Your ability to manage the day-to-day stresses of your life is essential to your happiness and success. Performing at your best requires calmness, clarity and an ability to maintain a certain amount of objectivity about yourself and your work. In this chapter you will learn how to be your own psychotherapist. You will learn how to control your thinking processes so you can minimize your stress and maximize your energy and optimism. You will learn how to be happy and effective no matter what is going on around you. The master goal is the achievement of peace of mind, the ultimate aim of all your efforts.
The highest human good is peace of mind. Your ability to achieve and maintain your own peace of mind is perhaps the best single measure of how well you are doing as a person. Peace of mind is the essential precondition for happiness and for getting the maximum amount of enjoyment and pleasure out of your work and your personal life. When you make inner peace your highest goal and organize all your activities, decisions and behavior around it, you will be happier and more effective in your life and career than under any other circumstances.
The opposite of inner peace is negativity. Negative emotions are the main cause of unhappiness in life. Negative emotions are the “robber” emotions. They rob you of peace, happiness and enjoyment. They make you sick. They shorten your life. All stress, tension and anxiety is ultimately manifested in negative emotions of some kind. Negative emotions, once aroused, are always expressed, either inwardly or outwardly. You either make yourself sick or you poison your relationships with others.
One of your major goals in planning your life must be to eliminate negative emotions and become a truly happy, healthy person. And the way you eliminate negative emotions is, first, by understanding the root causes of negative emotions, and, second, by learning how to neutralize them at will.
You need courage to be your own psychotherapist. You require tremendous honesty. You must be willing to look deep into yourself for the real cause of any stress or negativity that you may be experiencing. You must accept complete responsibility for both your inner and your outer life, and for how you feel about them. This requires tremendous strength of character but it pays off in terms of the best kind of life you could want for yourself.
Hans Selye, the pioneer in stress management, defined stress as “any nonspecific response to internal or external stimuli.” The key word in this definition is “response.” Stress is not contained in external events; there is no such thing as an inherently stressful situation. There are only stressful responses. Stress is not contained in what happens to you. It is the way you respond to what happens to you. You can choose to respond in a stressful way or you can choose to respond in a nonstressful way. The choice is yours.
The starting point of stress management and the achievement of inner peace is for you to accept responsibility for your responses. It is not what happens to you but how you think about what happens to you that causes your response, positive or negative, stressful or unstressful. And this is your decision, your choice, your responsibility.
For example, on any given day, two people may be stuck in traffic on the way to work. One person will be impatient and angry, while the other person will remain calm and relaxed.
Here you have the same situation but two ways of responding to it. The response, not the situation, causes the stress.
Or the same person may be upset and angry if he is stuck in traffic on the way to work on Monday, and be quite calm if he is stuck in traffic on the way to work on Wednesday. Here you have the same person and two different responses to the same situation. The choice is always up to the individual.
You pay a high price for poor stress management and the loss of inner peace. Easily 80 percent, and perhaps as many as 95 percent, of physical illnesses are psychological in origin. Modern medicine has almost eliminated most of the major diseases—typhoid, typhus, cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, polio and many others that used to shorten the natural life span. Yet in spite of this, we have more sick people and more of our gross national product being spent on health care than at any other time in our history. And a large part of the reason for this is the inability of the average person to manage the rigors and stresses of daily life in our dynamic and fast-paced modern society.
The leading cause of death in America is heart disease, killing more than five hundred thousand men and women each year. Yet experts such as Dr. Kenneth Cooper, of the Cooper Clinic in Dallas, have concluded that there is little incidence of death from heart disease before age seventy in the absence of the high-stress, or Type A, personality. High stress has also been closely linked to cancer, strokes, ulcers, colitis, hyperthyroidism, skin diseases and breakouts, migraine headaches, arthritis and a variety of other life-threatening and degenerative ailments.
If there is anything good about stress it is the fact that no one is born with any. Have you ever seen a stressed-out baby? All stressful responses are learned over the course of our lifetimes as the result of experience and conditioning. And if you have learned to respond to certain situations in a stressful way, you can also learn to respond to them in a more positive and constructive way.
In any case, stress is not all bad. The only people who are completely free from stress are those in the cemetery. Stress is an unavoidable part of being alive. But there is both good stress, or what Dr. Abraham Maslow called “eustress,” and bad stress, the kind that is harmful to your health. Good stress gives you energy, enthusiasm and excitement about what you are doing. Bad stress makes you tired, irritable and unhappy. It often makes you feel overwhelmed by your work.
The key issue in stress management is the subject of control, or what is called the “locus of control.” You feel positive about yourself and your life to the degree to which you feel you are in control of what is happening. You feel negative about yourself and your life to the degree to which you feel you are not in control, or that you are controlled by external factors, such as your boss, your bills, your relationships, your health or your other problems. (We discussed this key idea in Chapter Two.)
