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.