Stress and the Care of the Self

If you were to carry a pen and paper with you for a week and write down everything that you do, as you do it, at the end you would have a list that conclusively proves that you are overwhelmed and lucky to be left standing at the end of each day.  In fact not only is it a miracle that you can get anything done but that you can even remember the next thing to do.  Our lives are full of demands:  to keep up, to get done, to maintain and to handle emergencies.

The older we get the more our lifestyle takes over our lives and all this keeping up and doing takes the majority of our time and energy.  We never have enough left over for what used to be important to us.  We lose our energy.  We lose our enjoyment in life.  We lose our ability to love and the person we were all under the weight of 'taking care of business.' Changing that, bringing back energy, purpose, passion and joy to your life requires that you begin to understand what causes stress and how what you may be doing in your life to relieve it - may actually be adding more.

Stress comes from the loss of control over the details in your life.

With no control you are placed into a position of constantly reacting rather than being able to respond, resolve and move forward. 

If you are constantly reacting you are living in a highly charged emotional state.

It may not seem like you are moving through your day at the office being a 'highly charge emotional' person, but if you pay attention to how you respond to new responsibilities and new demands throughout the day you will notice a pattern of very emotional reactions. Feelings of resentment, disappointment, being overwhelmed - these are all emotions.  Stack them one on top of another throughout the day and you are becoming incapable of responding to what needs to be done because you are reacting.

What is the difference between responding and reacting?

When we react to a new situation we are acting upon pure emotions that have been influenced by our past history and experiences and do not provide us with the means to make a judgment based upon the reality of the present situation.

We are driven by emotions.  Emotions, which are the province of our right brains, are the source of all of our motivations.  If someone sustains damage to their right brain, they lose the capacity to do anything of their own volition.  Getting dressed, getting out of bed become things they have to be instructed to do.  The emotions of the right brain are where we make our connections between events and can generate motivational energy that is expressed through the organized and logical actions of our left-brain dominated life. 

Whether or not it seems like it, everyone around you is a mass of immediate and constantly changing emotional reactions - this is the nature of the human mind.  That is why reacting to things can be so disruptive because our emotional minds do not rationally think through consequences.  They are responding based upon our historical experiences.  Your emotional reaction comes first.  Babies, with no language and or even focus, will respond, even if they are hungry, to an expression of love and comfort over food.   Emotional reactions are very valid and important but not necessarily the best judge of the reality because they are based upon our perceptions rather than our ability to see a situation in context.  You may not even be aware of the emotions that come first because emotions trigger thoughts and it happens faster than we can process in our waking state. It may feel like being handed a new task and immediately jumping on it is without emotion and just being responsible and efficient, but that kind of response may lie well within your history of experience and be motivated by the emotions of fear or resentment.  You are not capable of efficiency if you are reacting out of fear.

As adults, things become even more complicated.

Even faster than our emotional reactions can trigger a thought that we then act on, the thought itself becomes an event that can then trigger another emotion.  We can take a moment of resentment and turn into a self perpetuating feeling of being overwhelmed and unjustly treated. 

We take a small amount of stress and we make it larger.

When you are reacting to new responsibilities and demands and 'getting them done' you are actually destroying your control over your own life.  Without evaluating each thing for its needs and then placing it into your schedule where you can best deal with it you lose control over your time and begin to feel overwhelmed.  The expectation you then create is that at any moment, anything can happen that will 'take your life away from you.'  That is a kind of anticipatory stress that few people can survive.

If you look at your schedule a majority of it really falls under maintaining a lifestyle and the things we have brought into it.  We do not equally focus on what it takes to maintain the life that is needed to be present in the lifestyle.  We lose the connection between our interior lives and our exterior life because we are used to seeing the elements of our lives as separate, as if we were sending off a different version of ourselves to live each hour.  This creates a kind of disjointed feel to our days that not only makes us exist in a state of constant discomfort mentally, physically and emotionally; but also creates even more stress because our ability to respond is damaged due to our unwillingness to allow all of our knowledge and experience to form our response to a need.  We create a conflict of longing between the responsibilities of our lives and the life we dream of by seeing only the contradiction between the two and not the similarities. 