If you think about your personal and work life, you will find that the areas in which you experience the greatest peace of mind and satisfaction are the areas in which you feel you have the greatest amount of control, or ability to exert influence, over what is going on. You will also find that the areas in which you are most unhappy, or experience the most stress, are those in which you feel you are not in control, or in which you feel there is little that you can do to solve the problem or remove the irritation.
The most effective method of stress management that I know of is called the “cognitive control method.” In a way, we have been talking indirectly about this method throughout this book. “Cognitive control” means that you use your mind, your ability to think, choose and decide, to exert control over your emotions and over your responses to difficult situations. It is in using the cognitive control method that you become your own psychotherapist and assure yourself life-long enjoyment of inner peace and happy relationships.
There are seven major causes of stress and negative emotions. These seven stressors cause probably 95 percent, perhaps even 99 percent, of all of the unhappiness you will ever experience. Once you learn how to identify them, and deal with them, you will feel more positive, more optimistic and more cheerful in everything you do. You will feel that you are back in control of your inner and outer lives.
The first major source of stress is worry. Worry is a sustained form of fear caused by indecision. Often people learn to worry from one of their parents and, by worrying repeatedly, they become chronic worriers. They worry about almost anything, almost all the time. And worry of any kind tends to depress your body’s immune system and make you susceptible to all kinds of illnesses, from colds and flu all the way up to life-threatening diseases and infections. Your ability to eliminate worry is your starting point for the happy, healthy, well-balanced mental attitude you need to get the most joy from everything you do.
When people are asked what they worry about, they usually give the following percentages: 40 percent are things that never happen; 30 percent are in the past and can’t be changed in any case; 12 percent are needless worries about health; and 10 percent are petty worries about unimportant matters.
That only leaves 8 percent, of which half, or 4 percent, are things about which nothing can be done. Only 4 percent of the things that most people worry about can be changed. How do your worries measure up against these percentages?
One of the best ways to stop worrying is to live in “day-tight compartments.” Live one day at a time. In the Bible it says, “Sufficient unto the day are the cares thereof.” Much of your stress is a result of worrying about things in the future, most of which never happen anyway. Cross the bridge, whenever possible, when you come to it, not before. And not repeatedly.
Perhaps the best method for dealing with worry is the “Worry Buster.” This simple four-step process has helped more people to gain control and eliminate worrying than any other method.
First, clearly define your worry situation in writing. Sometimes when you write out a clear definition of the problem, you see an obvious solution.
Second, determine the worst possible thing that could happen as a result of this situation. Often you will find that the worst possible outcome is not that bad. Just defining it clearly and considering it as a possibility often reduces the stress and worry associated with the problem.
Third, once you have determined the worst possible thing that could happen, resolve to accept it, should it occur. Once you have determined that you are “willing to have it so” you then have nothing left to worry about.
And fourth, begin immediately to improve upon the worst. Begin to do everything you possibly can to minimize the worst possible outcome. In business, this is called the “minimax” solution. It requires that you minimize the maximum worst possible consequences of any decision.
John Paul Getty, at one time the world’s richest man, gave one of his secrets of success as this: In every business deal or transaction, identify the worst thing that can possibly go wrong, and then make sure it doesn’t happen.
The only real antidote for worry is purposeful action. Once you have made a decision about what you can do to resolve your situation, get so busy working on the solution that you no longer have time to think about the problem.
The Law of Substitution states that you can substitute thoughts of positive action for thoughts of worry and drive the worry thoughts out of your mind. The key is to get busy. “Take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them,” as Shakespeare said in Hamlet. “I must lose myself in action lest I wither in despair,” said Tennyson after the death of his best friend, Arthur Hallam.
The second major cause of stress and negativity is having no clear meaning and purpose in life. It is having no clear goals to which you are committed. In business, a major source of stress is poor time management, which is almost invariably caused by a lack of clarity concerning goals and priorities. You can’t plan and organize your time efficiently and effectively if you are unsure about what it is you are trying to accomplish.
Perhaps 80 percent of all the problems and unhappiness that you experience occur because you are unclear about where you’re going and what you want to accomplish. The very act of selecting a major definite purpose, and making a plan for its accomplishment, is often enough in itself to snap you out of the feeling of negativity that you experience in the absence of a goal.
There is an old saying that is corny but true: “Feeling listless? Make a list!” The very act of sitting down and making a list of ten things you would like to accomplish over the next twelve months will get you excited. Your blood pressure and your heart rate will go up. You will become more alert and aware. You’ll be happier. Your mind is structured in such a way that you feel good about yourself only when you’re working toward achieving something that is important to you.
