In the first part of our series on mindfulness, we discovered that in order to develop mindfulness, you have to become more aware of your thoughts and emotions at all times, even if you’re working on something stressful.

You also have to remind yourself to look inward at all times so you can become a calmer and more relaxed spectator-participant of the world.

• Today’s post will center on some advanced techniques that you can also use to master mindfulness.
• It must be noted early on that there is no shortcut to deep mindfulness and you have to continue practicing if you want to be naturally mindful at all times.

How can you become more mindful despite the presence of stressors?

Mindfulness can be likened to a very sharp sword that can slice stressful situations in half.

However, you have to be willing to wield it before it can help you conquer stress. If you’re ready to vanquish stress through mindfulness, here are some additional steps that will help refine your mindfulness… and discover more of  ‘The Super Power of Mindfulness’

1. Suspend Your Judgments –

• We now live in a world where people are constantly required by society to choose, decide and judge things.
• We pass small and big judgments on anyone or anything that comes our way.

The problem with passing judgment all the time is that you end up spending too much mental energy on even the smallest inconveniences of life.

The result is that you will feel exhausted and burnt out even if you are just sitting in the office. Mindfulness requires us to adapt a mindset of acceptance, instead.

How does the mindset of acceptance work?

You must avoid viewing things as positive or negative; instead, you must simply accept what is happening at the present time and mold your action or response to suit your present needs.

As you practice suspending your judgment, you will soon find out that many of the stressors that have been “chasing” you around are actually insubstantial are not deserving of your time, effort or energy.

The fogginess caused by stress will also begin to lift and your mind will become as clear as the sky. A clear mind is something you will definitely need if you want to manage your stress more effectively.

2. Avoid Instant Reactions –

• The human brain was designed to create routines or patterns of thoughts and behaviors that are used automatically in different situations.
• These predetermined patterns, as you may already know, are not always useful or productive. I call these behaviors and thoughts “reactive elements” of the mind because they come to the surface without the need for conscious thinking.
• Instant reactions can foster a life full of stress because it’s easy to let the stress get the upper hand because it feels ‘right’ for the situation.

However, if you continue to let stress get the upper hand, you will become unhappy and less productive in the long term.

In order to combat these subconscious reactive elements, you have to practice conscious thinking.

How does conscious thinking occur?

1. The human mind is divided into two distinct parts: the conscious mind and the subconscious mind.
2. The subconscious mind actually gives instructions to the conscious mind.
3. The latter protects the subconscious mind from intrusions (e.g. potentially harmful ideas).

• Conscious thinking will require you to shift the power of thought to the conscious mind so you can exert more control over what takes place in your subconscious.
• Conscious thinking is also a great way to create actual solutions that you can use to remedy problems for good.
• The subconscious mind can help with creating solutions but only if it’s not on “autopilot”.

3. Be More Compassionate –

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines compassion as “having sympathy and pity for the misfortune of other people”.

Choosing to be more compassionate automatically hampers negative judgments and knee-jerk reactions, which then leads to a quieter and more peaceful mind.

• Being more compassionate toward other people and their situations in life is a great way to beat stress because your mind will be focused on sympathy rather than on negative thoughts and emotions.
• Immersing yourself in compassionate thought and action can also break down the hard shell of pessimism that many people develop as a way of dealing with stressors.

When you see reality as a series of bad situations and misfortunes, you definitely need a dose of compassionate behavior to reverse your pessimism.

A person who chooses to be compassionate at all times is more likely to find inner peace and happiness than someone who makes a conscious choice to be critical of other people’s words and actions.

If you have been reading this blog from its very first post, you may have already learned about the modern stress model or the sequence of events that lead to the physiological stress response.

For those of you who are not familiar with it, here’s the summary:

• Person experiences or thinks of something that is stressful. His negative thoughts and emotions combine at this phase.
• Person triggers psychological stress. He may begin experiencing signs of mental stress.
• Psychological stress, if left unregulated, triggers the physiological stress response. Person may experience physical symptoms of stress such as clammy hands and an elevated heart rate, even if he is at rest.

Why should you practice control over your own thoughts?

If we would look carefully at the modern stress model, we would come to the conclusion that the actual, physiological stress response only comes to the surface during moments of mental stress.

Mental stress on the other hand, doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. A person only experiences mental stress if his thought patterns and emotions are working toward this particular outcome.

With these facts in mind, it becomes very clear that in order to stop physiological stress in its tracks, you need to address the causative agent, which is mental stress.

