Emotional Health|Personal Development|Mindfulness Moment|High Performance

Unlock The Hidden Truth Sabotaging Your Happiness

Mindfulness Is Critical For Success

Stress.

It seems all of us are under it, overwhelmed with it, or just plain in it. It’s one of the most common words we use nowadays.

I’m old enough to remember when the word stress started making its way into our everyday vocabulary. I believe part of this is due to our society as a whole getting more comfortable with acknowledging weakness and the need for help. Definitely a necessary step towards being more honest with ourselves and others.

It was a good shift to make in our collective consciousness, however, I think we’re ready to take it to the next level.

We need to gain a deeper understanding of what causes our stress and learn how to decompress and resolve it much more thoroughly.

Seeing Stress As A Recipe

1. Stress is so very often a mixture of thoughts, beliefs, and emotions in relation to a situation or event. AND…
2. The mixture of multiple events, interactions, and situations over a given period of time. AND…
3. The (semi-conscious/subconscious) connection of these multiple events, interactions, and situations with their corresponding thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and situations to our back story.

Whew! Yes indeed, we are complex beings. We have all had a myriad of experiences leading up to this point. There’s a lot of data that we are sifting through at any given moment of the day.

New experiences keep occurring as we march through time and our brains are making the connections on the fly.

Our unresolved issues are on the table during any given minute and during any of our interactions with another human being- who is also dealing with their own stress recipe.

We don’t know what will trigger a stress response ahead of time. How we will react is anybody’s guess -including ours!

If we could learn to adjust our perspective more often, perhaps we would gain more wisdom on how to reverse engineer our stress recipe and find ourselves in a more peaceful and emotionally mature outlook.

Emotions: The Elements That Make Us Willing To Invest In The Process

Let’s consider one aspect of dealing with a stressor involving our physical self and analyze how the way we handle the rest of the mix of emotions and thoughts determines how we overcome it.

… or don’t.

Think about weight lifting or other physical training for something you really want.

Any pain or discomfort you experience isn’t so bad because of how you feel about the end result you have set out to accomplish.

You accept the fact that the pain is part of the equation necessary to obtain the reward.

The emotion you have in regards to achieving the goal outweighs the discomfort, so you figure out how to talk yourself through the negative thoughts and feelings in order to continue forward toward your goal.

You are invested in the process even though you may have to experience multiple adjustments to your routine, both mentally and physically, until you achieve success.

The same is true when deciphering your stress recipe. It can be done, but its got to be given priority. You have to be willing to invest in the adjustment process.

Mindfulness: The Crucial Step In Adjusting Your Stress Recipe

When we are forced to deal with something we don’t want any part of, adjusting our mindset is crucial. The ability to adjust our mindset can drastically reduce our stress load, even when the ailment or situation sticks around for a while.

The power to move forward with more peace, clarity, and kindness lies in mastering our mindset, emotions and perspective.

This works in every aspect of our lives- physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, social, job, home, with people, by ourselves, on a bus, at the pool, in a restaurant…

Kind of like green eggs and ham, these adjustments go absolutely anywhere! (Sorry, the cadence was just too much for me to resist).

Joking aside though, so many of us are going way too fast through daily experiences. We may give ourselves a break - to scroll through social media or binge-watch a show on Netflix, but we aren’t taking enough time to reflect on the actual situations that caused an emotional response.

Just because we get ourselves calmed down doesn’t mean we have resolved our stress load. Mindfulness is required to accomplish a resolution.

Without actually solving the issue(s) on a deeper level, we just “store” them so they get triggered later.

And triggers usually hinder our ability to be kind.

I’ve found that almost regardless of the details, stress occurs when we don’t take the time to really, thoroughly, process a situation.

As an Emotional Health and High Performance coach, I see the following list as being the most common origins of stress. Some of them will even work together as a team to really get you wound up and spinning.

The Roots of Stress

• Unprocessed emotions
• Unprocessed thoughts
• Not making a decision
• Using energy to avoid looking at the issue (distraction, denial, justifying, addiction)
• Control (feeling controlled, trying to control)
• Constraints (time, ability, resource)
• Unresolved situation (limbo or pattern repeat)
• A belief that is unrecognized, unacknowledged and/or unexamined
• Loss (of a dream, goal, relationship, self-image, nutrition, health, a job, awareness/dealing with illness, accident, death, divorce)

Notice that I didn’t add “people” to the list.

Of course, any interaction with another person has the potential to add stress to our lives, however, they are not the root of our stress.

How we interpret the interaction is our real ground zero.

It’s amazing once we address and then learn to coach ourselves through a collaborative conversation about how thriving during stressful events is totally possible.

Some of these sources (time, resource, ability) can look fixed to us, but by asking ourselves what we truly believe, regardless of what our logic says is the appropriate answer, we can shift our perspective even on these aspects that wear us down and stress us out.

Mindfulness Moment: Which roots listed above do you notice cause you the most stress? What are your “go-to” behaviors that help you calm down? I would love to hear about it. Please post in the comments below.

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Peggy Nazer is a Certified Coach in Emotional Release, Energy Psychology, Stress Resilience/Resolve, and High Performance. She has been a life coach and teacher for 17 years, specializing in emotional health, stress resilience, and building healthy relationships to help people accomplish their personal transformation goals. She uses a combination of techniques including mindfulness, emotional release, energy psychology, stress resilience mastery, and success habits in both private and group session settings. She created Success Dynamics Academy to help clients identify and effectively manage their mental and emotional perspectives that create conflict and stop progress pertaining to their personal and professional goals. Find out more at: peggynazer.com