Dropping the burden

Chronic, unremitting stress has been identified for nearly 20 years now as the underlying cause of much of our biological, psychological and spiritual distress. A critical "reinvention" ideal for people looking to create a happier, healthier experience of life would be to eliminate stress. Yes, to live stress-free. But few people imagine that possibility.

We carry our own particular burden of chronic stress as though we had no choice, like a sack of rocks we cannot drop, a drag on our progress towards happiness and well-being. The scientific term for that burden is "allostatic load," the level of continual harm from chronic stress on mind, body and spirit. We come into life equipped, psychobiospiritually, to bounce back from what is called acute stress without long-term consequences to our health and well-being. Acute stress is a brief interval of readiness to act -- what happens when we recognize danger or threat and marshall all our energy to respond to it. Acute stress passes after we take action, and then relax back into balance. Chronic stress is the weight of stressful thinking that sustains a constant state of alert and alarm with no relief. Chronic stress creates exhaustion of  mind, body, and spirit and depletes our resources so that when a new incident occurs, an acute stress situation, we have diminished our ability to respond to it appropriately.

My good friend and colleague, Dr. William F. Pettit, Jr., created a chart to illustrate this vividly.    (Click to enlarge.) Each of the lines in the chart represents a different level of understanding of how stress is created and sustained, a different setting of an individual's allostatic load. The higher the level of understanding, the quicker we bounce back from new stressors, incidents of alarm. The lower our starting point, the heavier our allostatic load, the more prolonged our recovery from stressful situations or ideas. For those who bear a heavy allostatic load, recovery is painfully slow, and often they are unable to return even to the low level of well-being they experienced before the new stress occurred.

Our understanding of how stress works within our own psyches determines whether life stressors are experienced as a quick climb over bumps on a smooth path, or a slow slog through deepening quicksand. It doesn't matter what the content of the stressor is, since every person's thinking about what is serious in life is different. One person's catastophe is another person's ho-hum. It only matters what we do with our thinking about that content.

So, what can lift our allostatic load, raise our spirits, help us live stress-free? The antidote is our own resiliency, set free from habits of dysfunctional thinking. We are naturally buoyant. We are innately stress-free. We can tie ourselves to our sack of rocks and sink, but as soon as we untether the rocks, we rise and float. Our allostatic load, that bag of rocks, is the stuff we've innocently made up and ruminated about -- chosen to carry -- without recognizing what we were doing.

At this point, someone will certainly think, "What about people in horrible, horrible circumstances, like war and poverty and terminal illness? Are they making it up? How could they not be stressed all the time?" Of course no one is making up circumstances; life happens beyond our control. Still, we can all see for ourselves that people's responses to circumstances are enormously variable. People in horrible circumstances are not all stressed, and those who are stressed are not all stressed all the time. The variability has to do with each person's own capacity to reconnect to resiliency, to allow their minds to quiet and their spirits to lift and their wisdom to guide them.

In the words of the late philosopher Sydney Banks, "Let your negative thoughts go. They are nothing more than passing thoughts. You are then on your way to finding the peace of mind you seek, having healthier feelings for yourself and for others."

Connecting the Dots

We can't help ourselves. We rush into high gear to figure out or learn the answers to life's questions, frustrating ourselves thinking, thinking, thinking, and taking on stress when we don't know what to do. It's hard for us to settle down into quiet reflection and accept that we DO know what to do, if we grasp the logic of insight and depend on discovery.

Do you know the puzzle called the "Nine Dot Box" in which you have to connect all the dots using only four lines without lifting your pen from the paper? To connect them all in four lines without leaving the paper, your line has to travel outside the perceived "box" created by the dots. Of course, first-timers often get trapped inside the "box" and can't complete the puzzle, even though the instructions never mention any limitations on where you can take your line. The first time I saw it done, a corporate executive had an absolute fit when he saw the solution. "You didn't give us complete instructions!" he shouted at the facilitator of the meeting. In the back of the room, one of his staff members giggled. The only way she could see to do it in four lines was to travel beyond the perceived boundaries. She was giggling because she had thought she was just too dumb to figure out how to solve it within the box. So she had been waiting to see how the "smart" people did it "right". She was one of only three people in the room who connected all the dots. She was laughing at herself because she got it right and then immediately assumed she was wrong, just as caught up in her own perceived boundaries as those who couldn't leave the box.