Why do we think the way we do?

I often encounter individuals who beat themselves up over the fact that they have a tendency to think and feel in certain ways especially when they have to contend with common stressors.

Your habitual responses to stressors are actually determined by 3 different yet interlocking factors:

1. DNA – Your parents’ genes are partly responsible for your tendencies and general temperament.

In addition to the way you were raised, there’s also the fact that you inherited your parents’ chromosomes, which also means that you’ve inherited at least part of their personalities.

So if one or both of your parents are aggressive or hotheaded, you may have the same inclinations because of your DNA.

2. Childhood – Sigmund Freud, the old father of psychoanalysis, often analyzed people’s childhoods to get to the bottom of strange neuroses.

It turns out that Freud was spot on when he determined that early childhood experiences have a lot to do with how we fully develop and mature as adults.

Our individual responses to stressful situations are partly determined by how we were conditioned to respond when we were still young. So keep this in mind when you are raising your own children; your children are not only absorbing the world at large, they are also absorbing your behavior and thought patterns!

3. Life Itself – Our DNA and early childhood experiences comprise only a small portion of the totality called the self. Your experiences as you grow older are also strong determinants of your behavior toward stressful situations.

We can’t do anything about past experiences, may they be good or bad, but we can do something about our beliefs and values in the present time. We must not allow past negative experiences to dictate how we live in the present time.

***

Now that you are more familiar with how the mind works and why it operates in a particular manner with regards to stressful situation, it’s time that you learned how to control unstable and stressful thought patterns.

How can you control seemingly unstable thought patterns?

Thought patterns are powerful, but they are never more powerful than the person itself. A thought, no matter how destructive, does not have free will or a life of its own. All negative thoughts are vulnerable and extinguishable, remember that!

Easy Mind Control Exercise

•  Find a quiet place to perform the Easy Mind Control Exercise. Get a piece of paper and write down 5 of the most horrid thoughts you’ve been having for the past few months.
• Below the first 5 items, write down 5 beautiful thoughts, memories or ideas that are directly in contrast with the first 5 items you wrote down.
• Focus your mind’s power on each of the undesirable thoughts and as you do, give your mind a firm command to remove the thoughts.
• Visualize a blank space where each of the undesirable thoughts used to be. Begin placing pleasant thoughts on this blank space, to replace the bad ones that have just been driven out.
• Repeat the exercise until you are satisfied and try again tomorrow.

The first part of our current series on acing the art of stress management, we talked about three important guidelines:

First, you have to become familiar with the actual stressors that are causing you feel chronically stressed on a daily basis. This can be accomplished through regular journaling.

Second, you have to identify the negative beliefs and values that you may have. These beliefs and values may be stopping you from successfully managing your stress. This can be done through consistent self-analysis.

Third, you also have to accept the fact that not everything can be done in one day or one week. Stress management is actually a lifelong endeavor which will help create better beliefs, behaviors and thought patterns.

Today’s discussion will center on some additional guidelines which you can also use to improve your handling of stress management. You can find a few more essential guidelines below:

1.Try One or Try Them All – The fact of the matter is that there is no “perfect formula” for fight stress. I personally believe that stress dissipates more quickly through deep tissue massage because I really feel relaxed and happy after a good massage. But that’s just me; deep tissue massage may not be as effective for you.

This is why it’s so important for people to seek out different methods of stress management.

• Do not limit yourself to only 1 or 2 techniques.
• If something doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t mean that you do not have the capacity to manage your stress.
• It just means that you haven’t found the right combination of techniques to bring you to your desired level of relaxation and happiness.

2. Assemble Your Army, One by One – Managing stress is literally a battle against bad habits and a myriad of stressors. What do you need to succeed in any battle?

Your personal anti-stress army, of course!

• This personal army of yours will be composed of different relaxation techniques and behavioral modifications which you will learn as you progress with your stress management efforts.
• The techniques which you will be using must fit the genetics of your lifestyle and way of life. If a technique just doesn’t fit your lifestyle, it won’t work. Learn to adjust and discard techniques that do not conform to what you feel is the right way to remedy stress in your life.

3. Keep Practicing! – Like I’ve said before, stress management is essentially a collection of different skills that will enable you to effectively combat stress before it makes you permanently sick.

If you want full mastery of a specific skill, you must be willing to practice it until it becomes second nature.

This guideline may seem easy in comparison to my other reminders but in reality, it’s one of the most challenging to carry out.

Why? Because old habits die hard. For example, it can be very difficult for a person to listen more during an argument because the old habit was to outdo the other person in a screaming match.

