was not quite the romantic lyceum I had imagined. Many of the dreams that had delighted my young inexperience became beautifully less and "faded into the light of common day." Gradually I began to find that there were disadvantages in going to college. The one I felt and still feel most is lack of time. I used to have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears only in leisure moments when the words of some loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul that until then had been silent. But in college there is no time to commune with one's thoughts. One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think. When one enters the portals of learning, one leaves the dearest pleasures – solitude, books and imagination – outside with the whispering pines. I suppose I ought to find some comfort in the thought that I am laying up treasures for future enjoyment, but I am improvident enough to prefer present joy to hoarding riches against a rainy day.
There are times when I long to sweep away half the things I am expected to learn; for the overtaxed mind cannot enjoy the treasure it has secured at the greatest cost. ... When one reads hurriedly and nervously, having in mind written tests and examinations, one's brain becomes encumbered with a lot of bric-a-brac for which there seems to be little use. At the present time my mind is so full of heterogeneous matter that I almost despair of ever being able to put it in order. Whenever I enter the region of my mind I feel like the proverbial bull in the china shop. A thousand odds and ends of knowledge come crashing about my head like hailstones, and when I try to escape them, theme goblins and college nixies of all sorts pursue me, until I wish – oh, may I be forgiven the wicked wish! – that I might smash the idols I came to worship.
When outcomes are uncertain, most of us spend a great deal of energy ruminating, worrying, and second-guessing ourselves. Not only is this a waste of time, but it makes us less likely to succeed
Through most of human history, our ancestors had children shortly after puberty, just as the members of all nonhuman species do to this day. Whether we like the idea or not, our young ancestors must have been capable of providing for their offspring, defending their families from predators, cooperating with others, and in most other respects functioning fully as adults. If they couldn't function as adults, their young could not have survived, which would have meant the swift demise of the human race. The fact that we're still here suggests that most young people are probably far more capable than we think they are. Somewhere along the line, we lost sight of – and buried – the potential of our teens.
As long as high schools strive to list the number of Ivy League schools their graduates attend and teachers pile on work without being trained to identify stress-related symptoms, I fear for our children’s health. I am not mollified by the alums of my daughter’s school who return to tell everyone that the rigor of high school prepared them for college, making their first year easier than they’d anticipated.If they make it that far.
Self-care is how you take your power back.
Let your mind have peace for a moment. Push away all the anxious thoughts. Release your tension and breath. Everything is going to work out. It might not be fine now but trust that in time everything will be okay. Allow yourself to rest. Put a hold on your stress. You can always pick up your stress at another time. Breathe. Be calm. Trust in yourself.
Pushing your limits is what allows you to grow stronger, so if you find yourself feeling passive, it can make sense to dial it up a little. Get moving. Accomplish something small. Do something you enjoy. Embrace what moves you. And start again.
Humans are born with a hodge-podge of various brain circuits, that possess the seeds of peace, fear, love, hate, rage, pain, love, stress and faith. All these elements compose the emotional domain of our mental life. All these characters are ingrained in our limbic system, that keep our head straight in the path of survival. We humans can survive, only if, all these elements of our brain circuits function properly. Failure of any one element would mean extinction of the whole species.
No matter how strong or strong-willed you are, you cannot live a stressful, maxed-out life without that pace eventually biting you in the butt. It is necessary to take breaks, set parameters, and be kind to yourself if you want to continue making an impact in your little corner of the world.
From time to time, one must release the grime built up inside them to to free their emotions like the ocean.
The woman recovering from abuse or other stressful life situations may feel she's in no way in charge of anything, least of all her own world. She faces the horse with trepidation. The horse senses the fear and becomes tense and concerned. The wise instructor starts small. The woman is handed a soft brush and sent to fuss over the horse. It's pointed out that if she stands close to the animal, she will be out of range of a well-aimed kick. She is warned to watch for tell-tale signs of fear in herself and the horse. She's warned to keep her feet out from under the horse's stomping hoof. They're both allowed to back away and regroup and try again until they reach an accord regarding personal space. Calm prevails, and within a few minutes, hours or sessions, interaction becomes friendship. It happens almost every time a woman is allowed enough time and space to work through the situation.So a woman whose daily life is overwhelming her learns to step back. Is this a cure for her endless problems? Of course not. Simple is not simplistic.
Certainly we can say that the pace of modern life, increased and supported by our technology in general and our personal electronics in particular, has resulted in a short attention span and an addiction to the influx of information. A mind so conditioned has little opportunity to think critically, and even less chance to experience life deeply by being in the present moment. A complex life with complicated activities, relationships and commitments implies a reflexive busy-ness that supplants true thinking and feeling with knee-jerk reactions. It is a life high in stress and light on substance, at least in the spiritually meaningful dimensions of being.
If you dream your problems at night and live your problems by day, you are suffering the effects of paralyzing toxins delivered by the sting of worry, stress, and fear. You must detach yourself from these leeches if you do not wish to be irreversibly poisoned.
It was after I first began to uplift my thoughts a bit that my cravings for junk food started to dissipate. I did not connect the two at that time. First, I simply noticed that I didn’t need to sleep so much. It took a while before I realized that in addition to my improved energy level, there was a direct correlation between chewing on mental garbage and putting garbage in my mouth.
You cannot free someonewho is caged intheir own self.
Master the art of selfloveand you will never have to seekvalidationever again.
I am no one's to be claimed,I belong to me.
A deep breath is a technique with which we minimize the number of instances where we say what we do not mean … or what we really think.
Although previous studies had suggested that friendship--male and female--could be a powerful antidote to stress, more recent research indicates that broken promises, dashed expectations, and other side effects of friendship gone wrong can actually raise the level of stress in our lives, often to disastrous effect.
Being under stress is like being stranded in a body of water. If you panic, it will cause you to flail around so that the water rushes into your lungs and creates further distress. Yet, by calmly collecting yourself and using controlled breathing you remain afloat with ease.
And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no illusion, but equally real was the yawning pit of exhaustion inside her. She just felt so tired sometimes. And because of everything her parents asked of her, she was ashamed of being tired. She could not, would not let the pit swallow her up, as much as she sometimes wanted it to.
If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.