The third major source of stress and negativity is the “incomplete action.” Each of us has within us a “compulsion to closure” or an “urge to completion.” We feel happy and contented when we finish a job, or achieve a goal. We feel unhappy and stressed when we leave something undone or incomplete. Engaging in an incomplete act, or doing a job only partially, can cause you enormous stress. Even watching someone engage in an incomplete action is stressful.
A famous courtroom lawyer, when it appeared that his client was going to be found guilty, would arrive in court on the final day with a big cigar. As the district attorney began his summation to the jury, the lawyer would begin to puff on his cigar, and the ash would begin to grow. As the ash grew longer and longer, without falling off, the attention of the members of the jury would begin to focus on the ash. The lawyer would continually make motions and objections with the hand that contained the cigar so that it kept moving back and forth in the air.
In no time at all, the eyes of the entire jury would be fixed on the growing ash and they would stop paying attention to what the district attorney was saying. When the district attorney was finished, the lawyer would put his cigar down in the ashtray and then get up and give his final closing defense arguments to the jury. In many cases, the jury would bring back a verdict of not guilty.
After the jury had left the courtroom, the lawyer would remove a long, thin wire that he had placed down the center of the cigar. The wire had been holding the three inches of ash. There was no doubt that this wire had saved his clients in many marginal cases. The tension of watching the ash was so great for the jury members that they were unable to listen to the summation of the case by the district attorney.
Similarly, the stress of being in the middle of an incomplete action can be extremely distracting to you and can make you incapable of concentrating on anything for very long. You think about the task or situation continually.
Procrastination is the most common example of the incomplete action. Whenever you procrastinate, especially on important tasks, you experience stress. And the more important the task or responsibility, the greater the stress, the greater the disruption of your peace of mind. This stress eventually appears physically in such reactions as insomnia, negativity and irritation.
The solution to any incomplete action is to begin the task and stay with it until it is complete, which requires tremendous self-discipline. The payoff for completing a task is an immediate increase of energy, enthusiasm and self-esteem. Task completion makes you feel better and more positive. It immediately relieves the stress you experience when the incomplete task is hanging over your head.
A variation of the incomplete action is “unfinished business.” Unfinished business refers to a relationship, personal or business, that is still hanging on. It is something you have not let go of or ended. It is not yet complete or finished. Unfinished business is often caused when you hold on to a relationship long after it is over, rather than going on to something else.
Unfinished business sometimes lingers because of an unwillingness to forgive and forget. It can be caused by a desire to get even. Often it is accompanied by bitterness and anger. Money can be involved, or a desire to get what you feel you are entitled to. Unfinished business lingers if you still want another person’s love or respect. You are still emotionally attached and you feel your own self-worth is tied up in his or her estimate of you. Unfinished business ties you to the past and negatively affects your business and personal relationships.
A woman who had been summarily fired from her executive position after several years was furious. She told me she had seen her lawyer and was going to sue for wrongful termination. She was both bitter and determined to get what she felt was the justice she was entitled to.
I asked her how long the process would take. She replied that it could take up to two years to get to court.
What were her chances of winning her suit? According to her lawyer, they were better than 50 percent.
What would she do in the interim? She told me that, in all honesty, if she took another position, it would weaken her case, her claim for remuneration.
We concluded that, if she pursued legal action, she could be tied up professionally and emotionally for as long as two years, and at the end of that time, she might lose her case in court and end up having gained nothing. But she would have lost two years of her life preoccupied with her lawsuit, not to mention the expenses involved.
What advice would you give her? What advice would you give yourself in this situation? What would you do in your own life if you felt you had been treated unfairly by someone?
I suggested to her that she drop the whole matter and get on with her career and her life. Her happiness and peace of mind were far too important to be held to ransom for up to two years. She would be living in a state of “suspended animation” emotionally, and there was no payoff or settlement worth trading all that time for.
She was both smart and perceptive. She told me she would think about it. Later, I heard that she had dropped the legal action. Shortly afterward, I read in the paper that she had been appointed to a senior position with another company. When I saw her briefly some weeks later, she was radiant and happy.
At Christmas, I received a card from her with a handwritten note saying, “Thank you for the best advice I’ve ever received.”
No one can have any control over your emotions unless there is still something that you want from that person. No one can make you feel unhappy or angry unless there is something that you still want, whether it is love, respect or money, or even custody of the children. The minute that you decide that you no longer want anything from the other person, you complete the “business.” You are free again.
The fourth major cause of stress and negativity is the fear of failure. This fear is usually manifested in indecisiveness, anxiety and worry. It accompanies the feeling of “I can’t,” which settles in the solar plexus, ruining your digestion, making you feel afraid and insecure. It can destroy your ambition and undermine your resolve. Instead of striving toward the fulfillment of your potential, you become preoccupied with not failing. You think only about playing it safe.
