I’ve been looking in to stress today and came across this written on an NHS website, which is typical of the writing on stress:
“There is not much you can do to prevent stress but there are many things you can do to manage stressful situations more effectively and reduce the impact of stress on your health.”
Or is there?
The questions the NHS site suggests you ask yourself are (and this isn’t to make the stress go away as the NHS says, it’s a fact of life):
- What were you doing?
- Who were you with?
- How did you feel emotionally?
- What were your thoughts?
- What did you start doing?
- How did you feel physically?
And if you answered these you’ll notice the answers will change by the day, by the hour, depending on your mood and how you feel. As your mood fluctuates, so do your answers. Funny that, isn’t it?
However, to save you a whole heap of analysis I’ve given the answer(s) to all the questions that fit 7.3Bn people (Everyone and 100% of the time)
- What were you doing? – I was acting on my thinking
- Who were you with? – I was feeling my thinking of the person I was with
- How did you feel emotionally? – I was feeling my thinking
- What were your thoughts? – I was thinking
- What did you start doing? – I was acting on my thinking
- How did you feel physically? – I was feeling my thinking
There you go. One single answer for all of these questions – thinking. Everything else is a consequence or effect. And nothing to do with the content of your thinking, just the fact that you were experiencing your thinking.
But that’s good. This just demonstrates that you and the operating system of the human mind is working perfectly. And just as stressful thinking arrived, so can (and does) other thinking. And there’s no-think to control either, the system naturally clears its self without any ‘help’ from you.
The process – operating system of the human mind – that creates your stressful thinking is identical to the process – operating system of the human mind – that creates happy thinking. Or, put another way the same process that creates mental health, is identical to the process that creates mental illness.
And there’s what you can do to prevent stress: not getting caught up when you experience your own self-created stressful thinking. Once you realise you are the creator or conjuror of your own thinking – not the other thing nor person – of your own stress, you give it less attention and the magic wears off, and it quickly passes by….to be replaced by another thought, and another, and another…..