What Are You Hungry For? (22 page)

If you want to deal with stress consciously, break it down into the following three components and minimize them in your feedback loop.

Repetition:
Doing the same thing over and over dulls the mind; in and of itself, this is stressful, because shutdown is taking place. Exposed to any repetitive stress (e.g., doing cold calls as a salesman, dealing with the same incompetent employee, putting up with a boss’s boorish behavior), the brain seeks a way to cope, falling back on a familiar pattern. Depending on your temperament, you will find yourself reacting with anger, frustration, suppressed resentment, boredom, or putting up a mental block—the tactic of stonewalling. These coping mechanisms cease to work over time, and then it takes smaller stresses to create a negative reaction.

Once you recognize a repetitive stress, you face other choices. If you find the repetition intolerable (for example, if there’s the same loud noise over and over), walk away. If you are only a bit dulled by repetition, add a little spice and variety to your routine (e.g., instead of listening to the same boring people at work, talk to someone new). Most people are somewhere in between. They can’t walk away or change the situation without making waves. In that case, you have to work on yourself. It helps to identify all the nagging, repetitive things that irritate you and change your routine to eliminate or at least ease them. As you take note of what these repetitive stresses are, for each one be aware of how you are presently coping. Ask yourself if there’s a better way, and then adopt it.

Unpredictability:
This kind of stress is perhaps worse than repetitive stress, because when you can’t predict the next bad thing, you remain vigilant and apprehensive even when it’s not happening. Children from homes where there is domestic abuse grow up to be hypervigilant. They cannot accept a normal state of calm when things are going well because they are conditioned to see this as merely the calm before the storm. There is always another shoe to drop.

If you find yourself looking over your shoulder in anticipation of
something bad, or if you dwell on worst-case scenarios, your enemy is unpredictability. If the stress is coming from an emotionally unpredictable person, stay away. Your chances of changing their mood swings, outbursts of rage, or wayward job performance are slim to none. If the unpredictability comes from external forces, do what you can to make them more predictable or organize a coping strategy (parents of infants are doing this when they take turns each night getting out of bed to handle the crying baby). Opening yourself to feelings of anxiety and apprehension is the worst thing you can do. Arm yourself with scenarios that reasonably fit the next turn of events, without letting your imagination run away with you; then you will be reducing their unpredictability. That’s how firefighters and police officers are trained to deal with many kinds of situations, so that they don’t have to improvise at the scene.

Lack of control:
I’d count this as the worst factor in stress. Having control over your life is important; it’s probably the main reason that people start their own business or, more and more often, choose to live alone. Controlling personality types go further, trying to manage every detail of their lives, not to mention the people around them. Yet for anyone, lack of control creates frustration and a sense of helplessness. It does no good to simply become passive, since bottled-up frustration presents its own set of problems.

The best remedy is to assert control where it counts. You can’t tell your boss where to go, and you can’t turn your back on your workload, either. Instead, assert yourself where control is possible, for instance:

Insist on respect from others.

Ask for a dignified work environment.

Give other people their own space and ask for the same in return.

Work on things that you do best.

Take on a workload that isn’t overburdening you.

Ask for monetary rewards commensurate with what you accomplish.

Insist on a minimum of busywork.

Don’t be held to perfectionist standards.

Receive criticism, if you must, in private.

Insist on never being attacked personally.

Make alliances that can be trusted, without the risk of betrayal.

Ask to be valued for your knowledge and experience.

The wording of this list focuses on the workplace, although the same values apply at home and with your friends. As you look over each item, consider whether you have let things slide to the point of being stressful. If so, take corrective action. You deserve to write your own story, and being in control is an important element of any story.

We should talk a little more about stress at work. Modern work, like modern life in general, is set up to undermine the individual’s sense of being in control. With huge forces amassed against you, from the demand for corporate profits to the undercutting of job and pension security, the need for you to assert control becomes greater. This isn’t control for its own sake, or to show who is top dog. This is control as a means of reducing everyday pressures. When you can accomplish that, you open the field for a much more conscious approach to your life. On the other hand, if you deal with pressure unconsciously, your awareness will become constricted, and then the possibilities for your future narrow down at the same time.

So far we’ve covered the stress that affects you, but there are also times when you might be adding to the stress of others. It’s good to focus some attention on relieving the stress you may be causing. A conscious person takes responsibility for both. Just remember that stress is a feedback loop, and the more you can do to improve your input, the more benefit you will receive in return.