There is a tonic strength, in the hour of sorrow and affliction, in escaping from the world and society and getting back to the simple duties and interests we have slighted and forgotten. Our world grows smaller, but it grows dearer and greater. Simple things have a new charm for us, and we suddenly realize that we have been renouncing all that is greatest and best, in our pursuit of some phantom.
Breathing is our participation with the cosmic dance. When our breath is in harmony, cosmos nourishes us in every sense.
You are a valuable instrument in the orchestration of your own world, and the overall harmony of the universe. Always be in command of your music. Only you can control and shape its tone. If life throws you a few bad notes or vibrations, don't let them interrupt or alter your song.
Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is... The only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds.
One's suffering, one's melancholy is, in itself, really only looked upon as failure or as punishment, as detestable or sinful or socially unacceptable in the eyes of man; but this is not so in the eyes of God: for He is close to the broken-hearted.
You must choose a positive response to any situation. This is the step action to conquer it.
I was stressed and scared and I had to hurry to be someone, become something, do something. I was running and talking and cursed myself when I wasted my time on things that wouldn’t get me anywhere. It was work and it was money and I was never where I was, always somewhere else in my head far, far away.
The UFOs were nothing more than the collective fantasies of a stressed out society... The world into which UFOs had appeared was one of under-the-desk siren drills against nuclear annihilation. Society had made a new myth, a communal idea of something outside a species apparently intent on dooming itself.
If you are feeling unhappy in life for any reason and often getting negative results, try this -> start replacing negative thoughts with the positive one, make a plan and act on them. The more positive thoughts you have the more positive and happy your will become and results are bound to be positive sooner or later.-Subodh Gupta author "Stress Management a Holistic approach - 5 steps plan
Every soul craves to fill the void. Only God can satisfy and set us free.
There are always waves on the water. Sometimes they are big, sometimes they are small, and sometimes they are almost imperceptible. The water’s waves are churned up by the winds, which come and go and vary in direction and intensity, just as do the winds of stress and change in our lives, which stir up the waves in our minds.
It’s easy to put the links between the increases in mental illness, depression, ADHD, and the like, with the speed of the modern world. People never get the chance to do nothing, or when they do, they lack the control to prevent their mind from racing off in a thousand different directions. So much so that their doing nothing becomes a thousand different things and the thousand different things becomes stress, anxiety, worry and fear. Left untreated these simple everyday things become well entrenched in our psyches and start to dominate our lives. We have a chronic addiction with doing and we love to use our busyness as a stamp of our hard work and hectic lives and we get stuck in this busy trap of always doing.
Don't ever think of bad things that could happen, and you'll have a better chance of them never happening. Don't ever think about doing something bad to someone, because depending on the intensity of your mind waves, something bad could really happen to them. Think love. Be love. Breathe only love, and love you shall be. When you stress out, things will stress out around you. Always control your thoughts and pacify any unnecessary stress. Control your vibrations and you are the master of your own harmony.
Dance your Soulful path / and you shall know the magic / of your mind & heart / and all the beauty laughing / to fill your rising self.
You can Transform into a Super-Soul! If you align your physical and mental (logical/emotional) self with your core self (or soul being), then you will know your personal path, and find ways to follow it to fulfillment. You can learn how to best nurture your body, plus train your mind as an empowering tool to enhance your overall balance, strength, and unique skills, so that you achieve your goals, as well as optimise your well-being.
When the expected occurred, never panic, by keep calming, you gain control over the situation.
THE NEXT DAY WAS RAIN-SOAKED and smelled of thick sweet caramel, warm coconut and ginger. A nearby bakery fanned its daily offerings. A lapis lazuli sky was blanketed by gunmetal gray clouds as it wept crocodile tears across the parched Los Angeles landscape.When Ivy was a child and she overheard adults talking about their break-ups, in her young feeble-formed mind, she imagined it in the most literal of essences. She once heard her mother speaking of her break up with an emotionally unavailable man.She said they broke up on 69th Street. Ivy visualized her mother and that man breaking into countless fragments, like a spilled box of jigsaw pieces. And she imagined them shattered in broken shards, being blown down the pavement of 69th Street.For some reason, on the drive home from Marcel’s apartment that next morning, all Ivy could think about was her mother and that faceless man in broken pieces, perhaps some aspects of them still stuck in cracks and crevices of the sidewalk, mistaken as grit.She couldn’t get the image of Marcel having his seizure out of her mind. It left a burning sensation in the center of her chest. An incessant flame torched her lungs, chest, and even the back door of her tongue. Witnessing someone you cared about experiencing a seizure was one of those things that scribed itself indelibly on the canvas of your mind. It was gut-wrenching. Graphic and out-of-body, it was the stuff that post traumatic stress syndrome was made of.
The author, then in the final stage as a candidate for Delta Force, was asked by the unit's foreboding colonel what he thought of the evaluation's Stress Week. He responded that he was waiting for it to begin, reasoning that, used to responsibility for others while leading a platoon, he only had himself to worry about. However hard the trial, he got four meals a day, nobody shot at, him, and the weather was pleasant.
Symptoms of chronic stress are feelings of fragmentation and of chasing after time - of not being able to be present. What we are looking for is a settled, joyful state of being, and we need to give this state space. The Archbishop once told me that people often think he needs time to pray and reflect because he is a religious leader. He said those who must live in the marketplace - business people, professionals and workers - need it even more.
Its little wonder anxiety, depression and other mental illness is at such a high point at this time in the world; people have little control over the mental capacities, of their thoughts, perceptions, feelings and emotions. People never get a moments silence from the constant bombardment and when they do they don’t know how to manage their thoughts so the endless barrage of noise simply continues giving them no time or space for clarity.
If the social stress is physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, the way to treat the depression is to stop the abuse. Unfortunately, advocates of the biochemical treatment of depression have gone along with the view of academic theory and popular culture that the problem is entirely within the skull of the victim. Enthusiasm for biochemical treatment and research is partly due to the fact that it helps perpetuate the myth that suicide and depression should be treated by changing the victim, not by changing ourselves. As long as we have a narrow view of the causes of biochemical imbalance, such as limiting it to innate genetic defects, we can practice denial on the social complicity in the causation of suicide. The narrow view does nothing to help reduce pain and increase resources for the millions of people whose problems do not respond to medications. It also deprives us of an opportunity for progress in a much broader area for social reform. The dynamics behind the oppression of the suicidal is similar to the dynamics of other forms of injustice; progress in one area can support progress in other areas.