That exercise is a simple illustration of the need to keep our minds quietly open and accept creative solutions that occur to us. The people with the least at stake, who are just playing around with the puzzle, tend to catch on to it quickly. The people who get invested in being "right" and figuring it out, usually don't see it until someone shows them how to let the line flow and ignore perceived boundaries. They see a box of dots, rather than seeing nine dots floating in open space, because they get caught in the familiar, what they should know, right away, and lose the touch with their capacity to see things fresh.

I've seen people use the experience of this puzzle to "brand" people, to conclude that some of us are creative thinkers and some of us are not. But that undermines the human spirit completely. All of us are creative thinkers, and sometimes all of us lose touch with that creativity. It depends on how we're using the gift of thinking at any moment in time. Understanding how our minds work sets us free from getting "boxed in" by temporary limitations.

There's a logic to it, principles that explain it all. We're all vibrant with the dynamic energy of life itself. We use that energy to form thoughts, and we become conscious of the thoughts we have formed because they generate a sensory experience of the moment. It's a constant inside-out flow from formless energy into the forms of our lives. The energy of Mind. The power of Thought. The awareness of Consciousness. Three principles that describe the creative process by which we understand life. To make the most of our experience, we have a simple guidance system: how it feels to us as it's happening. When we're thinking ourselves into negativity, distress, frustration, anxiety, upset, we realize that because we feel the psychobiospritual signals of discomfort, insecurity, dis-ease. When we're thinking ourselves into a positive, creative, wise, insightful state of mind, we realize that because we feel the psychobiospiritual signals of comfort, security, ease. Everyone knows how they feel -- whether they're relaxed with a free and clear mind, or tense, with a racing and cluttered mind. Everyone knows when they're at ease with the flow of life, and when they're not.

Not everyone knows that they're not stuck with any particular use of their thinking, that they can turn away from racing and cluttered thoughts and allow their minds to quiet down, like particles settling in a snow globe as soon as we stop shaking it. In the blink of an eye, their confusion and tension will dissipate and they will be at peace. When people have been in the habit of stressful thinking for a long time, they start to take it really seriously. It looks like all there is. They lose the freedom to let it go and let their heads clear and their discomfort pass. They lose their faith in joy, wonder, the exhilaration of knowing they are safe to navigate life through all its ups and downs and challenges and thrills.

What brings us all back is simple logic. Remembering that we're making it up and seeing it as real. Remembering that we're all the same; we create all kinds of thinking and take it more or less seriously. Remembering to heed the signals we get when we start to use our thinking against ourselves, the moodiness and urgency and bad will and self-absorbtion that characterize insecurity. Remembering to say "So what?" to our own insecurity, embrace it as part of life, and let it pass. 

Every day brings us a nine-dot box of some sort, a question to which we don't have an immediate answer. But every waking moment offers us a new possibility of connecting the dots.

Don't Worry, Be Happy

My inbox lately has been increasingly clogged with dire warnings. I have been told that I am likely to be poisoned from breathing oil fumes, swept into oblivion by a giant methane-explosion-induced tsunami moving at 600 miles per hour, cast into poverty by foreign investors calling in their loans to the US, murdered by a band of unchecked immigrants, blown up by a terrorist I thought was my harmless neighbor tending his garden, subjected to a horrible curse if I fail to forward a message immediately to at least 10 friends, doomed to heart disease by a lifetime of eating huge quantities of "hidden" salt and sugar in commonplace foods... I could go on and on. The underlying message always is, "You should worry, worry, worry. Terrible things could happen."