We become incapable of responding to anything with the totality of our experience that would allow us to be competent and to handle responsibilities without stress because we disallow ourselves from being present in all the areas of our life.

Most of us try to make an effort to include things in our schedule that are for our selves.  We have been trained that 'time for the self' is of the essence in being able to handle stress.  Yoga, meeting with friends, a run - good ideas , but we do them in a way that is not only self-defeating, but can create more stress rather than relieve it.

We treat the things we do (like yoga) as a means to handle stress.  While yoga may be a successful way of temporarily relieving stress, we miss the purpose of the experience.  Yoga is not about handling stress; it is about developing your body and mind so that the experience of living becomes more integrated.  If we only see it as a response to stress then if we are not experiencing 'enough stress' we will be incapable of recognizing the benefits of the yoga session.  We will not have that kind of bliss of relaxation and control that comes from the contrast to our stressed and out of control feelings we  had when we arrived at the yoga class.  Given enough weeks of 'less than optimum stress' one of two things will happen - we will find excuses to give up the yoga class (as it no longer feels needed) or, subconsciously we will begin to generate stress to provide the contrast so we can enjoy the yoga.

We work against ourselves when we choose to do things because of stress.  In planning out the week we set our yoga class on Thursday because we expect to be stressed by Thursday creating the opportunity for a self-fulfilling prophecy to occur.  Never underestimate the power of your subconscious.  The subconscious is a wonderful and powerful thing but has never been known to be guided by any type of logical or rational thoughts - those come from our waking mind.

If we approach it that on Thursday we have blocked out time for yoga because it is a benefit to who we are, then it will not matter if we are stressed or not.  The drive to attend and participate comes from our desire to be who we are, not in a response to what has happened or what we expect to happen.  It also does not exist in conflict with our lives; we do not view the hour or two set aside as 'the only time I get a break.' Yoga and its benefits become a part of our lives that washes its effect over every moment.  It becomes a tool for living better.

The key to looking at the things in your life is to remember that the goal in your schedule is to stop reacting and start responding.  Start thinking of yourself as the only thing that makes your day and your life happen because that is the truth.  Only you move through your day.  Only you live your life.  Mostly we live in a state of constant reaction to outside things - from emergencies, to demands, to deadlines to other people's perception and judgment of our actions.  We willingly push off what we know is important to our life by mistakenly believing that an outside demand is more important.  We react without thinking if our reaction (while perhaps filling an immediate and created need) benefits the totality of our lives or even is the best response that we can give.  There are such things as deadlines that are very real, but still, the goal is to not lose your self while meeting them.

You cannot acknowledge the totality of your life unless you can accept that every moment is connected to every other moment - from the job you do, to the love you have, to the passion that drives you they are all connected.

Outside sources that place demands on us do not know or recognize the totality of our life.  They can't.  It's impossible.  Even when you deal with another person, your interaction is based primarily on what you know of them, which is limited to what they have shared and you have chosen to recognize.  If you need them to do something for you, then you are focused on getting that one thing and not weighing and balancing how it fits into the totality of their life.  In work, the emphasis is on the product of the business, not you the person.  You, the person in the business however, have to keep the 'big picture' in front of you - that everything you do during the business day is a part of the entirety of your life.

It is essential that you remain in control of your time because you are the only one who can see it in it's totality.

The weighing and balancing is not the responsibility of anything that is outside of yourself.  It is your responsibility.  Maintaining the integrity of the schedule you created is essential; integrity comes from an integration of all the aspects of your life.  Only you can see the larger picture of your life that includes your hopes for the future.  You have to guide your life.

Everything new is a part of what already is.

You need to begin to view everything 'new' that comes into your schedule as a part of your total life.  Does it really demand that it disrupt your plans and be taken care of now?  Or if you gave it some thought, is there somewhere else in the week where you could deal with it better and with more attention? 

