Tag: stress

Change Is The Only Constant

I am sure you have heard the famous line from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: Change Is The Only Constant. Some people embrace change and some people tend to resist it. Today, let’s talk about how to navigate change without affecting our minds!

Have you ever heard the term managed growth? This used to be in fashion ten or so years ago and everyone and their brother used to throw the term around. In my experience, there is no such thing as managed growth. Either you grow or you shrink. There is nothing wrong with shrinking if that is what you want but to think that you can stay constant without growing or falling back is just a fantasy. Let’s talk about a couple of real-life examples.

Let’s start with corporate America. If you have followed IBM, you will notice that IBM has a history of struggles in the past 25 years. There challenge is to stay relevant in a constantly changing environment. They had CEOs who thought they can manage the company with what they were offering and just be at a certain level and keep the business going. It sure did not work and they had some spectacular declines. Then they had some CEOs who saw the landscape around them changing and embrace that change and transformed the company. Some companies adopt and some don’t. Look at Circuit City and Best Buy. Two chains with similar offerings, one is history and one is still relevant.

Now, this is just an example in the corporate world. The same is true in other areas of society and even in our personal lives. Change does not mean financial change either. Change to me is growth. I am sure all of us have changed from where we were 10 or 20 years ago. That is a good thing. We are better for it. It sure does not seem like it though when we are going through those changes. So how do we handle stress and anxiety that may flare up due to change?

First, let’s look at what brings that stress with change. As human beings, we are wired towards the status quo. Our mind interprets change as a threat. That begins this fight, flight, or freeze response in your system. Our system thinks it is protecting us from the change! The reason for this is that the pain of loss is usually a lot greater than the pleasure of gain. So if your pain of loss is x times higher than whatever pleasure you are going to get, why take that chance? This is the real dilemma. This is what brings stress with change. A Harvard Business Review article (https://hbr.org/2012/09/ten-reasons-people-resist-chang) outlined why people resist change. These reasons include Loss of Control, Excess Uncertainty, Concerns About Competence, Ripple Effects, Past Resistance among others. If you break this down, it all boils down to just one thing. Fear of failure. More specifically, the pain that comes from that failure.

So how do we handle this stress-induced change and more importantly embrace the change? First, let’s talk about handling stress that is caused by change. The first thing to do is to make sure that we understand the consequences of change. Often, we are stressing out because we are not prepared for change. If we look at the change in a rational way and see it through all its implications, we will be able to break down what preparations we need to make for different potential outcomes of change. Once we have clear ideas as to what can happen and how we may handle it, 90% of the stress goes away. Now, we are ready for that change. I had an interesting discussion with board members of a non-profit I am involved in. We have been growing like weeds in the past three years. Some members of the board are frightened by that growth. They think this growth will change the organization and I was trying to argue that it does and it will change the organization for the better. I tried to explain how big an impact we were making and that we needed to prepare for this and take certain actions now so that we are not caught off guard. You see some people like the status quo. Taking action means making decisions and bringing in change. They are just not ready for it. Maybe someday they will be but hopefully, it is not too late because if you don’t grow, you might end up shrinking.

So how do we embrace that change? We must look at what that change brings. What kind of positive outcome may be associated with the change. We also need to look at the negative outcomes of not embracing change. Once we are clear on this, oftentimes, change actually invigorates us rather than brings stress. Hope this makes some sense and you all look at it rationally next time you are confronted with change.

Keeping Calm in Turbulent Times – Meditation for Traders

A day trader friend of mine invited me to talk about meditation in his trading room. Below is a talk I gave to these traders.

Most of you have read Trading In The Zone by Mark Douglas by now. Some of you often comment on how Mitch trades with ease whether he is up $200K or down $170K on a given day. Many people will freak out if they go through that kind of ups and downs every week. So what is the secret to keeping calm when we are trading? We know when we are calm, we tend not to make unforced errors. Kind of errors when we meant to buy puts but ended up buying calls. Or did not close out your entire position and let some options expire worthlessly! We have all made some versions of these errors in our trading routine. Today, I want to talk about training our minds to make sure that we begin to reduce these errors and eventually completely stop making unforced errors. More importantly, make sure that our trading activities do not cause any mental and physical harm.

