Understanding Stress...

​Not all stress is evil.

We need enough attention, energy, and urgency to achieve what we set out to do. 

Those factors create what we would call a good stress.
It gives immediacy to our action. It gets us up and doing. 
It can be a great driving force and source of mental, physical, and emotional energy.

It’s the other kind of stress that gets to us; it’s what is generally seen as distress.

Stress is really are euphemism for fear, worry, anxiety, frustration, anger, uncertainty and even doubt, isn’t it?

The first one can help us get things done. The second one can interfere with the best of efforts.

Distress has not so much to do with the circumstances were faced with, as it has to do with how we perceive those circumstances and react to them.
Armed with this information we can take very definite steps to altering the effects of distress in our lives.
We can lessen those effects.
We can change them.
We can, in time and with practice, turn them to energy.

This can give us a great advantage in potentially stressful times.
Our minds are more calm, they are more quiet.
Quieter, calmer minds think more clearly.

 They can access resources and abilities that can otherwise be lost in an emotional storm of distress.
I’ve seen thousands of people over the past 50 years make this make this change in their lives.

They’ve had the desire to achieve it, and by learning good reliable straightforward, practical techniques, have been able to reduce the discomfort of inappropriate tension and stress  in their lives. They have then been able to use talents and abilities that they’d forgotten they had, or never knew they had.

It’s no mystery. 
Sometimes it’s the very simplicity of a methods or ways to do things that causes people to ignore them.

Learning to direct the mind, remain at ease physically, and to quieten the emotions, is a skill that repays the practitioner out of all proportion to the trouble it takes to do it.

Yet, once people have done it, and then apply it on a regular basis in their lives, they often wonder how they existed without it.

Many of the ways to achieve this are often referred to as “soft skills”. In my view, that’s  an unfortunate name. It implies something that is suitable to the dreamy-minded, romantic notion of escapism in which we place our trust in the idea that “something will turn up”.
 It’s on a par with the misconception of “positive thinking“, in which a solution to a challenge or a problem can be achieved merely  by wishing for it. 

Nothing happens without action.

Whether it’s dealing with problems or dealing with distress, it’s only by taking practical steps and putting them into action with force, drive, and determination that we can experience the benefits of positive thinking or dealing with stress.

Simple. Not always easy, but simple. 

And available to anyone with the gumption and will to do it, as thousands have.
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