Mindfulness is an ancient method of gaining self-awareness.

• It is practiced extensively in the East and has strong connections to the ancient philosophical bodies of Buddhism and even Hinduism.
• Mindfulness is one of the key practices taught by many spiritual disciplines because it helps quiet the mind and also helps improve a person’s understanding of his own thoughts and emotions.

NB: In the context of stress management, mindfulness can be extremely useful in changing a person’s general mindset and thought patterns because it encourages conscious thinking at all times.

NB: Too often, we live our lives on “autopilot” to save time and energy on actual conscious thinking.

>>> However, there are many instances where our “autopilot” tendencies produce the opposite of efficiency and convenience: they generate chronic stress.

How does “autopilot” thinking cause stress?

Here’s a good example: it is exceedingly common for people to become annoyed or irritated when they receive calls from telemarketers and similar sales agents.

The common autopilot response to this situation would be to immediately dismiss the telemarketer and feel annoyed that your time was somehow impinged upon by someone you don’t even know.

While the response to the situation may seem appropriate, it doesn’t mean that it’s helpful to anyone. On the contrary, such behavior often causes more problems because it can be extremely stressful to think that someone “stole” some of your time.

We are going to reverse this negative trend so that you can become calmer and more self-aware when you deal with potentially stressful situations.

The Path to Mindfulness

Below are some essential guidelines for developing mindfulness in your life. The journey to mindfulness is never easy, but you will begin reaping the rewards of your efforts very soon!

1. Move Inward – We are often overwhelmed with all the demanding responsibilities and obligations of modern life. Our minds end up focusing on what’s happening on the outside world and we forget to tend to what’s taking place inside.

• What’s happening to your inner life?
• Constant attention to what’s happening on the outside world can cause our inner lives to starve due to lack of nourishment. Our thoughts and emotions become imbalanced and as a result, we feel exhausted, frustrated and even angry at the world.
• To remedy this situation, you must relearn how to take refuge in your inner world. You must become more aware of what’s happening on the inside as you continue to manage your affairs in the outside world.

By doing so, you will become more aware of your thoughts and feelings and you will be able to transform yourself into a calm and impartial evaluator of the outside world.

2. Developing Hyper-Focus – Hyper-focus is a powerful tool that can help lessen the mental load of individuals who are constantly bombarded by racing thoughts and distractions.

Writers, painters and all manner of artists have a natural knack for developing hyper-focus.

Hyper-focus occurs when your mind becomes completely absorbed with what you are presently working on. No distractions, no racing thoughts – just pure, blissful focus that will allow you to complete your tasks with ease and efficiency.

In Eastern spiritual practices such as Buddhism, hyper-focus is used to enhance the positive effects of meditation. We can appropriate the same technique to help you rein in those distractions so you become more efficient and productive.

3. Practice Constant Self-Awareness –

• Like any other new skill, you must practice mindfulness whenever you can in order to master it.
• What I do is I remind myself to be more aware and mindful of what’s happening inside when I’m doing something.

When you practice mindfulness more frequently, you begin to discover your actual thought patterns and the emotions they rouse.

Mindfulness allows people to rediscover themselves completely so they can be more in control in times of stress.

4. Focus on the Moment – This is one of the toughest skills to master: focusing all your thoughts and energy on what’s presently happening.

• The Easter spiritual masters call this “being in the moment”. In the West, this state of heightened focus is called self-hypnosis.
• People hypnotize themselves all the time without knowing it. For example, when you read a good novel, hours pass and you barely feel it. Writers can write for a whole day without feeling hungry or tired.
• Hyper-focus is the stepping stone to self-hypnosis or being “in the moment”. This skill is challenging because we live in an era where multi-tasking is considered a valuable skill. However, not everyone thrives with multi-tasking.

Scientists have even stated that our minds can only focus on one thing at a time and that when we multi-task, our brains light up like Christmas lights.

• The various brain regions don’t “light up” or work all at the same time.

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.

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.