Worrying about scarcity is our culture's version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we've been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability) we're angry and scared and at each other's throats.
The hardest chore to do, and to do right, is to think. Why do you think the common man would choose labor, partially, as a distraction from his own thoughts? It is because that level of stress, he most absolutely abhors.
Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.
Caring for others tends to be the first cut when we review our personal time budget. It does not necessarily fulfill the goals of my ambition; it will not pave the way for my success; it takes away from my own depleted emotional resources. It is an imposition in every way. To some of us, it is an inconvenience from which we unashamedly run. We have become experts in maintaining a grand scope of friendships and amateurs in genuine intimacy and care. Unwittingly, we have sacrificed everything on the altar of self-sufficiency—only to discover that we have sold our souls to isolation.
Century after century, the belief that an individual’s physical health was independent of his or her emotional health has so dominated medical thought that there has even been open contempt for anyone who would dare to claim that a person’s physical well-being is the sum of its internal and external influences.
The truth is scary. We all think we want it, but once it’s given, it’s harder to swallow than we originally thought. But sometimes, when the pain is too much, we have to be honest with ourselves. Why are we unhappy? Why are we scared? Is it internal, or external? Then when we find the answer, we need to accept it (see chapter 1), and make the necessary changes to fix it.
Sometimes it happens that you become one, in some rare moment. Watch the ocean, the tremendous wildness of it--and suddenly you forget your split, your schizophrenia; you relax. Or, moving in the Himalayas, seeing the virgin snow on the Himalayan peaks, suddenly a coolness surrounds you and you need not be false because there is no other human being to be false to. You fall together.
Recovery through sleep isn’t going to happen if the majority of the components of your being aren’t getting enough stimulation or resistance to work against. Your brain may be tired after work, but if your body and emotions haven’t been challenged through the day, they’re going to keep irritating you even if you’re asleep. They don’t need rest; they need work for real recovery to take place.
Well-being, or wholeness, implies integrity and harmony between all existing elements, providing freedom for the whole.
In my experience, most people are actually seeking recovery from the monotony and anxiety of qualitative repetition. This applies to body, emotions and mind. And that monotony and anxiety involves inertia just as much as over-use, meaning inertia in some areas and over-use in others.
People generally believe that stress is responsible for depletion, but apathy and uninspired systematic repetition are equally responsible. Or rather, systematic repetition produces as much or more stress and anxiety as anything else.
There’s nothing worse than bottling something up inside and letting it eat at you. It’s like being shot, and leaving the bullet inside our bodies. The wound would never heal. Instead, we need to let it out.
Things weren’t always as good as they are now. In school we learned that in the old days, the dark days, people didn’t realize how deadly a disease love was.For a long time they even viewed it as a good thing, something to be celebrated and pursued. Of course that’s one of the reasons it’s so dangerous: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. (That’s symptom number twelve, listed in the amor deliria nervosa section of the twelfth edition of The Safety, Health, and Happiness Handbook, or The Book of Shhh, as we call it.) Instead people back then named other diseases—stress, heart disease, anxiety, depression, hypertension, insomnia, bipolar disorder—never realizing that these were, in fact, only symptoms that in the majority of cases could be traced back to the effects of amor deliria nervosa.
An observant friend will recognize the signs of the rise of grief: eyes that easily well with tears, a smile that is difficult to sustain, a tendency to withdraw. And ultimately, perhaps we each need to create our own symbol of grieving — to wear our version of black, or maybe to color with black crayons for a while.
As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt.What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet."Ah, humanity..." But he was heavy with shadow and the joke went into a dying fall. He trist to break its fall by laughing at himself.
…it seemed to Kirsch that the most reliable guide to the mental landscape of a patient was the patient himself. He was better placed to explain his behaviour and his experiences than anyone else. Yet wherever Kirsch went, the patient was the very last person anyone thought to consult. Because, of course, the patient was insane.
Ree-" Grey barked into the icy silence. "Lax!"The word spat so unexpectedly into her ear had precisely the effect Grey must have intended. It shocked Nan for a split second into a state of not-thinking, just being-Suddenly, all in an instant she and Neville were one.
You are the biggest enemy of your own sleep.
The traditional techniques used in getting sleep aren’t much effective any longer and our sleep techniques need to evolve as rapidly as our life style has, in order to cope with it.
If the world leaders can afford a 7 hours sleep, most of us probably can too.
Let’s imagine a running washing machine. Let’s imagine the dirty clothes in the machine and how the liquid detergent is getting the dirt out of clothes and draining it to the waste outlet. Now imagine brain surrounded by a large pool of cleaning fluid called CSF (cerebrospinal fluid). Imagine CSF pulling the wastes from inside the brain and draining it into the blood, which routes it to the waste outlets. CSF clears waste many times faster in sleeping brain than in the waking brain.
Tonight is going to be a big night, like any other night, because certain 10 million Americans will not be able to sleep well tonight.
Our current bittersweet relationship with our sleep hasn’t had a long history.
Our faster than ever evolution has resulted in our undermining certain incredibly important aspects of humanity—like our sleep.
The keys to health and weight-loss: stress reduction, sleep, deep breathing, clean water, complete nutrition, sunshine, walking, stretching, meditation, love, community, laughter, dreams, perseverance, purpose, humility, action.
This is the law of nature that every person who is born has to go through certain kind of painful experiences. Thepainful issues keep coming throughout life.As you progress on the spiritual path their impact become lesser and lesser and finally a stage would come where you can achieve liberation from Stress and unhappiness forever.-Subodh Gupta author, "Stress Management a Holistic Approach -5 steps Plan".
During the time of stress, the “fight-or-flight” response is on and the self-repair mechanism is disabled. It is then when we say that the immunity of the body goes down and the body is exposed to the risk for disease. Meditation activates relaxation, when the sympathetic nervous system is turned off and the parasympathetic nervous system is turned on, and natural healing starts.
Hannah's faith was the answer to her stress. And, through that faith, she found peace, even though her life remained far from peaceful. Her faith resulted in God working on her behalf. Hannah did not find peace because she left a stressful situation – she found peace because she had learned to depend on God’s strength to rise above her stress.
