The root cause of stress!!!
(The Survival Focus Mind-set)

On this Page

	Anger disorder:
	Find out what your root cause of stress is and conquer it.
	Be Warned- What You Perceive Can Kill You!!
	Are you only surviving? The effect of the survival focus mind-set
	Applying more effort than needed
	Worry as a tool
	Worrying the right way
	Trying harder with failing strategies
	Making your efforts work better for you:
	In these group of pages, I aim to help you pinpoint the things you do that increases your experience of bad stress and suggests practical steps you can take to change them.

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Find out what your root cause of stress is and conquer it.

Turn your perceptions and life worries around and reduce your experience of bad stress.

Making use of the information provided here will have the impact of making you feel less on edge which will help to reduce the constant sea of negative thoughts that bug you down.

Feeling less on edge will help free up space in your mind enabling you to be more productive and efficient, which will have the effect of giving you something pleasurable to wake up for each morning.

Invariably, you'll become aware of things you need to stop doing and know the things you need to do more of.

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Be Warned- What You Perceive Can Kill You!!

Perception is a powerful force. Why not turn it in your favour?

The psychological effects of stress: Is survival focused thinking turning the power of your perceptions against you? Read on to find out how you can tame those threatening perceptions.

The biggest causes of stress page ( click here) highlighted a central point. Bad stress is often as a result of the threats we perceive.

In other words, the perception of threat is all that is required for humans to experience bad stress. If you are reading between the lines, you would realise that what I am saying here is that the threats do not even have to be real.

Stress quotes by Adewale Ademuyiwa:

The perception of threat is all that is required for humans to experience bad stress, i.e. the threats do not even have to be real.

Yes, I know I have said the same thing three times in different ways, but I make no apologies because I believe it is a crucial point that it is often the perception of threats and not the threats that cause experiences of bad stress.

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So, I hear you ask, “Why then do these threats give me so many hassles when they are often not even real.” The answer is in the meanings we read into the threatand not the threat itself.

Think about it. If you were to come face to face with a lion, what will scare you most? Is it the lion itself or the fact that you know what a lion can do to you?

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So you see, if we have a survival focused mindset, it is largely because we somehow believe that the threats, we are aware of are more likely to affect us or overpower us because something peculiar about us makes us more vulnerable or weaker to them.

For example, a look back at Carla’s case would reveal that she believed that her personal weaknesses meant people were more likely to take advantage of her.

Our internal sense of vulnerability or weakness causes us to feel threatened on a constant basis, hence we always find ourselves on the lookout for situations, or people who may home in on our weaknesses and hurt us.

Stress quotes by Adewale Ademuyiwa:

Preoccupation with your weaknesses or personal vulnerabilities can cause stress to affect your overall health.

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Are you only surviving? The effect of the survival focus mind-set

Break free from the niggling voice that keeps suggesting that you are the source of your problem. Get to know the tricks of the survival focus mind-set and take back the control of your mind.

The survival focus mentality has a tendency to keep our threats alive. If I feel threatened on the inside because of myself, and I feel threatened on the outside due to external threats that may be real or not, what place of solace do I have?

As a result of this difficult situation, bad stress seems ever present. I can’t get away from it because I often feel the problem is made worse by me. Worse still, I may even feel the problem is me.

Some of us believe that this problem of our weakness or inadequacy affects all aspects of our lives whilst some feel that the problem only raises its head when they are out of their comfort zones or in situations that are new to them. Others are not even aware at all that the problem exists yet they are been driven by it.

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Applying more effort than needed-

Articles on stress management: If we fall into any of these three groups of people mentioned above, a common thing is that we have a tendency to expend a lot of energy in order to survive.

Our minds are aimed at protecting ourselves and defending ourselves from the perceived inevitable threat. We expend all our effort dealing with emotional stress.

 

 

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Often the case is that the effort we apply in order to cope is way too much when compared to the size of the threat we are dealing with. It is like trying to hit a pin into a soft board using a sledge hammer. Of course, you’d get the pin in, but you’d also break the soft board in the process.

The extended energy pushes us beyond our mental and physical limitations, hence the experience of stress.

Yes stress sneaks on us without warning.

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As a result of having a survival focused mindset, many of our life experiences increasingly feel like narrow escapes. We experience less positive affirmation about our personal abilities and expend a lot of energy planning observing and executing our plans in order not to be caught out and fall prey to our perceived threats.

As the sense of threat increases, we apply even more energy in the bid to stop our fears occurring.

The effect of this is that we gradually stop finding life enjoyable. Life becomes more of a chore due to all our exhausting strategies for survival.

How can we stop ourselves from following this destructive and stress related pathways? Let’s first take a look at the set of tools used by people with a survival focused mind-set.

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Worry as a tool- A stress management tip

Worry can be a productive thing if done right. I can almost hear you thinking out loud “but I have always being told worry is bad for me, how can you say it can be productive?” Sure you are right; Worry is a bad thing if done wrong.

Worry can indeed be a major companion to stress.

I asked my wife “when you worry, why do you worry?”  she answered “I worry not because I want to worry, but because I keep trying to think about solutions, how to sort things out. I don’t actually intend to worry and in fact, I don’t even think I am worrying at the time.”