You are creating unnecessary stress in the lives of others if you indulge in the following behaviors:

You are demanding, critical, and perfectionist—the perfect recipe for stress.

You give erratic orders and are prone to unpredictable changes.

You show disrespect for other workers and/or their work.

You create an undignified work environment (e.g., a place where swearing, gossip, and sexual remarks are commonplace).

You don’t give other people their own space.

You pass your own workload to others just because you can.

You burden others with personal issues you should deal with yourself.

You criticize a subordinate in public.

You make personal attacks.

You can’t be trusted.

You indulge in casual betrayals.

You devalue another worker’s experience and knowledge.

These are more than bad behaviors. They trigger the stress response in other people, which is easily recognized, because they would trigger the same in you if you were on the receiving end. It’s a myth that a hard-boiled attitude, confrontational tactics, and constant pressure are good for productivity. The best workplaces give people space, encourage creativity, allow workers to define their own work hours, assign tasks according to a worker’s strengths, and create an atmosphere of general respect.

The signs of stress may be subtle, but when you pay attention, they are unmistakable. Let’s say that you could possibly be stressing someone else out, once again focusing on work, knowing that the same signs may exist at home. People don’t look happy being under you. They avoid direct eye contact. They miss work or shirk
during work hours. They seem nervous in your presence. The atmosphere grows quiet and tense when you enter a room or give orders. There is silent resistance to giving you what you ask for—you have to ask a second time, and even then there are delays. People under you make excuses, or else they have lost their motivation to perform. (Substitute
your children
or
your spouse
in place of
people under you
, and you can see how much of this applies to home life as well.) If you don’t identify with being in charge, maybe there’s someone in your life who makes you act in these ways.

All of these symptoms are obvious. It doesn’t matter if you are the CEO of a multinational corporation or a father sitting at the head of the dinner table. Stress is a threat in any situation, which is why we need to devote the next chapter to the opposite of stress, the desirable goal of emotional well-being.

Power Points

•  When you are more aware, you can make better choices. These choices either add to your sense of emotional well-being or detract from it.

•  Like your body, your mind sends signals about its overall state. The signals for mental awareness are joy/suffering, love/fear, compassion/selfishness, peace (equanimity)/lack of peace.

•  A basic key to happiness is to make each day happy.

•  People who report that they are happy have a common trait: they actively connect with friends and loved ones for an hour or two a day.

•  Yet there is no fixed program for ensuring happiness, because it cannot be quantified. Experiences of pleasure and pain, which can be quantified, aren’t the same as well-being.

•  In a state of restful alertness, the mind is balanced and open to the constant change that life brings.

When you bring awareness to any aspect of your life, you will reap benefits, because awareness tells you how you are doing. It’s an infallible kind of radar, if you turn it on. Awareness allows you to sort out what you’re doing, how you feel, what you fear, hope, and wish for—indeed everything in your life. It’s tragic that so many Americans either turn their awareness off or focus it on unhappy states, such as anxiety and depression, which affect millions of people. Obesity is an unhappy state of mind just as much as an unhappy state of the body.

Awareness is turned off when you live under the following circumstances:

You act unconsciously, following habits and rote behavior.

You let others take charge of your life.

You feel victimized and emotionally trapped.

You isolate yourself and have no close connections with others.

You act passive and resigned in the face of things that make you unhappy.

You don’t really know what you want.

The last point is so critical that this entire book is based on coming to a better understanding of it. You must know what you want. Otherwise, you wind up drifting. Or your life gets channeled in undesirable directions. As we’ve already established, too many people put food into their mouths when they are hungry for attention, appreciation, love, and affection. What they really want is being redirected.

The human mind is incredibly complex, but it delivers some basic states that loom over all the thoughts and feelings you have in a day, the way a marble mosaic delivers a picture rather than a jumble of tiny colored stones. The signals sent by the mind operate like the body’s signals of comfort and discomfort. When you are mentally aware, the primary signals are the following:

Joy/Suffering

Love/Fear

Compassion/Selfishness

Peace (equanimity)/Lack of peace

On the left are the messages that lead to emotional well-being. On the right are messages that detract from well-being. You have a choice which side of the equation you want to live on. Finding well-being doesn’t happen by itself.