Hi again!
You’ve tried to manage your stress. I did too.
Maybe you even succeeded at times, but it never permanently ended it, did it? You ended up back there, as I did.
One thing I learned from the teachers and coaches I worked with when I was changing my life is that whenever we have a problem, we have three choices.
Live with it. Manage it. Go upstream of it.
A lot of literature is about managing stress. There’s nothing inherently bad with that, but merely managing it is to manage the symptoms. I’m a bigger fan of going upstream, which is about removing the cause.
Here’s the thing, though. The cause isn’t your circumstances, or your boss, or the deadlines, or the people you find annoying.
They may be the triggers, but what’s really going on is that our reaction to these things sets of a cyclotron of thought that speeds up and spins round inside us — and that’s what winds us up.
If you sit with that a while, you might see it.
Stopping that cyclotron of thought doesn’t have to mean new circumstances or different people. It’s possible to stop it by simply developing a new awareness of what’s really happening, and a new relationship with thought itself.
Wishing you happy success,
Steve.