A major cause of these errors is our mental state. It usually begins with anxiety. So let’s start with what causes anxiety. We live in a fast pace world. People have way too many balls in the air so stress, in general, is at an elevated level in our society. You bring the fast-paced world of trading in the mix and your stress goes through the roof. I mean you are putting thousands of dollars on the line and you are going in and out within minutes if not seconds sometimes. It is natural to cause stress. Our brain is designed to protect what it thinks is ours. So when it seems that a trade is going against us, its fight or flight response kicks in. You begin to panic sometimes and all of a sudden you get out of a trade before letting it play out based on your indicators. I heard last week someone say on daily wrap-up that they decided to stop using the 30-second chart. I think that was brilliant. Mitch keeps telling us that we trade a 2-minute chart and a 30-second chart is just used as an aid. For this person, seeing that trade was going against them in a 30-second chart even when all other indicators were telling them to stay in the trade, they got out and lost money. It was so smart of them to figure out what was causing the issue and stop looking at 30 seconds chart. Now, the stress of trade going against you is no longer there.

So how do we address the anxiety that flares up any time of the day with no warning? Anxiety comes because we provide inappropriate attention to a subject. What is inappropriate attention you might ask? It simply means we are exaggerating a problem we may be facing or blowing out of proportion the negative impacts of that problem and so forth. This happened recently. A friend’s son called me in panic. He had recently received a full-time job and his employer asked for a drug test. He went for the drug test and they took his social security number and date of birth. When he was leaving the facility, he noticed that they had a piece of paper with all his personal information in plain sight for everyone to see. He could not say anything but as soon as he went home he told his parents he was worried about his personal information being out there. They asked him to call me. Anyway, we started to talk and his anxiety was flaring up. So we went about breaking it down. And this is very important to get rid of anxiety. People who are going through anxiety episodes tend to talk about generality and how everything is going to be bad or worse. After talking it through, I asked him what the worst-case scenario? Another useful technic is when you know the worst-case scenario, it defines the problem and you can begin to address the problem. So he said the worst case is someone can steal his identity. So I asked him to put a freeze on his credit report with all three credit bureau.  As soon as he completed this step, his anxiety disappeared because now he knew his problem was solved. The point here is that if we break down the problem and begin to work on it, it reduces or eliminates anxiety.

This is what I call short term solution. Longer-term, we must learn how not to let our outer problems disturb our inner peace. This is where meditation comes in. If we have a meditation practice that allows us to find our peaceful selves, it can become our go-to solution.

Another way to address this is to realize that there is no inherent existence. Our anxiety about trading comes from our attachment to our money and our things. Once we realize there is no inherent existence, our attachment will drastically reduce even go away allowing us to just focus on the task at hand – trading.

Let’s look at an example. A friend of mine used to have anxiety issues. He would be in the car in a rush hour and would get upset about the traffic. We had an interesting discussion maybe 10 years ago. I asked him if he would consider just ignoring the traffic around him and focus on music or something during his drive. He said, well, that’s not me. That is not personality. I said maybe you should consider changing. He took a big offense he said that is my identity how can I change who I am. I let the subject go. Fast forward 10 years and he has calmed down considerably. Things don’t bother him as much in traffic. He adopted. What he thought was his identity changed. 10 years ago, he thought that was inherent existence. Today it is clear that it was not since he has changed.

Let’s look at another example. Have you ever been absorbed in a movie? I know I certainly have. If it is a well-made gripping movie and you are fully captivated by the plot; you can feel everything being real. You even get a physical reaction if there is an unexpected gunshot or something as if it just happened in front of our eyes. Even though we know we are watching a movie, at that moment we think it is inherently existent. We feel everything that is happening is real. We know it is just fiction.