Fear of failure is a conditioned response learned in childhood. Everyone has a certain amount of this fear. It causes you to be prudent, which in moderation is a good thing. But when fear of failure is carried too far, it can be a major obstacle to your success and happiness.
Everyone experiences fear of some kind. The brave person is not the person without fear, but the person who acts in spite of his or her fear. When you face your fears and move toward them, they diminish and grow smaller. But when you back away from the person or situation you fear, it grows until it can actually dominate your whole life.
Here is a simple but effective way of dealing with fear: First, affirm to yourself with energy and conviction, “I can do it! I can do it! I can do it!” This affirmation short-circuits and cancels out the feeling of “I can’t! I can’t! I can’t!” It is a powerful and fast-acting application of the Law of Substitution.
Then, do the thing you fear. Confront your fear. Move toward your fear. Use your specific fear as a challenge and instead of backing away from it or avoiding it, confront it and face it head on.
In her wonderful book Wake Up and Live, Dorothea Brande wrote about the technique that turned her life around. She spent the rest of her career speaking and sharing this secret with thousands of others, many of whose lives also turned around as a result. And her secret was simply this: “Decide exactly what you want to do, and then, act as if it were impossible to fail.”
Act as if the fear did not exist. Pretend. Ask yourself, “If I were totally unafraid in this situation, if I had no fears at all, how would I behave?”
And then behave that way. You can act your way into feeling courageous and unafraid. If you pretend that you are brave and courageous, you will begin to feel brave and courageous. You take control of your emotions by taking control of your actions.
Always ask yourself, “What’s the worst possible thing that can happen if I go ahead?” Then ask, “What is the best possible thing that can happen if I am successful?” You will often find that the worst possible thing that can happen is quite small, and the best possible thing that can happen is quite significant. This exercise alone can often motivate you to take the all-important first step that leads onward to success.
Thomas J. Watson, Sr., the founder of IBM, put it this way: “Do you want to succeed? Then, double your rate of failure. Success lies on the far side of failure.”
Remember, failure is never final. Failure is simply a way of learning the lessons you need to succeed. The only thing of which the fear of failure can assure you is ultimate failure in life. All great men and women developed the habit of confronting their fear of failure, and acting in spite of their fear, until the habit of courage became a part of their characters.
You overcome the fear of failure by moving confidently in the direction of your dreams and acting as if it were impossible to fail. As Henry Ford said, “Failure is just another opportunity to more intelligently begin again.”
The fifth major cause of stress and negativity is the fear of rejection. The fear of rejection manifests itself in an overconcern for the approval of others. The fear of rejection is typically learned in early childhood as a result of a parent giving the child “conditional love.”
Many parents make the mistake of giving love and approval to their children only when their children do something that they want them to do. A child who has grown up with this kind of “conditional love” tends to seek for unconditional approval from others all his or her life. When the child becomes an adult, this need for approval is often transferred to the workplace and onto the boss. The boss becomes, in effect, a surrogate father. The adult employee then becomes preoccupied with the opinion of the boss.
Drs. Rosenman and Friedman, two San Francisco heart specialists, have defined this obsession for performance as “Type A behavior.” They estimate that probably 60 percent of men and 10 percent (and growing) of women are Type A’s. This behavior can vary from mild to extreme cases. People who are what they call “true Type A’s” put so much pressure on themselves to perform that they burn themselves out and often die of heart attacks before age fifty-five. This is perhaps the most serious stress-related phenomenon in the American workplace.
The true Type A has several attitudes and behaviors in common with other Type A’s. Compare your behavior with these symptoms and see if any of them apply to you.
The most obvious sign of the true Type A is a “harrying sense of time urgency.” The Type A feels that he is in a “rat race.” He feels he is on a treadmill and can’t get off. He feels that he has to do more and more in less and less time. He always feels in a hurry and under pressure. This “time urgency” usually occurs because he is always volunteering for more and more work in order to win the approval from the boss that he never got from his father.
It’s not uncommon for companies to deliberately hire people with the Type A profile. They know that these people will work with tremendous intensity and produce far more than the average—at least until they burn out. Then, the companies fire or demote them and hire new Type A’s for their jobs.
Type A personalities have an obsession with performance, with achievement, to some undetermined high standard. No matter how much they accomplish, it’s never enough. Because they have never set themselves a measurable standard at which they can relax and enjoy their accomplishments, they keep on pushing themselves harder and harder.
No matter how successful Type A’s become, they feel a tremendous insecurity of status. They never feel they’ve done enough. If they win awards for the best salesman or best manager of the year on December 31, they feel they have to start all over again on January 1. They can never relax or rest on their laurels.
Type A’s are more concerned with things than people. They work harder and harder to rack up numbers of accomplishments—higher incomes, greater numbers of sales, more and bigger possessions, greater numbers of papers published. They believe that “the one who dies with the most toys wins!”