Why couldn’t I find one action that would make the need to binge automatically disappear? Because there is no magic action to make that horrible prebinge feeling go away. The cool thing is that we are designed so that the feeling will pass through us on its own—in time. All we have to do is sit there and feel what is going on inside of us. We must experience the feelings. To help us deal with the feelings, we can call someone on our support team. We can also express the feelings by focusing on our breath or even hitting a pillow. The important thing to remember is that no matter how terrible, feelings do pass. It takes patience and trust—not food . . .
There are two types of memory frequently experienced by individuals who have had overwhelming trauma that has been suppressed psychologically or chemically. The first is general memory, experienced as an adult, in which there is a natural recall of early events. The other is the memory that is often associated with post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS). The person suddenly smells, sees and feels as though he or she is actually living the event that took place months or years earlier.Many soldiers who survived horrifying combat experiences have PTSS. This has frequently been discussed in terms of Vietnam veterans who suddenly mentally find themselves in the jungle, hiding from the enemy or assaulting people they see as a threat. The fact that they have not been in Vietnam for decades and that they are experiencing the flashbacks in shopping malls, at home or at work does not change what they are mentally reliving. But PTSS has existed for centuries and has affected men, women and children in the midst of all wars, horrifying natural disasters and other traumatic experiences. This includes physical and sexual abuse when growing up.the PTSS Cheryl was experiencing more and more frequently, in which she found herself seeing, feeling and re-experiencing events from her childhood and adolescence had become overwhelming. She knew she needed to get help.
When you can begin to see the similarities between you and your work colleagues in respect of ‘being human’ and the collective challenges we all face, it makes life much easier to deal with, especially when met with overbearing behaviour.
,,, let go of the real source of our unhappiness: our own self-obsession. Stress, loneliness, pessimism, financial worries, and unhappy relationships all have one thing in common: they're all about "me".
Toxic relationships are dangerous to your health; they will literally kill you. Stress shortens your lifespan. Even a broken heart can kill you. There is an undeniable mind-body connection. Your arguments and hateful talk can land you in the emergency room or in the morgue. You were not meant to live in a fever of anxiety; screaming yourself hoarse in a frenzy of dreadful, panicked fight-or-flight that leaves you exhausted and numb with grief. You were not meant to live like animals tearing one another to shreds. Don't turn your hair gray. Don't carve a roadmap of pain into the sweet wrinkles on your face. Don't lay in the quiet with your heart pounding like a trapped, frightened creature. For your own precious and beautiful life, and for those around you — seek help or get out before it is too late. This is your wake-up call!
A life of hardship and personal suffering is unavoidable. A person must endure many humiliations of the mind and body, and expect persons whom they trusted to someday betray them. People inevitably witness the death of their loved ones. We also witness acts of depravity committed by criminals that lurk in every society and rouge acts of scandal committed by government officials in charge of the public welfare. A person must nonetheless resist personal discouragement, sadness, dejection, and despondency. I must reach an accord with pain, suffering, and anguish, or forevermore be tortured by reality while constantly seeking to escape from the inescapable agony of being.
When you are feeling stressed, and you keep going over and over the same problem in your mind, with no solution, take action. Do anything to remove your energy from the issue. You will find that when you are proactive, your mind will become more clear, solutions will arise, and you will feel more self-confident. Free yourself from feeling like a victim and become victorious instead!
You are not stress...you are experiencing stress. You are not anxiety...you are experiencing anxiety. You are not fear...you are experiencing fear. You can recognize the fact that you are not your emotions and simply accept the experience of that emotion and move right through it.
The person senses what it feels like to be free from inhibitions. At the same time he feels connected and integrated – with his body and, through his body, with his environment. He has a sense of well-being and inner peace. He gains the knowledge that the life of the body resides in its involuntary aspect. […] Unfortunately these beautiful feelings do not always hold up under the stress of daily living in our modern culture. The pace, the pressure and the philosophy of our times are antithetical to life.
Life is full of issues no matter what social status you enjoy in society, only the nature of issue would be different. You solve one issue, other would come and they would be keep on coming till you are alive. This is a reality and nobody can escape from this truth.-Subodh Gupta author, "Stress Management a Holistic Approach -5 steps Plan".
If you focus your mind on problem, the problem would become bigger and bigger and you get into the circle of worrying and then your mind gives you the false impression that the problem is very big and mind than start multiplying your worries without any actual basis and you see no way of coming out of it. To come out of the problems you need to focus on solutions. -Subodh Gupta author, "Stress Management a Holistic Approach -5 steps Plan".
Nothing happens on its own, you have to make things happen. If you really want to come out of your stressful situation than you need to take action. Unless you stand up for yourself and take action, the problem is not going to get away. Let fear of failure shouldn't stop you from taking action.-Subodh Gupta, author "Stress Management A holistic approach-5 Steps Plan".
Nothing is permanent in this world. Everything is changing, so no matter what problem or issue you are having inyour life at the moment, it would also change sooner or later but of course you need to take positive action too.-Subodh Gupta author, "Stress Management a Holistic Approach -5 steps Plan".
In the past, my brain could only compute perfection or failure—nothing in between. So words like competent, acceptable, satisfactory, and good enough fell into the failure category. Even above average meant failure if I received an 88 out of 100 percent on an exam, I felt that I failed. The fact is most things in life are not absolutes and have components of both good and bad. I used to think in absolute terms a lot: all, every, or never. I would all of the food (that is, binge), and then I would restrict every meal and to never eat again. This type of thinking extended outside of the food arena as well: I had to get all of the answers right on a test; I had to be in every extracurricular activity […] The ‘if it’s not perfect, I quit’ approach to life is a treacherous way to live. […] I hadn’t established a baseline of competence: What gets the job done? What is good enough? Finding good enough takes trial and error. For those of us who are perfectionists, the error part of trial and error can stop us dead in our tracks. We would rather keep chasing perfection than risk possibly making a mistake. I was able to change my behavior only when the pain of perfectionism became greater than the pain of making an error. […] Today good enough means that I’m okay just the way I am. I play my position in the world. I catch the ball when it is thrown my way. I don’t always have to make the crowd go wild or get a standing ovation. It’s good enough to just catch the ball or even to do my best to catch it. Good enough means that I finally enjoy playing the game.
