Do You Feel That Stress Is Stopping Your Self Improvement?

Everyone wants something more out of your life. Some want to alter their lives totally – some of us have misgivings about ourselves that we wish we could change. But, unfortunately, for too many people, life gets in the way! The stress of everyday life – yes, tens of millions of ordinary mere mortals are suffering from stress and national health services all over the developed world are leaking money trying to cope with the related health issues – stops us in our tracks.

But, if you think that you’re suffering from stress, you’re making a big mistake! Stress isn’t holding you back – you’re actually destroying your own life yourself. It is you who is the problem – but, happy days, that means that you have the solution. How are you the problem? Well, in actual fact, stress does not exist. OK, it seems real enough, the side effects are real enough, the related illness, messed-up lives and anxiety are real enough. But these are all just symptoms of an imaginary disease. Because, stress is a figment of the imagination, a creation of the average adult mind that pays no attention to the real world and, instead, is trying to make sense of what’s happening – using completely irrelevant data.

Let me explain. Something happens that gets up your nose or stresses you out. Now, it’s not what’s just happened that’s the problem. It’s what you make of it, how your subconscious make you think that you feel and, as a consequence, how you react. You decide all these things using the conditioning that you learned during your formative years. This is the data that your subconscious mind calls upon to evaluate everything that’s going on and everyone that you encounter – and that includes those difficult people that you think are stressing you out.

Sadly, your subconscious will always – I repeat, always – consult this now irrelevant data automatically. This self-defeating process is your default state of mind. And, as I’ve already, it always will be until you take positive action to do something different. And that something different involves you re-training your mind to give its undivided attention to what is actually happening right now – not what your subconscious has concluded is happening! You’ve got to realize that your subconscious mind’s conclusions about what’s happening now can never – yes, you heard me, never ever – be right. It’s not using the right data!

How are you going to break this bad habit? I’ve said that you must re-train yourself. I use the word re-train because, when we were little kiddies, we didn’t pay attention to what we thought was going on, we paid attention to reality. And you’ve got to get back to that way of looking at the world. To cut out the process through which that old out-of-date data is taken as the basis for making your mind up, you must train your mind to focus on what your five senses are telling you – and not allow your conditioning leap to different conclusions.

You can achieve these through meditation – because meditation disciplines an otherwise undisciplined mind. When you meditate you train yourself to pay attention to the reality of the now, what it sounds like, what your breathing feels like, what you can feel in your arms and legs. You will disrupt the process you’ve been using the second guess what’s actually happening. And, it you don’t do that, your life will always be just as it is.