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Remarkable Resiliency Skills for the Uncertain Times: Part 1
By: Jack N. Singer, Ph.D.
This article is the first installment in a series of articles, written for visitors to 4therapy.com, and directed at showing you how to master the stresses in your life---permanently!
You find yourself getting increasingly irritable, impatient, having difficulty concentrating or sleeping, procrastinating, wondering what meaning your life has, or you are 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, workers compensation benefits, reduced productivity, poor product quality, spillover into marital and family problems, and even drug and alcohol abuse, which is often a desperate attempt at coping with the stress. Stress has surpassed the common cold as the most prevalent health problem in America! Stress management training is among the most requested training programs by corporate America .
For most of us, work challenges, managing our teens, and pleasing our spouses represent daily stressors. But events, per se, being confronted by a disgruntled employee, 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 never 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 conference in Miami. 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 Chicago. There are no flights going into Chicago and it will not be possible to arrive 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!
If I find myself irritated at the airline representative, or I begin to perspire and feel a tightening across my chest...these are stress symptoms, but they are not due to the event of having my flight 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--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 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 nervous system 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 that 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 planner and the association executive director right away and see if they would like me to find a substitute speaker who is based in Miami...or if we can 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 situated in the meeting room, I can arrange to do the keynote by interactive television. I can even use this example with them when I discuss how self-talk always determines our emotional, attitudinal and behavioral responses to events!"
The Culprit: Your Internal Critic
The "culprit" in all of this is our internal critic...that voice within that spews out an average of 55,000 words per day, 77% of which are negative, self-defeating messages... messages like, "This CEO is difficult to deal with, so I will always have problems with him,"or "My son/daughter doesn't care if we worry when he misses curfew," or "My spouse never really listens to me."
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."
It takes the average human body a full 24 hours to fully recover from only five minutes of negative thinking! So, given approximately 77% of the thoughts being negative and counterproductive and the body taking 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 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 literally go through life programmed negatively so that we will not achieve our goals or live stress-free, or be happy. Of course , this is illogical, but as someone once so aptly put it, "If logic always prevailed, men would ride horses side-saddle!"
Please read the next installment, where I explain the relationship between your thoughts, stress level and your health. I'll show you how to change your thinking habits for the rest of your life!
Dr. Jack Singer is a practicing Industrial/Organizational, Consulting and Sports Psychologist in Laguna Niguel, California. He is President of Psychologically Speaking, and provides keynote presentations, training programs,and re-TREATS for Fortune 1000 corporations, athletic organizations and for a variety of associations around the world. Dr . Singer is recognized as one of North America 's premier experts in training organizations to "lighten up the workplace for health and wealth."
Click Here to learn more about Jack Singer, Ph.D.
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