Five Reasons Why People Become Stressed

|| Abundance || Stress || Career || Communication || Concentration || Creativity || Emotions || Self-Esteem || Fear || Happiness || Healing || Intuition || Leadership || Love || Maturity || Meditation || Memory || Mental Health || Peace || Mindfulness || Inspiration || Negotiation || Personality || Planning || PMA || Reading || Relationships || Relaxation || Success || Visualization || The Secret || Master Key System || Videos || Audio || Our Books || Being the Best || Resources ||

by Dr. Bob Kamath

The misery of stress and stress disorders, which millions of people in America suffer from, is preventable. It is based on the following five factors.

A. The lack of knowledge that the mind, brain and body are, in fact, one single unit, and that painful emotions affect our body organs, bringing on frightening physical symptoms and serious disorders. Ignorance of this single bit of information causes stressed-out people to ask such questions as, "How could my mind cause chest pain?" "How could stress cause my headache attacks?" "How could stress cause my heart to beat fast?" and to insist, "I am not imagining it! I am certain this is physical, not mental." They pursue repeated medical consultations with specialists to prove the point, and in the end, all they have to show for this medical wild goose chase is huge medical bills and three big Ds: disgust, disillusionment and demoralization.

What we think and how we feel affects every single organ in the body. Painful emotions in the brain can cause frightening physical symptoms without anything being physically wrong. Because of the intimate and intricate connections between the mind, brain and body, prolonged stress can bring on physical disorders, such as irritable bowel syndrome, arthritis, Fibromyalgia, high blood pressure, heart disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, psoriasis and many more. People who are unwilling to accept this reality are doomed to be on a medical merry-go-round for the rest of their lives.

B. The erroneous focus on physical activity as a solution for stress. Every single stressed-out person, regardless of his level of education, intelligence, profession or social status, labors under the erroneous opinion that coping with and managing stress consist of doing something physical, such as jogging, exercising, taking hot tub baths or lifting weights. This focus on physical activities as a solution for stress symptoms is due to the fact that some of the most distressing stress symptoms are, indeed, physical, such as muscle tension and spasms, feelings of being "wound up," pain somewhere in the body, inability to relax, etc. However, this emphasis on mindless physical activity completely disregards the fact that stress is an emotional phenomenon. Physical stress symptoms are caused by blocked off painful emotions in the mind. Anyone interested in coping with stress must shift his focus from physical activity to learning to identify and deal with his blocked off painful emotions.

C. The use of inappropriate coping methods to calm down. Almost all stressed-out people harbor the erroneous belief that it is a sign of weakness to express their emotions, so they try to "be strong" when faced with stressful events and problems. When they are upset about something, they hide, bury or bottle up their painful emotions to calm themselves down. ("I don’t want to think or talk about it. I just want to forget it!") When they can no longer hide their painful emotions, they indulge in denial ("I’m not upset. I have no problems."). They become experts in blocking their emotions off from their awareness. The unexpressed painful emotions get buried in the hidden mind and they disappear from their awareness.

Both these inappropriate ways of coping go utterly against nature. Their roots go back five thousand years, to when primitive man was being transformed into civilized man, and civilized society curbed the free expression of emotions as a way of taming primitive behavior. People who want to cope with stress must give up their hang-ups about expressing emotions, and reject burying and denial as coping methods.

D. The habit of indulging in distractions to cope with pain promotes burying.

1. The most common distractions are pleasurable activities that millions of people indulge in: drinking alcohol to excess, abusing dangerous street drugs, smoking cigarettes, overeating, having promiscuous sex, gambling and overspending. These activities become bad habits that can lead to serious health, financial, family and legal problems. They block off painful emotions and promote the burying of those painful emotions in the hidden mind. The hidden mind of just about every alcoholic and drug addict is saturated and his balloon is full.

2. When recreational activities, such as vacationing, hiking, trekking, skiing, cruising and the like, are used to escape from having to deal with emotional pain, they also facilitate the burying process. These avoidance activities are, basically, an inappropriate response to stress.

E. The preference for the short-term benefit of drug treatment to the long-term benefit of learning better coping methods. More and more people are resorting to exclusive drug treatment of their stress disorders due to the erroneous belief that their disorders are just the result of a chemical imbalance. They do not realize that unless they learn better coping methods, their stress disorders will keep getting worse over the years. Drugs merely coat the surface of the mind/balloon and temporarily reduce the tension inside it; they don’t shrink the balloon. In fact, psychiatric drugs facilitate the burying process no different than alcohol and street drugs do. As more emotions build up in the balloon, it pops again, and now one has a "breakthrough" episode of his stress disorder. He will then need two, three or even four drugs to coat the balloon and to control his stress symptoms. Most doctors prescribing antidepressant medication base their decision on a list of symptoms provided them by drug companies rather than on adequate understanding of the stage of stress the patient is at. Nowadays, doctors prescribe medications even to people who are merely grieving over the death of loved ones. In fact, the inappropriate and reckless use of antidepressant drugs by uninformed doctors is now so widespread that many patients are immune to drugs by the time they see a competent psychiatrist. Instead of learning to cope with stress, these patients are perpetually in search of new drugs to control their stress disorders. We will study more about this unfortunate and increasingly common problem in the next chapter.