Most likely, these words ring true for most of us. We worry because we are solving problems by worrying. Unfortunately, nine times out of ten, our worry solves no problems at all. Worse still, the worry leaves us with migraines, body aches, anxiety, irritability, anger, depression, etc.

This is because the worry makes our problems seem bigger and more threatening by revealing our inability to solve problems. Worry also has a tendency to manufacture problems when there is none.

In fact, if we become so used to worrying, we tend to feel unsafe when we are not worrying (A major stress trap to watch out for).

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Worrying the right way- stress management strategies

stress reduction kit: Using worry as a positive tool.

I am now going to reveal an approach to worry that is so simple that you will wonder why didn’t I think of this before.

 Returning to my initial claim that worry can be productive if done right, to do this, we need to worry in a way that allows us to remain logical. If we do not do so, our emotions will set in and bring along its companion “the sense of confusion.”

 

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No wonder we tend to feel confused when we worry a lot.

Ready for the technique?

It’s quite simple-

This is it:  Write everything down.

Yes, I mean literally Write down all your worries, in the order of

• Problems

• Solutions and

• Action plan

Let’s call it the WPSA technique (The W is for write).

And I do not mean... write everything down in an obsessive manner (If you have a problem with obsessive keeping of lists you will recognise this).

Actually, if you follow the WPSA technique, it can help to reduce your need to be obsessive with lists.

Once you have done the above, answer the following questions to refine your efforts.

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Question 1.

Can you create an action plan for the thing you are worrying about? This action plan needs to be something you can carry out within the week or at most within two weeks.

If your answer is yes to question one, then it pays to carry out your action plan rather than worry about it and do nothing about it.

If your answer is no to question one, and then move on to question 2.

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Question 2.

Do you have an action plan which cannot be acted upon within the suggested two-week time frame?

If your answer is yes to question 2, then it may be more efficient to put the plan aside until it is actionable.

In addition, you know you have made a plan for this particular worry Item, which means you can leave the worry until when you are able to do something about it.

Following this pattern of dealing with worry will help you be more efficient at dealing with things you can address because you are not expending energy worrying about things you cannot do any thing about now.

Imagine worrying about things you can only deal with in a year’s time. Expending energy worrying about that now only serves to drain us. In fact, we may still find that by using unproductive worry the year will pass by, and we still failed at achieving what we were worried about.

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Question 3.

Are your answers to both question 1 and question 2 no?

If so, then it most likely means the item you are worrying about is either something you cannot really do anything about, or the worry is about an unrealistic or over-exaggerated threat.

In these cases, worrying will only achieve a breakdown of your physical and/or mental health. So your best cause of action is to put the worry aside and carry on with your life.

Try the WPSA technique out and let me know what you think,

The WPSA technique is used by business tycoons to build entire estates of wealth (it’s usually referred to as a problem solving skill), and yet we fail to recognise its power when trying to resolve our life problems.

Strangely enough many of these same business tycoons fail to apply the WPSA technique when they are worrying about things in their personal life.

Stay tuned to Stresstherapist.net and I will show you the different ways WPSA technique can be used.

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Let’s move on to the next survival focus tool

 

Trying harder with failing strategies- temporary gains and long term losses.

Have you ever heard the saying- A sure way to madness is if we keep doing the same thing all the time even though the results are negative.

So you did the same thing last time, and got the same poor result no matter how hard you tried, right?

This is a certified pathway to stress.

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Why not do something completely different this time? Better still; why not research to find out if anybody else has discovered a better solution to the problem you are dealing with?
Makes sense doesn’t it?

But it’s a problem we all fall prey to. This particular tool becomes an ugly slave driver if we live more in the survival focused world.

The try harder tool works by constantly presenting us with reasons to try harder and showing us the possible disasters from not trying harder. Whilst it is a good thing to try harder, there is no benefit in trying harder with strategies that simply don’t work.

Unfortunately, the trying harder tool does not remind us to change strategies, so we slave away at the problem and wonder why it is not getting resolved.

We even criticize ourselves for not trying hard enough and push ourselves to try harder with the same strategy.

The trying harder tool tries to encourage us by patting us on the back and telling us well done. You see you are not lazy; you are working so hard. This makes us feel good about ourselves, but the feel-good factor is short-lived as the trying harder tool then presents us with more things to do or things we have not done well enough.

So a viscous cycle that can impact our self esteem negatively is ignited. This viscous cycle is maintained because of the temporary sense of achievement it provides. Unfortunately, it tends to leave us with long term emotional and physical effects of stress.

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Making your efforts work better for you: A simple stress management plan

Stress reduction kit: Using the reflection, review and planning to reduce stress.

The trying harder tool works better if we spend some time reviewing our strategies and readjusting them to meet our goals. Sound simple doesn’t it?

A client once told me that she was baffled at how simple the solutions I was offering her sounded.

Her amazement was because she found that the solutions helped her resolved problems she has been trying hard to deal with for the last five years.

So write out what your strategy was (it is always good to write) and pinpoint what went wrong.

Then brainstorm possible changes you can try out; try it out and start the review process again.

Just in case you are thinking, “that’s a lot of work,” consider the time and hard work you might have already wasted using inefficient strategies.

So by all means try harder, but also WORK SMARTER.

To be continued

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