I want for people not to worry so much. Life ain't going to be perfect, but tings will work out. People come to visit and I always tell them not to worry. If you got something to eat, don't worry, be grateful. Just look at all those books. Those books aren't about food. They're to do with worrying about food.
Ultimately, if the Lord doesn’t build the house (or the Sunday school class, or the church, or the family, or the business, or the relationship, or ), we are laboring in vain anyway (Psalm 127:1). We release the burden of stress when we release the responsibilities for the outcome to the Lord.
After a stressful event, we often crave comfort food. Our body is calling for more glucose and simple carbohydrates and fat... And in modern life, people tend to have fewer friends and less support, because there's no tribe. Being alone is not good for the brain.
According to research, people who live with animals have decreased anxiety and lower blood pressure. They have lower cholesterol. They are more relaxed and less stressed and are, overall, in better health. Unless of course you have a dog who pees uncontrollably wherever it wishes or eats your furniture to shreds.
Whether we know it or choose to admit it, we are either an Encourager or a Discourager. We each make a choice as to which type we will be… every day. Discouragers bring “stresspools.”I call any of those places that add unnecessary stress and aggravation “stresspools.” They are just as stinky and rotten as cesspools, but “stresspools” wreak of tension, strain, anxiety, worry, hassle, pressure, and emotional trauma.
Skip the urge to respond to a road rage invitation. I find that my days are far more smooth and pleasant when I don’t give someone the leverage to annoy or stress me. Just smile, giggle to yourself, or wave “hi” with a wag of your pinky finger, if you must. But then the incident is over, and no stress or annoyance remains, at least not in my car. The self-centered driver has the negative attitude. Don’t let someone else’s poor behavior choices become contagious.
Like gratitude, authentic appreciation in the workplace is a realisation that can be nurtured and accessed with daily mindful practice. By and large, people who are grateful, happy and enthusiastic are going to demonstrate better performance than those who are unhappy and unappreciative. There is increasing evidence that a grateful mindset amplifies happiness and mental and emotional wellbeing.
They were trying to orchestrate a revolution, which almost by definition generated a sense of collective trauma that defied any semblance of coherence and control. If we wish to rediscover the psychological context of the major players in Philadelphia, we need to abandon our hindsight omniscience and capture their mentality as they negotiated the unknown.
He tensed up at the thought of going back to work. Avoid stressful thoughts, he reminded himself. There was no need to rush his vacation thinking about such foul things as coming back home or going back to work. The vacation had only just begun and it was going to be a good one.
The biggest enemies of willpower: temptation, self-criticism, and stress. (...) these three skills —self-awareness, self-care, and remembering what matter most— are the foundation for self-control.
When the weeks have built up with frustration and immense stress and one of your co-workers, a manager or an employee triggers irritation or angers you, knowing how to respond in a mindful way can pay huge dividends. Knowing how to not take other people’s emotional baggage personally and intuitively sensing when to bring up concerns and when not to is an expression of emotional intelligence. This is all possible if we are being truly mindful.
To be self-compassionate is not to be self-indulgent or self-centred. A major component of self-compassion is to be kind to yourself. Treat yourself with love, care, dignity and make your wellbeing a priority. With self-compassion, we still hold ourselves accountable professionally and personally, but there are no toxic emotions inflicted upon and towards ourselves.
The human brain is incredible in its capacity to heal and rewire itself. The human brain can be shaped and trained to be more resilient, calm, compassionate and alert—we can condition ourselves to be successful. Through mindfulness meditation, we can literally re-wire our brains through new experiences, which modify our neural network and our neural chemistry. Mindfulness also enhances gamma synchrony and improves the function of the human brain.
Things sometimes go our way and sometimes they don’t. All we can do is apply ourselves to our profession, giving our very best effort but emotionally letting go of the outcome. Why? Because if we obsess about an outcome, we cannot possibly honour the present moment.
First and foremost, if we maintain healthy emotional boundaries and direct love and kindness inwards, we are taking care of ourselves and secondly we are giving a subliminal message to others about how we wish to be treated. People tend to subconsciously treat us how we treat ourselves.
It is impossible to control outcomes or results, although most of us have been programmed from a very young age to believe otherwise. The idea that we can perform actual ‘magic’ causes tremendous dysfunction, unnecessary suffering and prevents the development of emotional resilience.
Maybe (Taoist story)A classic ancient story illustrates the importance of equanimity and emotional resilience beautifully. Once upon a time, there was a wise old farmer who had worked on the land for over 40 years. One morning, while walking to his stable, he noticed that his horse had run away. His neighbours came to visit and sympathetically said to the farmer, “Such bad luck”.“Maybe,” the farmer replied. The following morning, however, the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “Such good luck,” the neighbours exclaimed.“Maybe,” the farmer replied. The following afternoon, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses and was thrown off, causing him to break his leg. The neighbours came to visit and tried to show sympathy and said to the farmer, “how unfortunate”. “Maybe,” answered the farmer. The following morning military officials came to the farmer’s village to draft young men into the army to fight in a new war. Observing that the farmer’s son’s leg was broken, they did not draft him into the war. The neighbours congratulated him on his good luck and the farmer calmly replied, “Maybe”.
Conscious breathing anchors us into the nowness of life and gives us a fresh outlook, no different from how a baby observes reality without mental commentary. The baby enjoys watching the world and human activity without any limiting mental concepts spoiling his or her perception. Naturally, we all have to evolve from the helpless state of babyhood, but to be able to tap into that wonderful ability and truly BE in the moment is immensely liberating.
Stress, burnout and strain on the human heart are all increasingly taking their toll for millions of hardworking people. However, even someone who is working in a job that simply ‘pays the bills’ can turn mundane and stressful tasks into pleasant activities with a slight adjustment in attitude and by adopting a daily mindful practice.
The word ‘pranayama’, often referred to as alternate breathing, comes from the Sanskrit meaning ‘extension of life force’ or ‘extension of breath’. At times, we are going to have days where we are bombarded with one task after another. This simple yet effective meditation only takes a couple of minutes and its calming qualities can be felt almost immediately. It is one of the easiest meditation techniques to apply. This practice is well worth applying at least three or four times a day (somewhere private) to develop emotional balance and evenness of mind, especially in the working environment.
