The Glass of Water

A lecturer was giving a lecture to his student on stress management. He raised a glass of water and asked the audience, “How heavy do you think this glass of water is?”

The students’ answers ranged from 20g to 500gm.  
                       
 It does not matter on the absolute weight. It depends on how long you hold it. If I hold it for a minute, it is OK. If I hold it for an hour, I will have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, you will have to call an ambulance.

It is the exact same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, we will not be able to carry on, the burden becoming increasingly heavier.

What you have to do is to put the glass down, rest for a while before holding it up again. We have to put down the burden periodically, so that we can be refreshed and are able to carry on.

So today at some point - put the burden down.  You can pick it up again tomorrow if you need to. Whatever burdens you are having now on your shoulders, let it down for a moment if you can. Pick it up again later when you have rested.

Recently I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, and we were talking about Starbucks reward cards. She had been poorly of late, and I offered to go and get the coffees and take them round to hers. “Swing by” she said “and pick up my reward card, so that I can get the points”.

Now if you didn’t know, Starbucks register each visit you make, and you build up the points until you qualify for a Gold card status. Not really sure what you get exactly, but my friend is close to the gold status and is keen to get there sooner rather than later.

I knew there was no point in arguing about it (she can be very persuasive!) although I did protest.  However, after getting the coffees, the conversation continued and I begun to feel quite agitated, mostly by the need to manage yet another ‘loyalty’ card. In fact, I then went onto to rant about how I now seemed to spend more time carrying out administrative duties for company’s services than I have ever had to do in the past.  

It was the look on her face that told me I was over reacting, and indeed I was, at which point I apologised and parked the topic.

Fortunately, my friend knows me very well.

But the point is, I was getting really agitated over something that was in fact very unimportant, so I knew that there was something much bigger going on, as I rarely get that cross these days. J 

I wonder how long I had been carrying around that burden!

So, what sort of issues cause your blood to boil, your heart to sink, your tummy to churn?

In a recent poll I carried out, https://www.facebook.com/#!/KimSearleHypnotherapy,  money seems to be the biggest stressor for people followed closely by time, or both and made me think about what causes stress.

Major Events

Everyone understands (and is probably more sympathetic) if stress is brought about by external events such as  bereavement, loss of a job, divorce, or illness. These events can wreak havoc in our life and threaten everything we have come to believe about ourselves and our lives. For most people there is usually plenty of support available from loved ones, and society to help us through this difficult time. These events tend to occur infrequently, and as a result, long term health effects can be minimal.

Daily Hassles

But could it be the daily hassles that cause us stress?

You know the sort of thing, the daily, minor irritations such as misplacing your car keys when you are in a hurry, traffic jams, minor arguments with family/colleagues, lack of sleep, job dissatisfaction, time pressures, money etc.  Research by Lazarus and Folkman (1984), at the University of California, indicated that it was these daily hassles rather than the major life events that affected us the most. 

Any constant, daily frustration caused by these hassles can result in our body frequently responding to what it sees as a threat, by releasing doses of adrenaline to help us react with the fight or flight¹ response.  Because these events occur so regularly, they become a natural part of our life, the constant release of Adrenaline which is not then used, can overtime, potentially begin to undermine our health. (Regular coughs and colds, headaches, poorly tummy etc).

And yet for many people even these daily hassles, are something that most people have learnt to live with, and do not experience any side effects.

Internal Stressors

Internal stressors, however, are more insidious stressors. These are caused by our own internal processes, and invariably we are completely unaware of their presence and effect.  

These internal stressors are like the programmes on your computer, happily running away in the background, and you only know they are there, when you experience difficulties. They can cause us to be have in ways that perversely lead to stress. Expectations of how we should be behave, finding that we 'believe' we can't do some things or constantly pleasing everyone, but ourselves. As we nearer Christmas, these internal stressors can become even louder when everyone has expectations of what a good Christmas should be, the need to make the whole event perfect for everyone or just endeavouring to keep everyone happy.