And then, yesterday, I received a poignant e-mail letting me know that the brother of one of my colleagues at West Virginia University dropped dead, alone in the water, on a practice swim for a big swim event. He was an athlete. He had done that practice swim, which he loved, many times. He was only 58 years old. No one ever would have thought that this would happen to a healthy, hearty man in his prime. No one worried about him when he set off to swim with a smile and a wave to his family, as he did nearly every day. I was reminded that terrible things DO happen, but they are rarely the things we've been anticipating.

The real message we get from life, if we listen, is: Worry is pointless. Worry erodes our health, our sense of wellbeing, and our ability to enjoy the present moment. Anything could happen any time. We can't predict disaster, and we can't predict wonderful surprises, either. All we can know for sure is what HAS happened and what IS happening, right now.

But too often, we miss what IS happening because we are so caught up in ruminating about or regretting what HAS happened, which we cannot change, or in worrying and fretting about what COULD happen, which we cannot predict. So the precious gift of now is lost because our worried minds are elsewhere.

For years, I have taught resiliency and have told participants in my classes and seminars the facts about stress and worry, about what it does to the immune system and to the capacity of our minds and bodies to regain or sustain health. I have recommended the book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers to hundreds of students and colleagues, to share with them the scientific understanding of the price we humans pay for entertaining stress, worry and anxiety. I have recommended the books Second Chance and The Missing Link to hundreds of students and colleagues, to share with them the logic of the simplicity of living at ease in the present, free from stress, worry and anxiety. I always feel privileged to be able to point in the direction of health and peace of mind, and watch innate wisdom blossom in people as they see this for themselves.

I want to send a message to all those people anxiously poring over and urgently sending out frightening messages of imminent horror that the world, individually and collectively, should be worrying about constantly. Stop! Please, just stop. You have the best of intentions, but all this doom and gloom stuff is not helping to make the world a better, safer place. Indeed, it is keeping people on edge and off balance as they turn their minds away from life right now and helpful ideas that might occur to them from a quiet state of mind to think about scary things over which they have no control.

It makes sense, of course, to be prudent. But being prudent is not a product of worry. Prudence is wisdom applied to information, in neutral, in the present. Once we've done everything we can, it is pointless to think more about it. Thinking more about it and extrapolating fearful ideas from it generate worry.

It is prudent to know the news and read your mail and ask, "Is there anything I can do right now to address this situation?" If the answer is yes, it is prudent to do that. If the answer is no, there is no point thinking further about it. There is nothing I can do to prevent a giant tsunami, for example. Going over and over in my mind about how horrible that would be is a misapplication of my imagination, a way to use my own thinking to keep me from enjoying life now. Instead of playing with my dog and enjoying the beauty of nature when we take our walks, should I be ignoring the dog because I'm too upset to play, and plodding nervously through our walks wondering what the scene would look like as the giant wave strikes?  Would that kind of thinking help me in any way?

A wise person, years ago, startled me out of a bout of worry, with this question: "If you knew you only had a few hours to live, is that how you would be using your mind?" Ever since then, worry has seemed like a waste of precious time to me. I cannot think of a single hour I've spent worrying that has contributed one iota to the quality of my life.

Ah, but the hours spent relishing beautiful sunsets, making up games with my grandson, tending to a growing plant, talking about constructive ideas with colleagues, immersing myself in beautiful music, writing a poem for an occasion, laughing at silly jokes, holding the hand of a dying friend and sharing good memories, cheering in the heat of an exciting sports event, picking up the phone to talk to somene I've missed, reflecting on a challenge and arriving at a surprising new answer -- those are the moments fully lived in the present. Those are the deposits in the account of a happy life.

I heard Bobby McFerrin interviewed on the radio recently. The interviewer said she wouldn't give in to the temptation to ask questions about the song "Don't worry, be happy!" because she was sure he was sick of people attaching his name only to that old, silly song, instead of his enormous body of subsequent creative work. He said he didn't mind talking about that song. A lot of people loved it. It cheered people up at a time they seemed to need that message. Essentially, his answer was, "Don't worry about what questions you ask me. Be happy we're here together now, talking about the power and beauty of music."

Remember the core idea of that little song? "In your life expect some trouble, but when you worry, you make it double."