The Happiest Man in The WorldThe French interpreter for the 14th Dalai Lama, former academic and dedicated meditator Matthieu Ricard, came into the spotlight in the field of neural science after being named “the happiest man in the world”. Naturally, there are many other men and women who demonstrate such equanimity, but the studies on his brain uncovered truly astonishing results. MRI scans showed that Matthieu Ricard and other serious long-term meditators (with more than 10,000 hours of practice each) were mentally, emotionally and spiritually fulfilled and displayed an abundance of positive emotions and equanimity in the left pre-frontal cortex of the brain. When talking about his mindfulness training, Matthieu Ricard said with humility that: “Happiness is a skill. It requires effort and time”.
We cannot control the mind by trying to force it to be peaceful or positive. Many have attempted this using a plethora of methods throughout the ages, but it simply does not work. Trying to fight the human mind is like walking into a lion’s den empty-handed and believing that you have a realistic chance of defending yourself.
Mindfulness (present-moment awareness) is deliberately focusing our attention on our thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations and mental activity without losing awareness of what is happening in the present moment. It is essentially being in a state of present-moment awareness and maintaining clarity without being swayed or distracted by mental commentary.
The process of applying Mindfulness Burnout Prevention (MBP) in the workplace or any environment has a much more far-reaching effect than simply accessing equanimity throughout the vicissitudes of life. Continuous learning helps us to stay youthful, sharpen our mental faculties and wire new neural connections in our brain (making us better equipped to accomplish); it is also a sign of humility.
Learning to practise mindfulness greatly enhances our ability to manifest emotional intelligence and equanimity under pressure and to display calmness, empathy and adaptability when communicating with others, whether it be with co-workers, clients or the board of directors. Learning to apply mindfulness on a daily basis will significantly encourage a positive, creative and enthusiastic attitude at all levels in companies large and small.
The incredible benefits of practising and applying mindfulness and self-compassion in the workplace are being increasingly recognised by human resource professionals as well as the medical profession, as the stresses of competing in today’s global economy take their toll on the mental health and emotional wellbeing of many otherwise talented and enthusiastic individuals in the workplace.
Whether someone is a CEO of a major corporation or is serving meals in a diner, failure to adopt a mindful approach will mean that mental and emotional exhaustion could become a habitual condition. Whether someone is stressed about their stocks losing value or being able to pay their bills, the internal underlying conditions of stress and pressure are essentially the same.
Many of us have been unconsciously programmed to treat walking as a means to an end, especially while in the workplace. Naturally, a lack of mindfulness while walking leaves one hostage to self-perpetuating stress and anxiety. We rush (often while shouting into a mobile phone), completely missing the enjoyment of walking. Walking and breathing, if practised harmoniously, can be peaceful and thoroughly enjoyable. Even walking down a corridor or into an office or wherever we are working or being of service can be a harmonious action.
Years ago, I dated a lovely young woman who was a few thousand dollars in debt. She was completely stressed out about this. Every month, more interest would be added to her debts.To deal with her stress, she would go every Tuesday night to a meditation and yoga class. This was her one free night, and she said it seemed to be helping her. She would breathe in, imagining that she was finding ways to deal with her debts. She would breathe out, telling herself that her money problems would one day be behind her.It went on like this, Tuesday after Tuesday.Finally, one day I looked through her finances with her. I figured out that if she spent four or five months working a part-time job on Tuesday nights, she could actually pay off all the money she owed.I told her I had nothing against yoga or meditation. But I did think its always best to try to treat the disease first. Her symptoms were stress and anxiety. Her disease was the money she owed."Why don't you get a job on Tuesday nights and skip yoga for a while?" I suggested.This was something of a revelation to her. And she took my advice. She became a Tuesday-night waitress and soon enough paid off her debts. After that, she could go back to yoga and really breathe easier.
People complain about cold weather during winter, about hot weather during summer and about rain in rainyseason. People who are single are depressed that they are single, those who are married think that singlesare having more fun, people with darker skin want to get fair skin, people with white skin want tanning and the list never ends. Sometimes I think what wouldhappen to people’s life if you take their complaining habit out of their life? -Subodh Gupta author, "Stress Management a Holistic Approach-5 Steps Plan
Personally, I like a chocolate-covered sky. Dark, dark chocolate. People say it suits me. I do, however, try to enjoy every color I see - the whole spectrum. A billion or so flavors, none of them quite the same, and a sky to slowly suck on. It takes the edge off the stress. It helps me relax.
The only people I am aware of who don’t have troubles are gathered in peaceful, little neighborhoods. There is never a care, never a moment of stress and never an obstacle to ruin a day. All is calm. All is serene. Most towns have at least one such worry-free zone. We call them cemeteries.
If you are in a pit of stress or despair, don’t succumb to defeat. Don’t accept that difficult place as your fate. Even though God has allowed you to be there right now, he never intended for you to live there. Our God is bigger then whatever problem you are facing. The only way to see past the problem is to believe that he has not forgotten or abandoned you and that, at the exact time that he has ordained, he will reach down and pick you up.
... A lobotomy involved some kind of rod or probe inserted through the eyesocket,the term was always "frontal" lobotomy;but was there any other kind?Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress. There must be some other way to deal with the knowledge of the disastrous consequences fear and stress could bring about.Some answer or trick of the will:the ability not to think about it.What if everyone knew this trick but Claude Sylvanshine?He tended to conceptualize some ultimate,platonic-level Terror as a bird of prey in whose mere aloft shadow the prey was stricken and paralyzed,tembling as the shadow enlarged and became inevitability.He frequently had this feeling:What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people?What if he was simply ill-suited,the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs?The neurology of failure.What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair,and all his so called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?...
I'm like my cat. I run around in circles in my apartment, because the big bad outside is just too big. And scary. And outside. How do stray cats deal with all the stress of having no protection from all the air that’s going on around there, without anyone to guide and control it into timidity?