These internal stressors are more difficult to identify and then address, as it calls for some honesty in what we ask our selves and this is where hypnotherapists can help. We can find out if there are any internal programmes running that may be creating even more hassle for you than necessary, for example:-

·         Our own expectations of how things should be (particularly at Christmas)

·         Our belief in our abilities

·         Perfectionism

·         People pleasing

·         Low self esteem

·         Believing we have no control

·         Believing everyone else is better than we are

·         Lack of self belief

·         Lack of confidence

We can all recognise the major events in our lives that cause stress and have access to extra support. We can even recognise when the day to day hassles are beginning to be an issue and the various distraction techniques we employ help keep us sane.
But it is probably the internal stressors, that are running away quietly in the background that we need to be more mindful of.
If you think you may have an internal stressor causing you a problem, or carrying more than your fair share of the load of  life, then a chat costs nothing. Give me a call, or drop me an email and let’s start to explore what is really going on for you.

It doesn’t matter when you call, just that you do!

NB: Stress is an individualistic, subjective experience and therefore what one person finds stressful another may not. 

¹ flight or fight - http://psychology.about.com/od/findex/g/fight-or-flight-response.htm

"Come on! Come on! Start!..." The Immortal Words of John Cleese

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78b67l_yxUc

John Cleese...Fawlty Towers....hitting the car with a branch....

A very funny scene when his car stalls and he can't get it started again, at which point he starts to lose his temper!

And who of us, has not been frustrated with a piece of machinery or equipment at one time or another? Felt under pressure to do something, behave in a certain way or be something we are not? And most of us have experienced a health issue that has prevented us doing something we need or want to.

STRESS

It means so many different things to people.

In a good way it can drive us forwards to achieve what we need to achieve, to do what we need to do, or be who we need to be.

Stress is only a problem when it becomes consistent over a period of time, and/or increases beyond our (perceived) ability to cope. And even at this point, it is just the body's early warning system that something needs to change.

If we do not recognise these early warnings and just carry on, believing we have no choice, then we can begin to store problems up for ourselves. Our ability to think clearly, our emotional state and even our physical wellbeing becomes increasingly volatile, haphazard, clumsy (making mistakes, bursts of uncontrolled emotions or increase in accidents and illness).

In the next  Journey's of Discovery workshop in January, we will be looking at how we can identify our own personal stressors and what we can do about it. And over the next  few blogs, I will explore the typical reasons for stress, what happens in the body when we get stressed and the latest thinking about how to manage it for yourself.

Look for me on Twitter to see nuggets of information, Facebook for polls and links to other sites that may be of use or call me if you want help with Stress.

It doesn't much matter when you get in touch, just that you do.

Who Do You Think You Are? Updated

I have been preparing for the first in my series of workshops called Journey's of Discoveries, "Who Do You Think You Are?" starting on Thursday 1st November in Basingstoke.

In this first one, I am going to talk about personality types and how we all differ.

We are each of us unique, and whilst this evening looks at just one model of how we can measure this, (based on Myers Briggs Type Indicator) there are so many ways that we can we differ.

Myers Briggs, (a mother and daughter psychologist) used Carl Jung's theory of archetypes and developed  a more usuable format for everyday life by identifying 4 key preferences

• How we re-charge our batteries
• How we communicate with the world
• How we make decisions
• How we live our life.

Within each of these areas, there are 2 opposites ends of a spectrum and altogether Myers Briggs suggest there are 16 'types' which enable us to identify our preferences.

And it is here that I issue my own health warning! Any model that tries to 'pigeon hole' us, say who or what we are should be used with caution, as it can only ever be a guideline. We are, each of us , complex human beings, and always much more than any model says we are. For example, for many of us, who we are as parents maybe different to the person we are at work or  when with  friends. It really does beg the question "Who do you think you are?"

We had a brilliant evening walking through our different preferences and discussing how we work, and just as importantly how others do! Fortunately the group was large enough to have some of each type which made it more interesting.

