Identifying the true source of stress is simple, that is, after you get past all the tricky parts. The true source of stress becomes easy to understand when you break it down.
Put simply, stress is a feeling. A feeling is an emotion. And emotions are our body’s natural biochemical response to something we perceive about an experience.
For example, imagine you’re on a plane and there’s some sudden turbulence followed by a really loud, very strange noise. Stop. Read that again. Then close your eyes and picture yourself in that situation for a second. Now, if you were actually on the plane, that feeling you would get is your body’s biochemical response to the perception of risk in that experience. That biochemical response is designed to physically prepare you to take action. It’s intended by nature to serve you. You may have felt a little hint of it just by imagining yourself on that plane. So here’s one of the ways it gets tricky. You weren’t on the plane. There was no actual experience. It was just a thought. The biochemical response was triggered by the thought, more specifically the perception of the thought, not to the experience itself. Quick footnote, this also applies to each of your hot buttons.
So the true source of stress is your reaction to a thought, which is to say your perception of something you have experienced. And that experience may not even be in your immediate environment, it could be a memory. But the point is that a perception is something you can manage at will. With surprisingly little training, and some practice, you can shift your perceptions so that stress it is only there when it serves you and in a way that serves you.
This is a quick glimpse at just one of the foundations of human behaviour that you will learn about in our workshop. Imagine having the tools at hand to choose when and how you allow stress to affect you. Think about the power that would give you, being in control of your stress, and of your hot buttons. Imagine being in an environment where everyone had that same power. Imagine the difference that shared power would make in your daily life.