I know what I'm talking about, Alecto! When I think of Jud, I think of the times he wanted to be a coal miner, the times he took Wendy and me sailing in the harbour, the times he showed me how to play soccer, but I forgot all the bullying and I’ll never understand why. And now you ask me, you ask me what happened once we were in high school. You said you didn’t understand what having a family was like, so ask me!” Mandy was shouting at him without even realizing it, her words sharp and unforgiving.“I….” Alecto started, hesitating for a moment. “You don’t seem like yourself Mandy Valems, not at all….”“No, go ahead! You want to know what having a real family is like?” Mandy snapped, turning to stare at him coldly. “Ask me what happened, I’ll tell you anything you want to know!”“…What happened?” Alecto asked quietly, looking nervous and confused.“I stayed late after school in shop class when I was in grade 9, trying to keep my lousy grades up. I was building a birdhouse, something like that, and that was when Jud and all his popular jock friends came storming in, laughing and swearing like a bunch of pigs,” Mandy continued. “So ask me what happened next.”“I… I don’t want to ask you what happened,” Alecto replied.“Ask me!” Mandy yelled.“Alright, what happened next…?” Alecto questioned.
A chorus of voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects most of them hate. When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo “retraining,” no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity, and for good reason: If human needs were put before technical necessity there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.
When you're a passenger on an airplane, you are told that in the event of a change in cabin pressure, you should put your mask on first and then assist your children. You can't help them if you are unconscious. A similar principle applies with your day to day health. Mothers tend to put others first. While this is admirable in one sense, it is not a good practice in the long run. You cannot strike a balance between your needs and the needs of your family if you are constantly run down. Stop abusing your body.
Everyone is tied down in some way. Work, family, medical problems. It's what you make of it. That's why it's so important to surround yourself with the things that make you happy. If you have a bad day at work but get to come home to a woman you love or your favorite hobby, the rest doesn't matter as much.
For kids like me, the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict is always activated...We are constantly ready to fight or flee, because there is a constant exposure to the bear, whether that bear is an alcoholic dad or an unhinged mom (p228)....I see conflict and I run away or prepare for battle. (p246)
Why do we live out every day as if there is no hope to overcome our chaos and no possibility for living a stressed-less life when Scripture repeatedly reassures us that God has the power and the peace to make that happen?
I have heard several people justify working long hours and getting home from work late it night by saying things like, “I have to put in all this time to make up for the vacation we’re going to take this summer.” I bet if I asked your kids, they’d say that they’d rather have you home every night to play with them than the weeklong summer trip to the lake where you’re stressed out the whole time anyways.
In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thing like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.
Chemistry is not destiny, certainly. But these scientists have demonstrated that the most reliable way to produce an adult who is brave and curious and kind and prudent is to ensure that when he is an infant, his hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis functions well. And how do you do that? It is not magic. First, as much as possible, you protect him from serious trauma and chronic stress; then, even more important, you provide him with a secure, nurturing relationship with at least one parent and ideally two. That's not the whole secret of success, but it is a big, big part of it.
Unlike simple stress, trauma changes your view of your life and yourself. It shatters your most basic assumptions about yourself and your world — “Life is good,” “I’m safe,” “People are kind,” “I can trust others,” “The future is likely to be good” — and replaces them with feelings like “The world is dangerous,” “I can’t win,” “I can’t trust other people,” or “There’s no hope.
Lewis's mental map of reality had difficulty accommodating the trauma of the Great War. Like so many, he found the settled way of looking at the world, taken for granted by many in the Edwardian age, to have been shattered by the most brutal and devastating war yet known." (51) Part (McGrath suggests) of Lewis's well-documented search for truth and meaning, that search that ultimately led him to Christianity, emerges from the desire to make sense of his traumatic experience in ways that satisfied him spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually.
Great leaders catch and correct problems while they’re still small and able to be managed without a lot of hassle. If ignored too long, small problems will morph into much bigger issues that will require more time and effort and at a high cost, causing a great deal of disruption and stress.
The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.
Stress is a natural and normal part of being alive. Stress-free promises set people up for failure. Even when used with good intentions and accompanied by relevant and beneficial ideas and practices, the use of the words stress-free is still ill advised because the approach is infused with an erroneous idea that will never come to fruition. The stress-free idea has become a significant hurdle on the path to real stress management, which is the balance between using stress productively and relieving harmful stress symptoms.
Stress-free moments certainly exist, but that is the extent of it. People, who have bought into the idea of a stress-free life, believe they should be happy and positive all the time. They have been sold a damaging falsehood. As the first sentence in M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled famously said: “Life is difficult.” Learning to deal effectively with life’s difficulties, learning to manage the inevitable stress of life is attainable, while eliminating stress is not.
In short, you do not have to take the job that will create excessive stress and overarousal. Someone else will take it and flourish in it. You do not have to work long hours. Indeed, it may be your duty to work shorter ones. It may not be best to advertise it, but keeping yourself healthy and in your right range of arousal is the first condition for helping others.
Science experiments have found that people who practice meditation release significantly lower doses of cortisol, known as the stress hormone. This is consequential because frequent release of cortisol can lead to heart disease, diabetes, dementia, cancer, and depression.
As you become aware of life, you will begin to see the root cause to all your actions and reactions. Then you will realize that you are not angry with the child because he made a mistake, but because you get pleasure out of being angry. The mistake was only a excuse.
Evolution has geared the human stress response to last about thirty seconds. It's enough time to facilitate fight or flight. Evolution has not adapted our brains or bodies to handle weeks or months of prolonged stress.
By observing your judging mind, you can avoid automatically buying into these negative judgments...This transforms your experience of stress by taking the terror and panic out of it.
In moments of great stress, the mind focuses itself upon some quite unimportant matter which is remembered long afterwards with the utmost fidelity, driven in, as it were, by the mental stress of the moment. It may be some quite irrelevant detail, like the pattern of a wallpaper, but it will never be forgotten.
Stress kills when you fuel the initial reaction with negative thoughts, aggressive behavior, belief and trust in the uncomfortable physical and emotional symptoms it causes. Don’t fuel it, and watch how fast stress disappears.
I felt squeezed in that vise along with the mass of everyday things and people, and I had a bad taste in my mouth, a permanent sense of nausea that exhausted me, as if everything, thus compacted, and always tighter, were grinding me up, reducing me to a repulsive cream.
The difference between "active" and "busy" is that the former includes reflection and is directed, whereas the busy life feels out of control and does not seem purposeful or meaningful.
