Your Passport to a Healthier Life

Mastering Stress and Anxiety

If you’ve ever been gripped by a panic attack or felt frozen in the grip of fear or stress, you’ll understand exactly how it feels to be incapacitated by anxiety. It’s like a straitjacket that paralyses our ability to act and interferes with all our reasoning faculties. The fact is that fear can imprison us just as effectively as a jail cell. So, it makes perfect sense to see if we can find a way to free ourselves from this debilitating behavioural trap.

The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.

– Sydney J. Harris

Whilst the fear response developed to help us avoid or survive threatening or dangerous situations, it’s helpful to remember that most of our fears are based on little more than our over-active imagination. When you pause to consider the problem, it’s clear that most of the things we’re typically afraid of never actually happen. That means that we expend a vast amount of our energy responding to things that don’t actually exist.

Think about that for a moment.

We routinely imagine situations and scenarios with all the requisite emotional reactions and then our bodies react as if the images in our minds were somehow real. And that’s part of the problem because our bodies can’t tell the difference between a real threat and a purely imaginary danger.

Remember that stress doesn’t come from what’s going on in your life. It comes from your thoughts about what’s going on in your life.

–Andrew J. Bernstein

As we’ve noted in previous articles, the reason that cinema and theatre are so appealing is that they draw us into a purely imaginary world that resonates powerfully with our emotions. And even though we’re watching images projected onto a blank screen, we behave as if the scenes were real. Plato would certainly have understood and appreciated the phenomenon! After all, the flickering shadows cast onto the wall of a cave provided one of the ways he used to describe our perception of reality.

In most cases, fear is a distinctly unhelpful distraction – because we don’t make great choices and decisions when we’re afraid. As an immediate reaction to a threat, the urge is to hide or run or fight. But very few situations present us with the need to make these knee-jerk choices. In the vast majority of cases, a calm and reasoned approach is the best way to engage the brain’s ability to think and plan and determine the most effective course of action. We rarely behave in our best interests when we panic.

You are braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.

Christopher Robin

On another level, we need to bear in mind that fear is highly contagious. We’re social creatures who respond to the messages that constantly swirl around us and, when someone shows signs of panic, we instinctively react by assuming there must be a good reason for the panic. In other words, one person’s behaviour can trigger panic in everyone else. The antidote is to pause. That’s right. Take a moment to breathe and assess the situation - rationally. Relax your jaw and release your shoulders. And, suddenly, the situation can be appreciated in a very different light. Free from the fear response, your rational mind can take account of the details and then determine the best course of action.

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answers.

-      William S. Burroughs

Stress and the constant pressure of anxiety are mostly the evidence of habits that we adopt during our formative years and then accept as being perfectly normal extensions of our personalities. We learn to be stressed and anxious and afraid and this insight into the origins of our stress reveals to us the possibility of replacing these habits with healthier and more productive responses. The key is to create that moment of calm before you react. Learn to take a deeper breath and consider the alternatives. Find the inner peace that frees you from over-reacting and from following the herd instinct of people in panic. Remember: fear is contagious. And we rarely make wise decisions when we’re frightened.

Everything you need you already have; you are complete right now. You are a whole total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality.

-      Wayne Dyer

The simple truth is that we do not flourish when we’re stressed. We don’t operate at high efficiency when we’re afraid. We tend to find the better answers when we turn down our stress response and turn up our creativity. And it’s possible that your calm demeanour will encourage others to turn down their anxiety and turn up their creative thought processes. Prolonged stress is harmful. If you aspire to a happier, healthier way of living, taking control of your stress response is one of the most important steps you can take on the pathway to self-mastery.

 Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths.

-      Etty Hillesum

 Important News! You can now access the celebrated Wellness Foundation Courses online.

Go to www.thewellnessfoundation.eu

to discover your personal pathway to a happier, healthier and more fulfilling way of living.

Greg Parry created The Wellness Foundation and the Cognitive Empowerment Programs specifically to help people master their stress, overcome their limitations and explore the power of their true potential. Feel free to join us today and discover the power of your own potential.