Stress-Free Living: The Long Road Home

It’s fairly safe to say that almost everyone gets stressed every day. Here is why. A definition of stress might sound like this. “Stress is a form of pain or discomfort that comes to tell you there is something you need to change”. And that means there is something you need to learn. No learning equals no change. Unfortunately many of us ‘learned’ to believe that our learning ended when we left school, but it didn’t, it started. School is largely an exercise in memorization and memorization isn’t learning. The real school is of course life itself, and every relationship is a workshop!

So lets play with our definition of stress for a moment and see where it takes us. You are sitting in your chair and your body sends you a message that it is uncomfortable. What do you do? You change your position. You don’t turn to the chair and say, “You rotten nasty chair, you are making me feel so uncomfortable”. (although some people do!) You put your hand in the fire and what do you feel, pleasure or pain? What do you do? You learn to never do it again. You change your behavior instantly. The next level is emotion. You get angry. Pleasure or pain? (I hope you said pain otherwise you can now delete this article!) What do we learn? Absolutely nothing! We either shoot the messenger or ignore the messenger (or ask the messenger is there some more message!) Reason? Most of us carry three beliefs that stop us hearing the message and making the necessary changes. Belief one – anger is good, it’s OK, don’t keep it in, let it out, it’s good to let others know how you feel, it may even make things better, make ‘others’ change.