Beating Stress (Part Two)

This article is a 3 part series of stress removal. Click on the link below to get to the next article.

So you’ve been eating clean, exercising and meditating every day. You look back at your stressful past and realise that your proactive actions have taken you from a stress level 10 to a stress level 6. The 6 is still a bit higher than what you want, so you are after the next steps.

What is causing your stress? What is the source?

The benefit from meditation is it will create clarity. It removes all of the excessive thoughts bouncing around your head and allows you to focus on the important aspects.

Remember when we used to have to tune the radio to specific stations? There would be heaps of interference in-between stations, and you would have to fine tune it ever so slightly to hear the station clearly. Think of meditation as the mechanism that removes the interference and allows you to focus on the radio station at hand. Now you can hear the radio station clearly – but you don’t like that station and it stresses you out. This is the next level of stress removal.

Whatever radio station you focus on will determine how your stress levels are. You have cleared out the interference, so now you have a clear picture of what you are telling yourself, but you have found that the picture or the radio station your mind is focusing on is causing you stress.

You could be focused on songs such as:

“She Hates Me” – Puddle of Mudd.

“I’m an Asshole” – Dennis Leary.

“U Can’t Touch This” - MC Hammer.

Or maybe it is just Adele’s “Someone Like You” on repeat. That alone is enough to stress you the fuck out and make you curl up into a ball and cry for 2 weeks straight.

Where you focus goes, the energy flows. If you are focused on negative things that are going to stress you out, you can’t help but be stressed out. Focusing on the negatives of life – be that songs or real life – will only get you toward negative destinations.

The solution here is once you know what it is that you are focusing on, you change your focus towards something more positive.

There is always something positive happening in our lives, and there is always something negative in our lives (One day closer to dying!) You get what you focus on.

Changing your focus can be as easy as changing the radio station, and sometimes it can be as challenging as kicking someone out of your life or correcting a process or a situation from happening again.

Stress is inevitable, and we will always have something stressing us out. What is important is that it is never a 10/10 on the stress scale, and we manage it as best we can by being proactive. Avoiding problems and stressors will only make them come back stronger. It is a signal that something must change – either the problem itself or your attitude towards it.

If you have defined the problem, you can now take the steps required to remove it. If you can’t remove it, the next step is to change your attitude toward the problem.

Read: What To Do When You Have A Problem

Stress almost always boils down to a FEAR. We get anxious because something hasn’t gone according to plan, or something MIGHT happen, then because of these things not going to plan and not possibly happening in the future, that means that a fear is potentially realised.

Next article: Let’s dig into FEAR.