If you would like to find out what your preference is for each of these, then drop me an note and I will send you out the questionnaire.

Two Frogs in a Milk Churn

Two frogs

This is the story of two frogs. One frog was fat and the other skinny. One day, while searching for food, they inadvertently jumped into a milk churn. They couldn't get out, as the sides were too slippery, so they were just swimming around.

The fat frog said to the skinny frog, "Brother frog, there's no use paddling any longer. We're just going to drown, so we might as well give up." The skinny frog replied, "Hold on brother, keep paddling. Somebody will get us out." And they continued paddling for hours.

After a while, the fat frog said, "Brother frog, there's no use. I'm becoming very tired now. I'm just going to stop paddling and drown. It's Sunday and nobody's working. We're doomed. There's no possible way out of here." But the skinny frog said, "Keep trying. Keep paddling. Something will happen, keep paddling." Another couple of hours passed.

The fat frog said, "I can't go on any longer. There's no sense in doing it because we're going to drown anyway. What's the use?" And the fat frog stopped. He gave up. And he drowned in the milk. But the skinny frog kept on paddling.

A little while later, the skinny frog felt something solid beneath his feet. He had churned the milk into butter giving him something to help him hop out of the vat and to safety.



In this story the fat frog believes that there is no use, “it’s Sunday and nobody’s working” that they “were just going to drown”. I wonder how he come to that decision?

Have you ever wondered how you make decisions? You know the ones such as the instant ones, whether to ring a friend or get a drink; others that require some thought, like what you are going to do later or how you are going to get from A to B; to those that need more effort, like where to go on holiday or which car to buy, where to live etc.

We make decisions every day and generally without thinking about how we make them, but have you really thought about it? I mean really ever thought about HOW you make them?

If you are anything like me, then you won’t have done….you just make them. And yet it can be a powerful thing to understand.

So, yes we will reason, learn all the facts, take into account practicalities and weigh up choices before making that decision…all very important stuff, but all that is doing is providing you the evidence for your decision, it is not the decision itself…does that make sense? A decision is actually that split second moment where you are still deciding and then you move to having done so. In that fraction of time, something else has helped us make the final decision.

In the story above, the fat frog made a decision that they were “doomed”, and certainly there was a possibility that they were, but the real issue was that he made a decision to give up. But based on what?

Behind our decision making, there are a number of complex processes that takes place within the body, which involves our beliefs (the rules we live by), our values (what is important to us), our emotions and our own past experience.

Beliefs (or the rules we live by) then, tend to have been learnt during our lifetime and they are very powerful as they do not tend to be based on reality, just something that we hold to be true. They may not even be our own beliefs, just ones we have inherited from other influential people in our lives and that may not always be a good thing!

In most cases our beliefs work well for us, (fire will burn, the sun is warm, our family love us) but as in the case of the Fat Frog, sometimes they do not.

During my training as a Cognitive Hypnotherapist, we were shown 3 types of belief issues that may arise when seeing clients:

·         Hopelessness – Where a person believes a positive outcome is not possible, so why  even try

·         Helplessness – Where a person believes that they are not able to do something

·         Worthlessness – Where a person believes they don’t deserve something/someone and then sabotage anything that may prove the belief wrong.

Part of our role as a Cognitive Hypnotherapists is to get to those underlying unhelpful beliefs that may no longer working for  the client and explore different ways in helping the client to change them. Beliefs that can result in decision making may not be full of confidence, may cause undue stress and anxiety or comes from low self esteem.

In my Journey’s of Discovery series, I look at the different ways we react in our world, including decision making. If you would like to know more come along to the event on 1^st November in Basingstoke, check out the details here https://www.facebook.com/#!/events/279363592183467/ . Alternatively you could call me now on 07843 271 249 to discuss how we might be able to work together or just like  my FB page to keep up to date with what is going on https://www.facebook.com/#!/KimSearleHypnotherapy