The New Science of What Makes Us Click: 8 - Why You Get STRESSED And What YOU Can Do About It

Have you ever considered why it is exactly that you get stressed?    

What causes your chest to tighten, become short with those around you and for you to feel like you’re fast spinning out of control?   

Of course you have, just like everyone else on this planet.    

Stress is very real and a large sum of us experience it’s consequences on a daily basis without relief in sight. We struggle to get to sleep, focus on our tasks at hand and begin to drop balls in many key areas of our lives.

But just why do we get stressed and what can we do about it?

Let’s find out...


We Overestimate Our Emotional Response to Future Outcomes

In his book, ‘Stumbling on Happiness’, Dan Gilbert discusses his findings and those of other researchers around how humans predict or estimate their own future emotional reaction to events. Gilbert found that we all have a tendency to overestimate our emotional response to perceived future successes such as:

• scoring a new job;

• getting promoted;

• meeting the love of your life;

• getting married / having a baby;

• getting a philanthropic project changing lives successfully over the line;

• or attending the biggest social event on this year’s calendar.    

We place our happiness in imagined future outcomes, mistakenly predicting that if the event does live up to expectations we shall be ecstatically happy (rarely true, at least for very long!); and if it doesn’t, we will be devastated by it for a long time (not true either).

Luckily for us, we have a built-in regulator: so in fact, when it comes to the event – whether positive or negative – we experience the normal level of ‘happiness’ or ‘sadness’ in our response that we’re akin to experiencing. This ’emotional scale’ remains consistent and is dependent on our general response held previously to other events that have stimulated similar emotions.


We Compress Time & Increase Pressure    

The reason why so many of us get stressed is because:

a.     We over-exaggerate when predicting our emotional responses;

b.     We cannot see past the outcome we want to achieve to what will follow...    



For example:  

Say you have to make a speech at work this Friday. You may find yourself overindulging in negative emotions of self-doubt: not very beneficial to the desired outcome! In this instance, the mistake many of us make is failing to look past Friday and into Saturday, when the scary event is all over and life continues to go on as normal.    

It’s as if life stops on Friday and that’s it. Everything good ceases to exist, and (without consciously realizing it) this damaging mental process compresses perceived time and dramatically increases stress levels caused by the exaggerated predictive emotional response to the task at hand.


Finding Sweet, Sweet Relief    

To release this tension we must imagine not only the process and the steps to be taken leading up to the key event that is stressing us out, but also the week, months and even years beyond it, including positive social interactions with others in which we are smiling and laughing and getting on with life as normal. This takes the pressure off and relieves tension so that you can focus your energy more effectively in the present moment.

 
Trick The Subconscious    

This technique literally tricks the subconscious mind into believing that you have already experienced what you have previously dubbed as a ‘stressful event / process,’ hence if your mind believes that you have been there before – then there is nothing to get stressed about. The event is now familiar territory and you can relax and enjoy the process.

So, next time you find yourself getting stressed out about a particular deadline, simply ask yourself if you are ‘compressing perceived time’ then go about decompressing it by visualising the entire process right through to the other side when life is back to normal again.

 
Is it really that easy?

Yes and no. First of all it takes heightened levels of awareness to realise that we are ‘compressing’ time in the first instance and secondly, recognising we must undertake mental rehearsal to overcome feelings of loss of control.

The payoff however is in becoming the ‘master of your own mind’ and that my friend, well that is priceless.  

Would you like to learn a powerful technique to reduce stress & FINALLY discover the art of 'self-mastery' ? 

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Posted by Ben Angel on 5th June, 2011 | Comments | Trackbacks
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