Let’s say someone loses their months’ worth of income. Now by all means, if there is a possibility of getting it back do it. If not, the first thing you do is to learn not to make that mistake again. Beyond that though if you let it bother you, it will start affecting your health and your relationships. So it certainly does not make sense to let that keep bothering you.

Stress Less

As the holidays are fast approaching, we are getting into the most stressful season of the year in the Western world. So today let’s discuss how to keep the stress at bay and more importantly, how to make sure that you keep your mental peace amid all the chaos.

Before we talk about tackling stress, let’s discuss how stress originates in our body. Stress comes from trying to control people and situations. Getting other people to behave our way is not really working and is never effective. The only thing we can control for sure is our mind. There will be always things to worry about. So if wait for things to settle down, we will be waiting for eternity. Our thoughts carry us all over the place and they bring stress in our lives. If we gain mastery over our mind and thoughts, we find deep peace. Our mind is like a crazy wild elephant. It destroys everything on its way, it thinks about scary thoughts that will most likely never materialize. Someone put it nicely, anxiety and worries are misuses of the imagination.

But we live in the real world so there will always be things out of our control. If we learn to control our reactions to situations, we will be able to avoid stress and bring happiness and peace. In that spirit, I found this stress handling quadrant. I am going to share this document on the screen. This document is courtesy of Tashi Nyma a Buddhist Monk out of Dallas, Texas. No need to copy this document – I will email you a copy at the end of this session. Those of you who are watching this on our YouTube channel or on LinkedIn, please email meditatedenver@gmail.com and I will email you a copy of this document.

As you can see, this is called the Four Quadrant Practice. The first quadrant is Avoid. We want to avoid as many situations as we can that can create stress in our life. For example, is looking at our phone 10 times an hour really necessary? Once people start looking at their phones, all kinds of stressful situations arise. They say an average American looks at their phone 96 times per day. That is insane!! Going on social media all day is another one of those things that we can avoid. What I found helpful was to limit my social media interactions to twice a day. And I am trying really hard not to get into an argument on social media. I limit checking my emails three or four times per day. Again, it is different for everyone but no one expects you to respond within minutes.

The next quadrant is Adjust. Let’s adjust our behavior to avoid stressful situations. For example, because I am in a High-Risk COVID group, I started getting stressed out when COVID increased in the last two months about shopping. So we adapted to a 100% online or curbside pickup model for the last 6 weeks. It eliminated all the unnecessary stress. You might want to limit the duration of meetings if that stresses you out.

The next quadrant is to Adapt. We adapt to the situations that we can avoid or adjust to. For example, you may not be able to avoid a meeting with that annoying coworker. Take some deep breaths before you begin the meeting. Go for a walk if you have an option.

The last quadrant is Accept. This is if all fails kind of category. Accept that you have to take that meeting and it may go bad. Prepare yourself and change your attitude towards it. There is no reason an external situation should give you stress. Train your mind. Essentially, this is what we started the session with.

So as you can see, there are ways to stay out of stressful situations. We must make sure that what the world brings does not need to disturb our internal peace. Hopefully, with some practice, we can all experience that peace within. I would like you to do this exercise as homework with the worksheet. It would certainly make you think if nothing else.

Why Meditate?

Simply put, meditation increases your self-awareness. There are added benefits such as reduced stress; reduced anxiety; increased focus; increased compassion; and others.

Meditation and Science – Straight from the National Institute for Health (NIH)

Many studies have investigated meditation for different conditions, and there’s evidence that it may reduce blood pressure as well as symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome and flare-ups in people who have had ulcerative colitis. It may ease symptoms of anxiety and depression and may help people with insomnia.

Meditation and the Brain

Some research suggests that meditation may physically change the brain and body and could potentially help to improve many health problems and promote healthy behaviors. #NIH; #science; #meditation; #anxiety; #stress; #compassion; #focus; #bloodpressure