Is Stress Messing Up Your Self Improvement?

We all want more out of life. Some of us want to change our lives radically – some of us have things about ourselves that we want to change. But, unfortunately, for most of us, life keeps getting in the way! The stress of everyday life – yes, millions of people are suffering from stress and national health services worldwide are leaking money trying to cope with the related health problems – stop us in our tracks.

But, if you think that you’re suffering from stress, you’re wrong! Stress does not get in your way – you’re getting in your own way. You are the problem – but that means that you can also be the solution. How are you the problem? Well, in actual fact, stress does not exist. Sure, it seems real, the effects of it are real, the related health problems, damaged relationships and sleepless nights are real enough. But they are all just symptoms of an imaginary disease. Because, stress is a figment of the imagination, a construct of the normal adult mind that is paying no attention to the real world and, instead, is trying to make sense of what’s going on using completely out of date data.

Let me explain. Something happens that annoys you or stresses you out. It’s not the something that happens that’s the problem. It’s what you think about it, how you think it makes you feel and, as a result, how you react. You make up your mind on all these things using ‘knowledge’ that you learned during your formative years. This is the data that your subconscious mind uses to evaluate everything that’s going on and everyone you meet – including those difficult people that you think are stressing you out.

And your subconscious mind will always – I repeat, always – refer to this out-dated data automatically. This horrible process is your default state of mind. And, as I’ve said, it always will be until you take positive action to do something different. And that something different involves you re-training your mind to pay attention to what is actually going on – not what it has concluded is going on! You must understand that your subconscious mind’s conclusions about current events can never – I repeat, never – be right. It’s not using the right data!

So what do you have to do? I’ve said that you need to re-train your mind. I say re-train because, when we were young and impressionable, we didn’t pay attention to what we thought was going on, we paid attention to reality. And that’s what you’ve got to learn to do all over again. To cut out the process through which your out-dated data is used, you’ve got to learn to pay attention to what your five senses are telling you – and not allow your subconscious mind to leap to different conclusions.

This is done through meditation – because meditation disciplines an otherwise undisciplined mind. In meditation you learn to pay attention to the reality of the moment, what it sounds like, what your breathing feels like, what your body is telling you. You destroy the process of second guessing what’s actually going on. Until you do that, nothing in your life will change.