How we can finally let go of our fear of stress by transforming ourselves
What’s your current level of stress and anxiety these days?
And all those techniques you’re using to manage the stress and calm yourself down, how are they working for you?
You see the temptation when we’re feeling lost and stuck in the mire of these feelings is to want to get rid of them as quickly as possible. Understandably, we don’t want to get stuck in the pain and discomfort.
We desperately want to “do” something about them. and that might lead us in one of two directions.
Changing our life circumstances to deal with life’s challenges
Perhaps we opt for the “change things around in our life option” because this seems like the perfectly sane thing to do. If it’s the job, or the husband’s snoring that is causing our stress then it makes perfect sense to change the job, send the husband to the spare room or resort to something even more extreme.
These actions make perfect sense when we’re working from the assumption that it’s our circumstances that are causing our stress, that our feelings come from worry and anxiety about events that we are going to struggle with in the future or that are overwhelming us now.
Managing our feelings to deal with life’s challenges
But maybe, we’re in a place where it’s more tricky for us to change these situations. When this happens, it’s going to be easier to do something about how we cope, to use some form of managing strategy to deal with our feelings.
When this happens, we turn towards techniques. We’ll learn mindfulness or deep breathing, go to relaxation classes or line up our bottles of essential oils.
Dealing with the real problem
Yet at some point, both these options are going to fail you. You’re going to run out of options to make changes to your external life. You’ll discover you can run but the feelings will keep on following you. The stress management techniques will work sometimes and not others or simply fail you completely.
I can guarantee this will happen because no matter how successful they seem in the short term or on some occasions, they are simply sticking plasters. With both these options, we fundamentally haven’t changed. We are still the same person we were before the stress struck except now we’re carrying the luggage of stress and anxiety.
These options cannot work for you in the long-term. And this is because we are making the mistake of treating the symptoms (the feelings, sleeplessness, anxiety) and not the cause.
How does change really happen?
Real progress or transformation only ever comes when we change in some way. This could mean that we develop a part of ourselves or look at the world in a different way because of some insight we have gained.
And when this happens, change is inevitable, it’s a leap to something profoundly new, an evolution. We saw the world and our place in it in one way, we had an insight or shift, and the the world was forever after different for us.
This is how it works.
It means that the change doesn’t have to be a case of gritting teeth or forcing against our more familiar judgement. It just happens of it’s own accord, naturally and effortlessly.
So how does this relate to stress?
If this is going to work in this context, we are going to need some internal cosmic shift. Perhaps we see something new about the nature of stress ( where it comes from perhaps) or we understand something deeper about our own nature. For example, decreasing our identification with the thoughts in our head, seeing them not as “us” but as a thought stream independent of the real us, the observer of all this mental and internal noise.
That is where real change happens and then it cannot be any other way. We see clearly and in that beyond intellectual sense, but know it in our body.
Then we know what needs to be done when stress and anxiety hit. Our relationship with them has been altered forever. We are able to ride the storm of it or surrender to the reality of the situation.
How this change took place for me
The first step that took place was that I started to understand the connection between feelings and thoughts. You can read much more about this in these blog posts
Six secrets you need to know about thoughts to find peace of mind
Is it time we learned to embrace the big, bad wolf of stress?
Once I had transformed my understanding of this and saw how it worked in my own life, stress became far less of an issue for me. That’s not to say that it disappeared completely, as that would be impractical, this is real life we’re dealing with after all. But I saw the connection with my thinking.
But over time, I also noticed another more profound shift.
My relationship with stress and anxiety had changed. I saw that the cause of my difficulties with stress, my suffering in these difficult situations, wasn’t that I was stressed and fearful, but my beliefs about what these feelings meant.
I no longer feared these feelings. I could see when my thinking was making situations worse and I was able just by having this awareness, to calm myself down so that I thought more clearly and was able to deal more resiliently with any situation that was difficult and challenging. More importantly, I no longer tried to push those feelings away.
I allowed myself to feel them.
Fully.
And finally, I have realised that the change in me meant that no matter what life throws at me, I no longer fear anxiety and stress. They are there to be embraced and felt fully and that has proved more life -transforming than stress management techniques and endlessly trying to create a calm life for myself, could ever be.