True Type A’s measure how well they are doing by what they can count. Type A’s talk about their possessions, number of achievements, or level of income all the time. They continually compare themselves with others, especially those who appear to be doing better than they are, and are determined to surpass them.
Type A’s bring work home. They are always talking about the boss. They are preoccupied with what the boss said, what the boss did, or what the boss meant. They have an obsession with the opinions and views of their employer. Nothing makes Type A’s happier than to get approval from the boss. Nothing makes Type A’s more upset than to be out of favor with the boss, for any reason.
Perhaps the most important distinguishing characteristic of the Type A is a feeling of aggression and hostility, especially toward coworkers with whom the Type A feels in constant competition.
Type A’s are typically angry, impatient and irritated. They work harder and harder but get little satisfaction from their work or accomplishments. They feel a sense of hopelessness, that there is nothing they can do. They feel out of control. They constantly say, “I have to do this” or “I have to do that.” They feel there’s no point where they can relax and take it easy. They finally send a message to their subconscious mind: “Get me out of here!” And the first signs of heart disease or other illnesses appear not long afterward.
If you recognize Type A behavior in yourself, especially the attitude of hostility and a harrying sense of time urgency, or time pressure, there are specific things that you can do to get over it.
The first step is simple. Admit it! Admit that you are a Type A personality. Many Type A’s are reluctant to admit that their work controls them completely, rather than their controlling their work. If you accuse them of demonstrating Type A behavior they will turn their hostility and aggression on you and vigorously deny it. They will lash out when their wives or husbands try to get them to slow down. They become defensive and angry when their behavior is brought to their attention.
To get over Type A behavior (which is usually fatal) you must realize that you can never find peace or happiness in your accomplishments. You can only find peace within yourself. If your father never gave you the unconditional approval you needed, you must accept that he did the best he could with what he had.
There is no point in your striving incessantly to earn the approval of your boss in order to make up for the love and approval your father never had to give you in the first place. It can only shorten your life.
The second step you must take to get over Type A behavior is for you to make the decision to change. Make the decision that you do not want to live like this any more. Make the decision that you want to become a more relaxed, more productive and more enjoyable person, parent or spouse.
Many people will admit that they are Type A’s, but then they go on to say that they are proud of it. Don’t fall into this trap. Killing yourself twenty years early with hard work is nothing to be proud of. In fact, it’s just plain stupid.
The third step to overcoming Type A behavior is to learn to relax. And the very best way to relax is to just stop. Practice complete relaxation or meditation, even solitude, for twenty minutes, twice each day.
Going for a walk in the park at lunchtime is a wonderful antidote to stress. And it’s when you are convinced that you have no time at all to take a break that it is most necessary for you to discipline yourself to do it. It is when you feel you have the least amount of time to take care of yourself that you are closest to the breaking point.
There is a basic difference between the Type A personality and the “workaholic.” The two are distinctly different. True Type A’s cannot take time off without thinking or talking about work. True Type A’s brag that they have not taken a vacation for years. True Type A’s take a briefcase full of work home on the weekends, and even if they go away on family vacations, they take a load of work with them and are on the telephone back to the office all the time. One of the hallmarks of the true Type A is this inability to take time off.
Another hallmark of Type A’s is that they have an external locus of control. You will hear them use the words repeatedly, “I have to, I have to, I have to.” They don’t feel that they have any control over what they do. They are always doing something because someone else wants it or someone expects it.
Workaholics are quite different. They have an internal locus of control. Workaholics are working toward self-determined goals and objectives. They get a tremendous feeling of satisfaction and pleasure from their work. Workaholics can work hard for ten, twelve or fourteen hours a day, five, six or seven days a week, but unlike Type A’s, workaholics can take a day or a week off, or go away on vacation and not think or worry about work at all.
Workaholics tend to be positive personalities, fulfilling their potential by doing something that is important to them. Workaholics have no hostility, anger or resentment. They are full of enthusiasm and excitement about their work. Workaholics are usually doing what they love to do, what they really enjoy.
This is the key difference between the workaholic and the Type A personality: the amount of enjoyment each gets from his or her work. Now, honestly, which one are you? Type A or the workaholic? Your life may depend upon how accurately you answer this question.
The sixth major cause of stress, negativity and lost inner peace is “denial.” Denial lies at the core of most stress, unhappiness and psychosomatic illness.
Denial is the behavior of a person who refuses to face an unpleasant reality. It occurs with all its unpleasantness when you do not want to admit that there is some part of your life that is not going well. You slip into denial and pretend there’s nothing wrong. However, what the mind harbors, the body expresses. When you engage in denial for any period of time, it begins to manifest itself physically. Denial triggers insomnia, headaches, digestive problems, depression, angry outbursts and often frantic activity.
