Remarkable Resiliency Skills for Uncertain Times The Keys to Managing Your Emotions!

This is the first in a series of articles written for readers of Body Mind Spirit Magazine.

You find yourself getting increasingly irritable, impatient, having difficulty concentrating or sleeping, procrastinating, wondering what meaning your life has.

Or perhaps you're being accused of acting cold and distant, displaying sarcasm and a short fuse.

All of these behaviors and attitudes are symptoms of stress.

"Stress" is such an overused term, yet in our competitive and impatient culture, examples of stress are with us constantly. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually for stress-related medical insurance claims, and workers' compensation benefits. Then there's reduced productivity, poor product quality, marital and family problems, and even drug and alcohol abuse, which are often desperate attempts at coping with the stress. Stress has even overtaken the common cold as the most prevalent health problem in America!

For most of us, work challenges, managing our teens, and pleasing our spouses represent daily stressors. But events, per se, such as your teen missing curfew, or an argument with your spouse, never cause your stress!

EVENTS ARE NEUTRAL

Your feelings of stress, including all of the symptoms mentioned above, are not caused by events that take place in your life...events are neutral! For example, let's assume that I am booked to conduct an opening keynote speech for a major Holistic Health Conference in Denver. Attendees have flown in from all over the country for this conference. Five minutes before I am to board my plane, my flight is cancelled due to inclement weather in the Phoenix hub. There are no flights going into Phoenix and it will not be possible for me to arrive in Denver in time for my program. While one might consider this situation to be "stressful," it is actually a neutral event. The situation or event does not cause stress!

Continuing with this example, if I find myself irritated at the airline representative, or I begin to perspire and feel a tightening across my chest...these are certainly stress symptoms, but they are not due to the event of my flight being cancelled. Events do not directly cause stress, or any other emotion, attitude or mood, for that matter. The emotion or attitude that results from an event is strictly caused by your interpretation of, or belief about the event. In effect, it's that little voice in your head that communicates with you--your self-talk, your internal dialogue--that always determines how you react to events. We all have a little voice that we "listen to" constantly.

To continue my example, if I learn that the flight is cancelled (the event), I might say to myself: "Oh, that's just great...Now I won't make the meeting; everyone is there expecting a rousing keynote, and the good folks at the Holistic Health Conference will be so angry at me that they'll never hire me to conduct a program again."

Such a negative, self-defeating statement immediately activates the specific nervous system that is necessary to deal with life-threatening situations, and my body reacts accordingly. My blood pressure rises and my behavior may become irrational, such as yelling at the attendant, even though she can do nothing to change the flight situation.

On the other hand, suppose that when I learn the flight is cancelled, I say to myself the following: "This is really unfortunate and I feel badly that I will not be there, but it is absolutely beyond my control. I will phone the meeting planners right away and see if they would like me to find a substitute speaker who is based in Denver...or suggest that we postpone my keynote until the last day of the conference, when I will be able to make it...or, perhaps there is a way that I can do the keynote through a tele-conference tomorrow. That way, with the audience all seated in the meeting room, I can arrange to do the keynote by interactive television. (I would even use my situation as an example of how self-talk…not events… always determines our emotional, attitudinal and behavioral responses to events.)"

THE CULPRIT...YOUR INTERNAL CRITIC

The "culprit" in all of this is your internal critic, that voice within that spews out an average of 55,000 words per day, 77% of which are negative, self-defeating thoughts and ideas... thoughts like, My son is so inconsiderate! It doesn't matter to him that we worry when he comes home late or My spouse never really listens to me, or I have a devastating disease that I absolutely will never be able to overcome.

Where does such an internal critic come from? We now know that well-meaning but misinformed parents, teachers and other authority figures actually begin this process by trying to protect us. Comments from these folks, who of course begin talking to us when we're youngsters, start the process. One well-known researcher determined that between the ages of 6 and 18, the average youngster in America hears approximately 148,000 negative, self-defeating comments from these folks, versus 4000 positive, “go for it” comments.

Lee Paulos, a wonderful hypnotherapist from Vancouver, says that these people, making comments such as, “Don't take a risk,” “You're not pretty enough, so don't embarrass yourself by auditioning for the beauty contest,” or “You aren't an athlete, so don't try out for the team,” begin the process of “planting weeds in the beautiful garden of our subconscious.” Those weeds give rise to our “internal critic,” which then continues the process in us by parroting the same comments to ourselves. Thus we begin to water and fertilize those weeds ourselves. So now we have a negatively programmed subconscious mind that is flourishing.

The wisdom about how our inner thoughts and beliefs about events are critical to our well-being has been around for centuries. The Greek philosopher Epictetus said, "Men are disturbed not my things, but by the views which they take of them." In Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote, "There's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

YOUR THOUGHTS AND YOUR BODY

We now know that every thought we have translates itself very rapidly, chemically and electronically, to every cell in the body! Strange idea, but true. We can demonstrate this in a variety of examples, from the body language of athletes who begin to lose faith in themselves to the recovery rate of breast- cancer patients who begin to think optimistically about their prognosis. When we have negative, self-defeating thoughts, it takes the average human body a full 24 hours to fully recover from only five minutes of such thinking! So, given the fact that approximately 77% of the thoughts we have are negative and counterproductive, and that the body takes 24 hours to recover from only five minutes of negative thinking, our bodies are taking a tremendous beating--just by our thought processes alone!

Just think. Suppose I open a casino and you love to gamble. If I told you that 77% of the time the house will win, and that every time you lose it will take your body 24 hours to recover, would you consider coming to my casino and gambling? Of course not! Yet many of us do literally go through life “programmed” negatively, so that we will not achieve our goals, live stress-free, or be happy or healthy. Of course, this is illogical thinking, but as someone once so aptly put it, "If logic always prevailed, men would ride horses side-saddle!"

The good news, of course, is that your thoughts are ultimately under your control. Once you learn how to do this, you actually add life to your years and years to your life!

Watch for the next installment, in which Dr. Singer will explain the relationship between your thoughts, stress level and your health. He'll show you how to change your thinking habits, so that you can positively impact your health for the rest of your life!

By Jack N. Singer