Apart from learning new skills, effective stress management will also require you to change your attitudes and behaviors toward your stressors. In the previous blog post, I recommended that you start writing on a stress management journal.

Your stress management journal is more than just a laundry list of things to do.

• It’s actually a special picture of how you think and behave in response to different situations.
• You need a source of special insight if you want to discover your true self and reinvent it so you won’t be so stressed anymore.

4. Don’t Forget “Me” Time – In order to carry out your plans to conquer stress, you have to create space in your daily schedule for stress management. Now, I know that many stressed individuals feel that there isn’t enough time in a whole day for everything that needs to be done.

• However, I would like to point out that the statement “I wish there were 2 more hours in my day” is more of a state of mind than reality.
• The reality is that 12-18 hours of waking time is sufficient for most groups of tasks. There’s also enough time for relaxation within this time-frame.

If you cannot fit everything that you need to do within this amount of time that simply means that you have poor time management skills.

Evaluate how much time you spend on your different activities and try to create more balance within your day.

How does stress harm both the body and the mind?

For many years now, medical doctors have been warning people of the dangers of poor stress management.

Many people still believe that stress doesn’t affect the body and it’s “just a state of mind”. What the majority of stress individuals do not know is that the body’s natural stress response is mainly a physiological event.

This means that the effects of stress have never been limited to our minds. When a person is stressed, his whole body experiences it, too. So the idea that stress is essentially harmless because it’s somehow limited to our imagination is actually a dangerous belief.

Why? Because a person who experiences chronic stress for many, many years has a much higher risk of making health conditions such as high blood pressure worse. So if you want to be physically healthier, you have to understand how stress actually affects the body.

How does stress come about?

The modern stress model gives us a simple and clear explanation of how physiological stress is roused:

1^st Phase: Mental and Emotional Triggers are Engaged. A person perceives an event, situation, action or idea as negative and stressful.

2^nd Phase: Psychological Stress Engaged. If a person does not arrest his emotions and negative thinking, the present situation causes psychological stress.

3^rd Phase: Physiological Stress or “Fight or Flight” Response: Unmitigated psychological stress often leads to actual, physiological stress.

When the instinctual “fight or flight” response comes into play, a person feels an immediate surge of adrenaline, which temporarily increases a person’s speed, strength and stamina.

A person’s breathing rate and pulse rate also increase in preparation for sudden, intense physical activity (e.g. running away from a real, physical danger).

***

Stress normally abates when the perceived threat or danger finally passes. Thousands of years ago, the instinctual “fight or flight” response was extremely useful for our hunter-gatherer ancestors as they had to battle wild animals and each other in pre-modern society.

Scientists believe that the stress adaptation came about because our ancestors were almost always exposed to threatening or dangerous situations.

 What are the signs that a person is experiencing stress?

Below are some common physical symptoms that a person is experiencing stress:

1. Inexplicable exhaustion or fatigue
2. Acute headaches that have a tendency to disrupt work or chores at home
3. Shallow chest breathing
4. Increased heart rate even when the person is not performing strenuous or challenging physical activities
5. Minor muscular pain
6. Twitches
7. Facial tics
8. Hand and arm tremors
9. A general feeling of nervousness and anxiety
10. Insomnia
11. Oversleeping
12. Inexplicable perspiring of the hands and feet
13. Turning to different substances such as caffeine, alcohol, nicotine and even recreational drugs

The list of symptoms doesn’t stop there. Here is a breakdown of the mental symptoms associated with moderate to extreme stress:

1. Short temper
2. Feeling angry all the time
3. Inexplicable mood swings
4. Feeling of isolation and helplessness
5. Short term memory problems
6. General decrease in work productivity
7. Lowered sexual desire
8. Distracted thinking

Why do people experience psychological stress?

The psychological signs of stress often manifest when a person has been under stress for a long period of time. These signs come about because the mind is trying to escape the stressful situation however it can.

This is one of the main reasons why stressed individuals are often less productive in the office.

Their minds are so sick of the prolonged stress response that their own thought patterns are preventing them from focusing on the things they have to do.

The same thing happens to university students who are overwhelmed with the nature and volume of work they have to complete to pass different course subjects.

How severe are stress-related symptoms in the general population?

In the United States alone, it is estimated that 90% of all physician visits are associated with symptoms related to chronic stress. It has also been estimated that on a monthly basis, 400 million people take medication to ease these symptoms.