Denial takes place when some part of your life is not working and you don’t want to admit it. Denial is always accompanied by a fear of embarrassment or loss of face. Denial occurs when you refuse to admit to yourself or someone else that you are not the person you appear to be. You engage in denial when you don’t want to admit that you have changed your mind. You slip into denial when you no longer feel the way you did in the past. You use denial to cover up when you know you’ve made a mistake.
There are two personality profiles, healthy and unhealthy, that illustrate different responses to stress and denial. The first is the “Confronter” and the second is the “Evader.” At a leading university, students were tested for these distinctly different personality profiles and then divided into two groups, based on whether they were predominantly Evaders or predominantly Confronters.
The first group, the Evaders, were put into a room where each person was hooked up to an electrode that gave him or her a mild electric shock every sixty seconds. There was a clock on the wall located where the students could see it. Every time the second hand passed the number twelve, the students received a shock to their fingertips.
When the Evaders were hooked up to the electrode, they engaged in a variety of behaviors to distract themselves as the second hand moved toward the twelve. The researchers had put a video camera in the clock so they could observe the faces and eyes of the students from that viewpoint. As the second hand came up to the twelve, the most noteworthy behavior of the Evaders was that they refused to look at the clock when it signaled that the shock was coming. Instead, they looked away. They evaded facing the symbol of their stress and discomfort.
At the end of the experiment, the Evaders were tested. Their heart rates, their respiratory rates and their blood pressures, all good indicators of stress, were 30 to 40 percent above their rates as measured before the test.
Then the students identified as Confronters were brought into the room. They were also hooked up to the electrodes and told that they would receive a mild electric shock each time the second hand crossed the twelve.
The researchers watched the Confronters through the hidden camera. The most noticeable difference between the Confronters and the Evaders was that, although the Confronters engaged in the same behavior to distract themselves and to take their minds off the coming shock, when the second hand came up to the twelve, all of the Confronters were looking straight at the clock and were mentally prepared to take the shock on the ends of their fingers.
At the end of the experiment, the Confronters’ blood pressure and heart rates were almost exactly the same as they had been before the test.
Men and women who squarely confront their problems and difficulties are far healthier than those who evade them. They are far happier than those who hope that they will go away or take care of themselves. The more willing you are to honestly confront the difficulties and challenges facing you, the happier and healthier you will be.
By continually facing your problems honestly and objectively, you become a more confident and competent person. You become stronger and more self-reliant. You stop being afraid of unpleasant situations in your work or personal life. You deal with life as it is, not as you wish it were.
To be your own psychotherapist, to achieve inner peace and outer effectiveness, there is a simple question you can ask yourself whenever you feel unhappy or “out of sorts” for any reason. Assume first of all that your discontent is caused from within. Then turn into yourself and ask this key question, “What is it in my life that I am not facing?”
This is a tough question that forces you to be totally honest with yourself. It forces you to stop fooling yourself by pretending that all is well. “What is it in my life that I’m not facing?”
You could be in the wrong job. You could be in the wrong relationship. You may feel that someone else is better than you are at your chosen profession. With men, denial is usually associated with their work. With women, denial is most often associated with problems in their relationships. Each person is especially sensitive in areas in which his or her self-esteem is most involved. You often practice denial in parts of your life in which change is seen as both inevitable and threatening.
No matter what the reason might be for your unhappiness, you must be willing to ask yourself, “What is it in my life that I’m not facing?”
Then you ask, “What is the worst thing it could possibly be?”
When I first started using this technique, I identified the worst possible thing it could be in my life as something being wrong with my marriage. That would involve the greatest amount of embarrassment and emotional upset for me. So I would ask myself, “Am I happy in my marriage?”
I would force myself to answer the question honestly. As it happened, my answer was always, “Yes.”
Once that particular possibility was out of the way, I would then go on to ask myself if it could possibly have to do with my work. If not that, what other area of my life could it be? Eventually, I would find the cause of the stress and then take action to deal with it.
Usually, because confrontation is so painful, people try to fool themselves. They will say that the reason they are unhappy is that they got a parking ticket or that they had lost something. This is just a way of avoiding the real issue.
Whenever you begin to suffer physical or mental pain of any kind it usually means that what you are refusing to face is tied up with your ego. You need to search it out, whatever it is, like a detective, so that you can face it squarely. Go through the rooms of your mind, as if you were going through a darkened house with a flashlight, and shine the glare of honest confrontation on each of your problems.
There is always a price you can pay to be free from any unhappiness. There is always something that you can start doing or stop doing. And you always know what the price is. The only question you must answer is, “Are you willing to pay the price?”
The rule is: Whatever the price is, pay it! You are going to have to pay it sooner or later, and the sooner you pay it the sooner you will be free from whatever it is that is bothering you.
