The stress releasor

I went for a stress management class recently. My boss appreciates me enough to acknowledge that I do have a lot of work and think that I should attend this class. That's positive thinking. The negative sentense to the same thought sounds like this, "My boss thinks that I am not handling my work well enough and thus creating a lot of stress for myself and sends me to this class to learn a thing or two to increase my performance."

Much like the "secret", which I discussed in my previous blog, this class emphasis the importance of positive thinking...Positive thinking is stressed over and over again as one of the main stress reliever. To change your state of mind is the basic step to overcome stress.

One of the exercises was to ask you to write down what your average day look, sounds, feel like. This is what I wrote:

"I wake up rested to the sound of my mother in law fussing over my son's getting ready to go to school. I go to work with the sun in my eyes, the sound of traffic horns and busy policemen in sight. I step into the office to hear the frantic buzzing of ringing phones and constant chattering of some busy colleagues. As I sit down, the dull drone of my slow PC fills my ears and I continue working to churn out solutions after solutions to help ease my customers with their daily manual processes. I return home to the smell of my mother in law's cooking and the hustle and bustle of the TV and my son playing."

The trainer asked me to read out my passage and she in turn change all those into negative forms.

"I wake up barely rested to the sound of my son, fussing and refusing to go to school again. My grumbling mother in law is not helping and my husband is complaining that his shirts are not ironned. I set out to work to find a horrendous traffic jam and the stupid policemen are not doing anything about it. I curse and honked at the cars beside me because there are a lot of donkeys behind the wheels. As I reached the office, the phones have already started ringing, signalling that there are more problems to be reported to me. I see colleagues running late for meetings while swearing loudly. I sit down wondering when my slow PC is ever going to produce the results which my screaming customers are already waiting for. I return home exhausted but I am forced to eat my mother in law's cooking. My couch potato husband will watching TV while my son will be playing instead of working on his homework."

So you see, the scenario is basically the same, but the CHOICE of words that we use are pretty powerful. If we look at the scenario in a positive manner, it does seemed like a good life to live, doesn't it?

While we may question whether this is living in denial, the trainer says it's not self denial but a CHOICE. We CHOOSE to look at the beautiful and positive side of things because the easiest thing to change is within ourselves and we should take that first step to look into ourselves and make that change. What she's preaching is that we try to see the brighter side of things so that it's easier for us thread along this path called life....

Of course, this change in the state of mind doesn't solve the problems that we have, but at least it clears the mind of negative thoughts so that our emotional brain doesn't take over to make irrational decisions. It clears the way for our Rational brain to evaluate the problems and the possible solutions while not being cluttered with negative emotional thoughts. When our emotional brain gets a rest, and our rational mind is able to solve the problems systematically, then our stress level will reduce.

Hope the sharing of this quick tip (positive thinking) helps..