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All Stressed Up and
No Place To GO!
Adapt, Alter and Avoid
by
Mimi Donaldson
There you are—stuck in traffic—again. All the lanes are jammed, and you
can’t see anything! “I hate being behind a truck,”
your thought begins. You start to worry about being late. Your face feels
hot; your right temple starts to throb. Just then
you hear a knocking sound coming from the engine. Is it the same knock
that cost you $346 two weeks ago? On top of it all, it starts to
drizzle—and traffic stops completely. “These people don’t know how to
drive in the rain!” you think, glaring at
strangers in the next car. A scene of you arriving late starts playing in
your head. You feel your neck and shoulders
tighten; the throb in your right temple intensifies and spreads across
your forehead. “My day is ruined,” your internal voice
declares.
And it may be. Stress is an internal response to an external event. The
traffic jam is your external event, and all your
responses are the ones you label “stress”. Since the externals seldom
change, how do we change our internal response? Pretend to love traffic
jams? Not bloody likely.
At WAR With Yourself
Stress is caused by resisting what’s going on. When we resist a traffic
jam or a rude person or an uncomfortable situation,
we respond with three emotions: worry, anger and resentment.
Notice the first three letters of those words describe the stress response
perfectly: WAR, the war within you. If you look at
your stress event, you will find that the worry, anger and resentment are
not caused by a traffic jam. The traffic jam is
merely the trigger that sets off those three emotions inside you. Let’s
look at what the true causes may be.
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You worry about being late—where are you going? To a beloved,
joy-filled place? Or to a place you’d rather not go, where
you feel anxiety and pressure to perform? What’s this worry really about?
Fear of reprisal, punishment? Perceived lack of
choice on your part?
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You feel anger at the mechanic who fixed your car, suspecting he didn’t
really fix it. Is this suspicion familiar? Do you
often mistrust people—and yourself? Or is your anger related to the notion
that someone else should have chosen the mechanic or at least helped? Do
you feel the duties you have in life are fairly distributed, or do you
feel you do more than your
share? This feeling can cause an angry response to many external stress
“triggers”.
- You feel resentment at “these people” who don’t know how to drive as
well as you do. Are you often impatient with people
who don’t do things exactly as you do? Do you resent people in the
supermarket who are standing in a faster moving line?
The Pause That De-stresses
How can we learn to stop fuming and seething in line, and become the
person pleasantly chatting with another person?
Let’s look at your first reaction: resistance. There is another reaction:
The opposite of resist. Accept. I don’t mean, “Oh
goody, traffic jam, oh boy!” I mean, “Ah, a traffic jam. That’s one of the
things that drive me crazy, and here it is.” Use
humor to accept. Once you accept a situation, you can act upon it. When
you’re busy resisting it, you’re paralyzed.
When you accept, you can stop, look and listen. STOP means “push the pause
button”. People have an internal “pause button” like the one on the
remote control. You can push it and pause while you decide what course of
action to take. Use your pause button to gain control over an
automatic stress response. LOOK means to recognize and see this is one of
your stress triggers, and you have a choice about whether or not to
get upset. LOOK also means look at what you really want and ask, “Are any
of my stress reactions going to help me get what I want?” LISTEN means
listen to your inner self which tells you what to do.
There are three
alternative actions: adapt, alter or avoid. For the “traffic jam” example,
you can eliminate the third one
right away—“avoid”. Unless you have a James-Bond-type-car that will sprout
wings and fly you over a traffic jam, you can
hardly avoid traffic jams all the time.
“Adapt” means adapting yourself to the situation. Listen to entertaining
audiotapes in traffic. One of the most useful
adaptations is the cell phone—albeit the most expensive.
“Alter” means changing the situation. Finding alternative routes to main
roads, starting your journey sooner. Your inner
voice will tell you to adapt, alter or avoid. And you will no longer be
stressed.
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