Never compromise your peace of mind for anything. Set peace of mind as your highest goal and organize every part of your life around it. If you ever trade your peace of mind for something else, you will end up with neither. If you trade your peace of mind for a job, you will end up with neither your peace of mind nor the job. If you trade your peace of mind for a relationship, you will end up with neither the relationship nor your peace of mind.
There seems to be something in nature that demands that you be true to your sense of inner peace. If you are ever false to your internal standards you will always suffer the consequences. You will always end up paying, and the price will always outweigh any temporary benefit or advantage you obtained.
The seventh source of stress and negativity is the phenomenon of anger. Anger is perhaps the most destructive of all negative emotions. Outbursts of anger can cause heart attacks, strokes, burst blood vessels, ulcers, migraine headaches, asthma and skin diseases of all kinds. Uncontrolled anger ruins marriages and relationships, destroys the personalities of growing children, loses jobs and careers and causes more unhappiness than any other emotion.
The remarkable thing about anger is that it is largely unnecessary. Nothing good ever comes from it. It is a purely destructive negative emotion that you can largely eliminate if you decide to.
Anger comes from within you, not from without. It comes from the person you are, not from what people say or do. No one makes you angry. Nothing causes you to feel anger. Anger is a response that you choose to a particular situation. You can decide to respond to difficulties in a calm, positive manner, or you can decide to respond with anger. You are always free to choose.
Anger is triggered by pain, or by a perception that someone is attacking you, or that you are being taken advantage of. Often anger is caused by frustrated expectations. It is a reaction you have when things don’t work out, or when people do not behave the way you expected. Anger can be set off by a fear of loss of some kind. Often you become angry if you feel you are being victimized, or being dealt with unfairly.
In every case, it is your perception that triggers the feeling of anger. It is the way you interpret the event to yourself. When you see yourself as a victim, your natural response will be to become angry. You may even strike back verbally or physically to protect yourself or to get even.
When you perceive that you are a victim of some kind of aggression, you send a signal to your autonomic nervous system that you are in danger. Immediately, your autonomic nervous system sends a message to your adrenal cortex, and adrenaline is secreted into your bloodstream. The adrenaline causes your heart and respiratory rates to increase rapidly. Your blood pressure goes up and your system goes on to “Red Alert,” ready to protect, defend and counterattack.
Your entire body prepares for either fight or flight. If you become angry repeatedly, your resistance to anger becomes weaker and weaker. You become angry faster and faster. Eventually you have no resistance left. Anger then becomes your automatic response to any perceived problem in your environment. Some people are angry all the time. Everything and everyone makes them angry because of their perception that they are victims and under attack from a hostile world.
High blood pressure is caused primarily by a pattern of angry responses. You become angry. Your blood pressure goes up. Your body prepares for fight or flight, but in a short while the situation passes and your blood pressure goes back down. Each time you become angry, your blood pressure goes up, and then down again. Eventually your blood pressure simply stays up.
The solution to high blood pressure is usually not a change of medication, but a change of attitude toward the inevitable ups and downs of day-to-day life.
Angry outbursts are a mark of weakness. They demonstrate immaturity and a lack of control. Someone who gets angry all the time is responding like a child, with no self-discipline or self-restraint.
Make two decisions: first, get your anger under control; and second, stop using anger as a response to things you don’t like. Resolve to be more patient, and to withhold judgment until you’ve studied the situation and asked a few questions to slow yourself down.
Once you become angry, your entire body prepares for retaliation. However, in a civilized society this retaliation is usually frustrated, for one of three reasons.
First, retaliation or counterattack may not be possible. If someone cuts you off in traffic, or leaves a dent in your car while you’re shopping, you may become angry but there is little you can do about it. The other person is long gone. The anger builds up inside you but has no outlet.
Second, retaliation is usually not acceptable. If someone is rude to you or if your boss chews you out, it is not appropriate for you to shout back or physically assault him or her. You may become angry but you end up holding the anger inside, where it accumulates.
Third, retaliation is often not advisable. If a 350-pound former football player bumps into you in a bar or a restaurant, you might become angry but you would be foolish to strike back at him. If you came back to your car and there was a gang of Hell’s Angels sitting on it you would be well advised to keep your anger inside. So you suppress it.
In each case, once you become angry, if you don’t do something to get it out of your system, it builds up and eventually poisons your body. Sustained anger actually changes the chemical composition of your blood. Eventually it will erupt in skin diseases, ulcers, migraine headaches or much worse. You will express the built-up anger at members of your family, or at people who can’t defend themselves, such as employees or the staffs of other companies.
The best way to deal with anger is refrain from becoming angry in the first place. Resolve in advance that you will not allow yourself to become upset. Take control of your tendency to blame or lash out by catching yourself and repeating, over and over, “I am responsible, I am responsible, I am responsible.”
