Most of us are familiar with the dangers of stress – elevated blood pressure, digestive distress, decreased immunity, headaches and on up to serious illness. If we are to protect ourselves from this threat, we need to understand what it actually is and how it operates – in our emotions, our minds and our bodies. When we think of stress most people tend to think about being overworked and overextended, or having too many bills to pay. But stress is a complex mechanism that can be triggered in many ways. In actuality, anything that is outside of our normal expected routine is a source of stress, even if it is something positive! In fact, in biological terms, any change to which our bodies, tissues, organs or individual cells must adapt is a stress.
Have you ever gotten home from a vacation and thought, “Now I need a vacation?” Seeing stress from its wider definition, it’s easy to see how such a feeling comes about. Nice as it may be to get away from the office for a week, those action-packed days and nights in Vegas may still be perceived at some level as a stress. The key word here is “perceived.” Perception is the lynchpin that can be both the source and remedy of many of the stresses in our lives.
To better understand how stress is perceived, take your mind back in time – far back! Imagine it is several hundred thousand years ago- here we are, a bunch of primitive humans adapting handsomely to survive as well as we can. Our minds are already quite advanced, with complex memory, language and capacity to reason deductively and inductively. With this tremendous capacity to reason comes a wonderful survival skill – the ability to adapt our behavior in a predictive way. While other creatures do prepare for seasonal changes and adapt to the environment once it has shifted on them, we have this new capacity to speculate at what the most likely changes will be, and so get the jump on the changes by being ready. In order to do this, we must store and process vast quantities of information. As we begin absorbing all this data we need to be able to sort through it, and so we start to classify our experiences and inputs. The most general classification of experiences is as either safe or dangerous. This is because at the most basic level, the first thing we need to know about anything that happens, if we want the best chance of survival, is how dangerous the situation is.
It is this necessity for our minds to label experiences as safe or hazardous that is the ultimate source of so much of our stress today, and so this is a question of perception! These decisions about what is hazardous are usually not made by our conscious mind at all, but rather by our subconscious mind, for the sake of expediency (too much conscious processing is just too slow, and threat assessment needs to be as rapid as possible to keep us safe!) and so our conscious minds may have one outlook on a situation, but our subconscious mind might be working in another direction.
So if we don’t get to consciously decide what is a stress and what isn’t, how do we avoid or reduce the stress in our lives? Well today there are lots of techniques out there to help relieve the effects of stress – yoga, meditation, tai chi, hypnosis, exercise, breath-work etc. For some people turn to less healthy alternatives, like alcohol or just watching TV, but these tend not to provide as much benefit.
The answer is an ancient one, a simple one, an obvious one, and yet it seems for many people it is a difficult one. Though many mind-training techniques, like hypnosis, can alter the beliefs at the subconscious level directly, and therefore alter the perception of stress, the most straightforward technique to change the perception of stress is simply to chose to perceive differently.
What? How? What mystical secrets do I need to know to perceive differently? Didn’t that already fail in the 60’s?
Though there are many extreme ways to radically alter experience/perception (such as with hallucinogens or deprivation) these potentially harmful activities are not required. We all have everything we need within us right now! We simply forget. We forget, moment after moment, that we are choosing our perceptive focus. We decide what and how to perceive. Yes, much of this mechanism IS running by our subconscious minds, but still our conscious mind gets to choose its point of focus. This can seem very difficult when our subconscious is running a very emotional “program” for us about what we “should” be perceiving, but even in those moments, the choice is open to us if we simply remember that it is. What is required is setting a firm intention to remember that we are choosing our experience, our perception of our current situation, in each moment.
So, when it is three o’clock on a Wednesday and things are not going well with your account at work, and the boss is screaming and your client is upset and no one is getting the job done and everyone is blaming you- how do you feel? Do those conditions enter into your body in some way and release adrenal corticoids and put you into “fight or flight” mode? No, they don’t – you do that yourself. Your mind does this for you by labeling the situation threatening. And perhaps it IS threatening! Your livelihood is at risk! You might get fired! But consider this: does preparing yourself for physical combat actually help you here? Or does it rather cloud your judgment (physiologically, by shunting blood flow away from your high-thinking centers in your brain back to your limbic system for more rapid reflex responses!) and eventually exhaust you and perhaps even make you sick, and therefore less able to do your job?
But how can I choose in that moment to feel a different way? Well, here’s the trick- perhaps you can’t, because your subconscious is running the show at this point. But, even while the subconscious is doing its thing, your conscious mind is still present. It has just become conditioned to be submissive in this situation and follow along with what the subconscious is doing. What if you took a fraction of an instant and in that moment decided, just for this brief flash of time I am going to focus on how good it is to be alive and healthy, or to have a home, or to have a loving spouse, or whatever it is that brings you joy (perhaps even just the miracle of being conscious!)
The subconscious may still be running riot, but the conscious mind can place its perceptive focus on something else- and soon, even the subconscious must begin to release its perceptive hold on the situation at hand.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t easy! It’s a struggle at first. It is the warriors battleground. It is simple, but not easy, because the subconscious will continually bring the old view back, again and again, attempting to distract the conscious minds focus until it concedes again and goes back to sleep and lets the subconscious go on running things. But every time this happens, the opportunity is still right there to decided differently again. Choose your focus! Choose to be present in your perceptive focus. Choose positivity, and eventually, unavoidably, the stresses will lessen and vanish. And then, possibilities will begin to open – you will begin to connect with your true creative nature. Won’t that be nice?