You need to begin to know how each element of your life effects you.  You need to define what is required in each element and make the effort to not only meet those requirements but to be careful that you do not exceed them without a full and conscious understanding of what changes that brings.  A prime example of this is work, most of us  - if we have been in a job for a while - have wandered away from our job descriptions but never made any adjustments or effort to accommodate this through salary, recognition of responsibilities, or an acknowledgment of how this impacts our lives outside of work.  We just let it happen.  When asked to do more, we never point out that it exceeds what we are suppose to be doing and in doing more, you are less able to handle what is your actual job description.

Here are 7 ways to begin regaining control of your life and relieving stress.

1.      Do the Mandala Key Exercise.  This will start you on your way to understanding how each element in your life connects to the totality.  Note the way each element adds and subtracts from the quality of your life.  There is nothing good or bad about this, it is just a realistic assessment of the impact of what you have chosen to have in your life.

2.     Make a schedule in which you block out the time you need to spend on each of the elements of your life.  Write down what you plan on doing and decide how long you will give to that one element.  Write one word in that block that sums up your purpose in that area.  Use the Mandala you created when planning the schedule and pay attention to what it showed you about how each element adds and subtracts from your life.

3.      Make a list of the things that need to be done, underline the ones that never seem to get done.  Make a list of the things that you want to be doing.  Now, look at what you wrote down and break it down into four steps - three that are small and the last step is the one where you will finish it.  Decide what you want to get done over the next month.  Week by week, work it into your schedule.  At the end of each week make a list, on one side write down everything you did in the past week that moved you towards your goal; on the other side write down a list of everything you did not do to move you toward that goal.  Read it over once.  That's it.  Start another week.

4.     Respect the integrity of your schedule.  Do not let one thing run on and take time from another.  Everything is important.  Everything in your life deserves to be treated with the same respect and integrity as everything else.  Give to everything a set time frame. Plan your weekends.  Plan your evenings.  Do not plan to do the same thing for the same amount of time every day, that will lead to burn out and resentment.  Be flexible, look at what is going on each day and decide if your mindset will be better suited to getting all your errands done or if you need that hour or two by yourself.  You will learn over the coming weeks how much time you actually need to do things.

5.     Begin to learn to respect your time.  Voice mail, emails, text messages will all sit there waiting for you until you can focus on them.  There are very few people whose call you have to take the moment it comes in.  There are very few actual emergencies in life.  In the beginning, as something comes up demanding your immediate attention - pause, breathe and then write down what needs to be done, what the real deadline is,  then decide if it needs to be done immediately or if there is a time in your week when you would better focus on it. 

6.     Plan ahead for time to be with yourself, your friends or family and let nothing intrude on that time.  Give it a limit, but be there.  Be honest with yourself, when do you begin to flag in conversation - you should be leaving about twenty minutes before then. Make sure you write down that one word of purpose in that time block.  It may seem hard at first to place a time limit on such things but the goal is to begin to bring your entire focused self into your relationships.  If you are wanting to do something on the weekend, like go out to dinner or see a movie with your partner - pick the restaurant or movie on a Monday, trying to do it at the end of the week when you are tired and distracted will just create more stress and now you both have something definite to look forward to.

7.     Sit and think when your week really begins and end.  Most likely it is not Monday through Sunday, you may be like me where my week is from Friday to Thursday (even though I work Monday through Friday).  I plan 'my week' on Thursday night because I can better accommodate everything that has come up during the week that needs to be addressed on the weekend when I am not at work.  Find what day is the end of your week and plan your schedule for the next week on that day.

These steps are just a small portion of the time management system developed for Eat not the Heart and the exercises available to help you begin changing your life.  They are your first steps towards regaining control, walking away from stress and beginning to learn how to live again.  The ideas are simple but it does take a commitment and effort to begin to unravel the life that has been built around you and make the life you want.  Once you begin, you'll be surprised at how much easier each step you take forward becomes.

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