You may not be responsible for being cut off in traffic but you are definitely responsible for the way you choose to respond. You will be far more effective if you respond calmly and constructively. And you will feel much better as well.
However, if you have already become angry, you can dispel anger through contact. Dr. Hans Selye called this “gross physical impact activity.” He found in his stress research that making contact of some kind relieves anger. The anger passes from your body into whatever you are making contact with.
Selye found that you can dispel anger through one of four outlets: your hands, your feet, your teeth or your voice. You can get rid of anger by hitting, kicking, biting or screaming.
Any sport that requires hitting something with your hands dispels anger. Racquetball, handball, volleyball, baseball and basketball are all excellent ways to transfer anger from the body into the ball. Hitting a bucket of golf balls on a driving range is a real tonic for the nerves. Men and women in high-stress occupations often find themselves attracted to these sports because they feel so much better after an hour of batting something around. All their anger is dispelled into the ball or object.
Much of acne in adolescents and most skin breakouts in adults is caused by repressed anger. It can be dispelled through gross physical impact activity.
One concerned father whose son was bothered by acne bought him a huge block of wood and a big box of tenpenny nails. He then gave him a hammer and had him spend ten to twenty minutes each day hammering these large nails into the block of wood. The boy’s acne cleared up in less than two weeks.
Another father bought his son a cord of wood and an axe and put him to work chopping wood every evening after school. With this gross physical impact activity, the boy’s acne cleared up completely in a few days.
Any kind of sport in which kicking is involved, such as football or soccer, is excellent for dispelling anger. The very act of kicking something serves as an outlet. You often see angry people stamp their feet in exasperation, as an unconscious attempt to get rid of pent-up feelings of anger.
However, many forms of exercise, such as running, swimming or cycling, don’t dispel anger because they involve little or no contact. They may help you reduce stress or lose weight, but they don’t reduce anger.
You can dispel anger by eating something that requires a lot of chewing. Often when you’re hungry for a steak, it is because you’re feeling frustrated or angry and chewing the steak vigorously dispels the anger from your body into the meat. After a hearty, heavy dinner, you feel more relaxed because much of your anger is gone.
Screaming is another way in which people, both adults and children, get rid of their anger. It’s a common form of release. Children develop anger as a result of feeling small and helpless. They scream to vent their frustrations. So do many adults.
There is a form of psychotherapy called “primal.” In treatment, patients are encouraged to scream in the presence of trained psychotherapists. They are taught to release suppressed anger built up from childhood. It’s often very effective in helping people get a grip on their emotions. It certainly beats suppression of anger on the one hand or screaming at your loved ones on the other.
In a vicious fight between two very angry people, they will hit, kick, scream and bite. These reactions are all ways of expelling anger. Often, after a loud disagreement or physical battle, the two combatants will become lovers or good friends. All the anger is gone; only good feelings remain.
Your goal is to become a low-stress, high-performance personality. To achieve this, you must use the “cognitive control” method already discussed here. Performing at your best requires that you use your ability to think and to control your emotional responses. Practice the Law of Substitution. Deliberately think positive thoughts. Think optimistically. Think constructively. If you deliberately select a positive thought, you cannot simultaneously think a negative or stressful thought. You substitute the positive for the negative.
Repeat to yourself, “I like myself,” or “I am responsible.” Keep your mind fixed on your goal. Since a goal is inherently positive, when you force yourself to think continually about your goals, you keep your mind positive and optimistic most of the time.
If another person makes you angry, practice the Law of Forgiveness. Let go of any feelings of anger or resentment. Remember, forgiveness is a perfectly selfish act. Your job, your responsibility, is to keep yourself calm and positive rather than allowing things to make you angry and upset. If this requires letting go of negative feelings you have toward anyone else, do it! It’s your key to happiness, peace of mind and long life.
You take complete charge of your inner life by deciding that you are going to set peace of mind as your highest goal. Organize your life around this goal. Become a psychological detective and carefully investigate any thoughts, opinions, attitudes or responses that cause you stress of any kind. When you deliberately set peace of mind as your organizing principle, you become a more positive person. You become more relaxed and likable. You enjoy better health and you accomplish much more than you ever could otherwise.
Examine your life and identify one area in which you experience stress or anxiety. Write out a clear definition of the stressful situation. Then write out a list of all the things that you can do immediately to alleviate this stressful situation. Think in terms of facing it squarely and taking some positive action to address it. Be active rather than passive.
What is there in your life that you’re not facing? What is the worst that it could possibly be? Go systematically through each area of your life and clear it up. Make each part of your day a source of pleasure and satisfaction rather than a cause of stress and anxiety. Set inner peace as your highest goal and you’ll probably never make another mistake.