Of course, we know now that medicating a stress-related symptom is a futile effort because you’re not addressing the main cause of the symptom – you’re just padding the symptom itself.

Now, it should be noted that the symptoms we discussed earlier may also be genuine signs of other health conditions (and not just stress). Consulting with your physician is still your best option if you experience symptoms such as racing heart rate or persistent headaches.

Background:

Back in the sixties and seventies, people dreamt of a time when they could kick back and relax more because modern technology was finally there to help with tiresome tasks like cleaning the house. Politicians and community leaders and the media convinced us that life was getting better. And many of us we were convinced!  People looked forward to more and more wonderful inventions that made life easier and essentially, happier.

Yes, many of us we were on the ‘happy’ bandwagon.

Fast forward to the era of the eBay, i Phones,  Playstations, Apps and hand held computers of all sorts that connects us to the Internet in a heartbeat.

We are experiencing more advanced technology than all of the previous decades combined. Thanks to globalized trade and endless technological innovations, we can now enjoy the many benefits of the Internet- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Any ordinary laptop or PC that was assembled around the year 2012, would be at least 1,000,000 times more efficient than the computer that launched the Apollo rocket to the moon.

We are literally living the dream, Or are we?

So the question now is: why are we still stressed?  Or more importantly: why are we even more stressed than our predecessors? Are we managing?

And will we feel and think less stressed in the years to come?

Sociologists, psychologists and modern day economists have all tried to determine at which juncture our era has become completely and almost inextricably associated with stress!

The studies that tackle the “stress puzzle” are complex in their entirety. However, I have taken the liberty of summarizing some of the most important findings.

The Roots of Stress

1. Less Leisure Time – Many people often associate stress with having to deal with childcare and taking care of the household.

However, if we were to compare the amount of time that people spend taking care of their homes and families now with the amount of time spent doing the same things back in the 1910’s, we would arrive at pretty much the same average number of hours per week: 52 hours.

The reason for this is that we are now spending more time on additional activities such as shopping for the daily household goods- checking out the things we see on TV. Those must haves, at least according to the media. We are perhaps at the mercy of having to have ‘things’.

Kids want them, women want them, men want them – the neighbors have them! My friends and mates have “it”.  The stress of keeping up! Do people find these wanting activities pleasant and leisurely? Or…

So even if we have plenty of modern appliances to lessen the time needed to complete different tasks, the time that we could spend for leisure is now being consumed by additional, avoidable activities and chores.

2. Stressors Abound – In an ideal world, a person who continually feels stressed at work would be able to unwind and distress when he comes home.

There are some people who have managed to accomplish this feat. I am also certain that theses people are mostly extremely happy that they “cracked the code” and have less stressful experiences.

However, for 60% of adults, the scenario isn’t as bright and stress free. The present reality is that more than 50% of all adults in America and other countries experience the same level of stress both at home and at work.

So an ordinary working adult no longer experiences a reprieve from stress because both environments are deemed stressful. Stress is everywhere.

3. Harmful Societal Standards – It is no secret that modern society is still ruled by double standards, especially in the workplace. Competition in workplaces, bullying work environments, lack of equality, lack of appropriate leadership and culture and relationship building by managers, means many people are at risk of feeling, thinking, and behaving stressed!

Despite significant breakthroughs in the field of gender equality, many people still subscribe to the idea that a woman is less able than a man!  Why ARE men paid more than women for the same work? Why do men hold more senior positions than women? Why?

Are equal rights afforded to people of all races, religion and beliefs, disability, and sexual orientation!

These different standards are actually toxic in the workplace because it encourages aggressive competition rather than co-operation! People are not respected for their skill, abilities and talent!   Does this make the workplace a frustrating and stressful place for both males, females and all the different groups?

4. Chronic Overwork – More than 25% of all adult workers complain of not having enough time in a day to finish everything they have to do.

To compensate for the scarcity of time, many adults resort to overworking. Unpaid work hours are increasing around the world.  Does this leads to a “burn out”?  It is difficult to recover from burn out if people don`t have the skills and time to reduce stress levels. What to do?

5. Fragmentation – The present divorce rate in the United States, as an example, is a staggering 50%. This means that a significant percentage of the entire American population is comprised of single-parent families with only 1 main earner. Stressor?

This reality is forcing many single parents (mostly females) have to work twice as hard and longer hours just to keep up with the daily expenses of their families.

Obviously this situation is extremely stressful because….  leisure time is almost nonexistent!  All other free time from work, if any, is diverted to taking care of the children and the household.