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"Stop Stressing Me Out" - Changing our Reaction To Stress | Mind Power Blog - Mind Power: How To Change Reality in Your Favor

"Stop Stressing Me Out" - Changing our Reaction To Stress

Sat Jan 29 18:35:35 2011

How to take stressful situations under control by learning to react to them differently.

Most of us know that being under a great deal of stress is harmful. Research was done that showed prolonged stress causing the person or animal to “give up” and not even try avoid stress anymore. How often do you feel stressed? Bills are unpaid, kids are misbehaving, the car broke down, and this person won't lay off incessant pestering, holds unreasonable expectations, and just doesn't seem to get it! You feel like yelling: “Stop stressing me out!”

It's natural for us to assume other people or things are the problem. After all, we feel stressed only when they are around. However, could this belief be an illusion, a trick? Do we inadvertently fool ourselves into believing the problem is not ourselves? I think so.

Other people do not cause us stress. They merely create a situation, and it is only our reaction to that situation what causes stress. Work of an American psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (try saying that name three times fast) relates various states of mind into which we enter to the proportions of skill and challenge we face. If the situation is challenging, and we do not feel apt enough to handle it, we experience stress. A more prominent aspect of Mihály's work, however, is the concept of “Flow.” It is a state of mind we experience when the balance between skill and challenge is just right – when we are neither stressed nor bored; you might have felt Flow before, when time stood still while you worked elated.

While people react to stressful situations differently, this research suggests it's possible to turn a lot of stressful situations on their heads, and most people can do it! We can be jubilant when a customer scoffs at us; exultant when the computer conspires against us for hours; and the excitement can fill us when everything that can go wrong, does. How do we achieve this? Skill.

If stress is the result of poor skill, increasing said skill will abate stress, even when you can't change the other aspect of stress, the challenge. How far can we go with this? What kind of skill are we talking about when an angry customer is yelling at us? What kind of skill do we need when the computer doesn't do what we ask? I could mention “patience”, but there is a more direct and meaningful approach.

Create a text file on your computer, and title it “The Answer.” From now on, instead of blurting out expletives or slamming fists on your desk, whenever you feel stressed, take a 2 minute break, and write down in your text file the cause of stress you've just experienced and most importantly the single “answer” to this situation that you will always use from now on. For example, if the customer is ignorantly insisting you work faster, your answer might be “I'll finish this as fast as I can.” If the computer problem won't budge, the answer might be asking the specialist to help you. Review your file periodically to remember your answers to recurring situations.

Squeezing stress balls and sharing your misery with colleagues might seem to work equally well. However, squeezes and vociferation only create an illusion of a solution. You only feel you solved a problem, but the problem remains. Finding concrete answers and writing them out not only makes it seem your skill is rising, but actually does increase it! And, perhaps, in a few years, your small computer file of solutions can become a printed book.

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