All he really knew was that if he stayed here he would soon be the property of things that buzzed and snorted and hissed, that gave off fumes or stenches. In six months, he would be the owner of a large pink, trained ulcer, a blood pressure of algebraic dimensions, a myopia this side of blindness, and nightmares as deep as oceans and infested with improbable lengths of dream intestines through which he must violently force his way each night.
The ever-increasing weight of responsibilities that enmeshes our lives keeps us locked into the system. We become the pulse that keeps the beast alive, but the cost is our own lives. The natural world around us shrinks, crushed beneath the suffocating might of work.
One myth that has become established in the self-development arena is that it only takes 21 days to form a new habit. This simply isn’t true in all cases. Sometimes it takes a shorter time, sometimes a longer time, and sometimes old habits are so hard to break that new ones never take hold.
The worst possible approach to a problem is waiting until it becomes overwhelming or irreversible, and that is exactly what many people do. They put dealing with stress on the backburner until they start to experience all the worst symptoms of stress, and by then, it may be too late!
If you have ever procrastinated and then found yourself energized to complete a task at the last minute, then you have used the beneficial aspect of the fight or flight response (not the procrastinating part, but the energizing part). You see, with all its negative long term effects, the fight or flight response still gives us energy, and if we know how to use that energy, then stress is potentially good, at least in the short term.
Habits equal autopilot. Take brushing your teeth for example. Once that becomes a habit, you don’t have to write positive affirmations or remind yourself constantly to brush your teeth. It is simply a habitual part of what you do every day. That is why I emphasize the five habits of stress management, not the five rules or the five goals. If you make these five habits an essential part of your life, then you will be able to manage stress effectively.
Everyone knows that a quick-fix usually doesn’t work, yet we have all been sold on the idea time and time again. Most of us would like to believe in miracle drugs and fast relief. The truth is that most of the quick fixes for stress focus on temporary relief from tension or pain. Temporary, as in, the problem will return with a vengeance. This doesn’t mean we should never take drugs to alleviate tension or pain, it just means that taking drugs is not a viable permanent solution; it’s just a temporary relief.
Be aware of the abundance of life right now. If you remain stuck in the past, clinging to the baggage of old disappointments or relationships, you block yourself off from the riches of the present. If you worry too much about tomorrow, you can't hear your heart today.
No one ever wants to hear how stressed out anyone else is, because most of the time everyone is stressed out. Going on and on in detail about how stressed out I am isn’t conversation. It’ll never lead anywhere. No one is going to say, “Wow, Mindy, you really have it especially bad. I have heard some stories of stress, but this just takes the cake.
I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one's own pleasure, that fear may be mild — timidity is the word I've used here. If, however, one is working under deadline — a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample — that fear may be intense.
If you have a million things to do, adding item number 1,000,001 is not such a big deal. When, on the other hand, you have nothing to do, getting out of bed and washing yourself before 2:00 P.M. feels like too much work to even contemplate.
I do not think stress is a legitimate topic of conversation, in public anyway. No one ever wants to hear how stressed anyone else is, because most of the time everyone is stressed out. Going on and on in detail about how stressed I am isn't conversation. It'll never lead anywhere.
Most emotional and physical symptoms of stress and depression are not typically caused by the circumstances themselves, but instead by how our minds perceive what is going on and how our hearts hold up under the pressure.
[D]espite her alternative leanings, it turned out Crystal was not particularly psyco-babbly or airy-fairy or tree-huggy, as one might have expected.In fact, the first thing she did was write a list. She said writing lists helped calm her down when she was stressed about anything because it put problems in order. You can look at a list of things and see how you can tackle each one separately without feeling sick about it, she said. Whereas if they all just stayed jumbled in your mind in one great bit sticky ball you never got to consider them individually. She actually spoke a lot of sense for someone with toe rings and a Chinese tattoo.
Gail loved to talk about how stressed she was. She would do this thing where we'd be walking in the hallway, and suddenly she'd stop in her tracks, rub both of her temples with her index and middle fingers, and theatrically let out a deep guttural moan: "Mooooog.""Mooog. Minz. I am just so stressed out," she'd say. "I just want to go home, open a bottle of red wine, draw up a hot bath, light some candles and listen to David Gray." A note about me: I do not think stress is a legitimate topic of conversation, in public anyway. No one ever wants to hear how stressed out anyone else is, because most of the time everyone is stressed out. Going on and on in detail about how stressed out I am isn't conversation. It'll never lead anywhere. No one is going to say, "Wow, Mindy, you really have it especially bad. I have heard some stories of stress, but this just takes the cake.
And here I am sitting again, yes, sitting again by this faithful lamp, feeling indescribably serene and unhurried. I shall travel this day's path quite calmly and just take a little holiday—my eyes and head are slightly overstressed and overstrained. One must have the patience to do a little less.
The pattern of your breathing affects the pattern of your performance. When you are under stress, deep breathing helps bring your mind and body back into the present.Over the years I have handed out thousands of little stickers to athletes that read ‘Breathe and Focus.’ A baseball player will place the bright orange circle on the shoulder of his uniform or underneath the bill of his cap, or on the barrel of his bat. A hockey player might affix it to his stick. Firefighters I have worked with place the stickers on their self-contained breathing apparatus. The stickers serve as a reminder. Whenever they feel themselves growing anxious, breathe in energy. Breathe out negativity. Breathe in relaxation. Breathe out stress.
A mind that is racing over worries about the future or recycling resentments from the past is ill equipped to handle the challenges of the moment. By slowing down, we can train the mind to focus completely in the present. Then we will find that we can function well whatever the difficulties. That is what it means to be stress-proof: not avoiding stress but being at our best under pressure, calm, cool, and creative in the midst of the storm.
There is no social stigma attached to the frenzy, no peer motivation to slow us down. Rather it is the opposite; busy is popular currency, traded among members of modern society like a precious commodity. Busy is the silkiest cloth at the emporium, the most well-travelled spice. Living with a full schedule speedily typed into a pinging, vibrating device is a highly valued state of being. And, as with any addiction, it becomes self-perpetuating. We feel a rush from being in a rush; we take pride in the breakneck pace at which we travel through our days.
It is our reaction that creates stress and this we can change"This book will start you on a journey that will give you the ability to handleany difficult customer with ease. In order to feel no stress we all have to go through many instances of being stressed, so we can learn one step at a time to be free of it.