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Your feelings of stress are a product of the way you think. When you think things are going to be bad, difficult and stressful then you experience fear, worry and stress. When you think they are going to be good, exciting and fruitful you feel happy, expectant and fortunate. These diametrically opposite results are the consequence of diametrically opposite ways of thinking. So let’s consider the way you think.

The title of this section, creative thought, may seem to imply that there is non-creative thought as well as creative thought – not so. All your thoughts are creative, one way or another, and your thoughts create your reality.

People think in different ways. Some people think only, or largely, in words, some people think only, or mainly, in pictures and others think only with their feelings. Most of us, however, think in all three modes, even if one mode does predominate, and the combination of all three gives you your total ‘thought’. For our present purposes we will use ‘thought’ to cover all three modes of experience.

If your thoughts create your reality and part of your reality is the experience of stress then it should be possible to change the experience of stress by changing your thoughts. This is the concept we are going to explore.

Good and bad days

Consider some of the good and bad days you have had. On a bad day you might wake up late, you trip getting out of bed, run the cold instead of the hot tap in the shower, burn the toast, find the milk is sour and mutter to yourself that this is going to be an awful day. After that it probably will be.

On a good day you may find everything goes right. The clothes you want to wear are all clean, the sun shines, you catch your bus and get to work exactly on time and decide that this is going to be a great day. And it probably will be.

How does this come about? There are two possibilities. Either you focus your attention on the things that fall within your expectations and, consciously and subconsciously, ignore or filter out those that don’t, or, by your focus of attention and expectation, by the subtle messages you give out, maybe even by the sheer power of your thoughts, you actually change the way things happen.

Filtering

The first of these two possibilities involves filtering the input you receive from the world around you and the events happening in your life. In this way if you expect it to be a good day you will focus your attention on the good and positive things that happen; if you expect it to be a bad day you will focus on the problems and setbacks that occur.

You may insist you do not filter, that you see the world rationally and objectively, as it is. However, if you are willing to open your mind and see past your normal mode of thinking you may be in for some surprises.

You filter the world in which you live in a number of ways and the ways in which you do this can have a great bearing on the amount of stress you experience.

Species filters

As human beings we filter out much that is going on around us. We have ears to hear, it is true, yet they can only hear certain sounds. Dog whistles are tuned to a frequency that can be heard by a dog yet is outside the range of the human ear. Many other animals hear at a frequency that is inaudible to human beings. The same is true of vision. Some animals can see in the dark while we as human beings are blind. Our sense of smell is minimal when compared to that of many animals, and thus we filter out many major olfactory experiences that are part of the daily life of other species. We filter out the radio waves that pass through us and our environment every day, likewise the television waves, the electrical and magnetic frequencies and so forth. All these things pass us by because we do not have the sense organs to perceive them; they are filtered out by the details of our make-up as a species.

This means that you are only consciously aware of part of your environment. It also demonstrates that something doesn’t fail to exist simply because it is not detected by your senses, a point that is well worth bearing in mind.

This filtering also means that there could be a number of stressful things happening but because you are not aware of them you do not feel stressed. For instance, sounds that fall outside your auditory range will not frighten you, smells that your nose doesn’t detect will not trouble you.

Cultural filters

Secondly you learn to filter as part of your upbringing. Some things stress you because they are not what you are used to or what you consider to be normal. These same things that you find stressful could leave someone else totally calm because they fit in normally with their expectations as to the way their life would be.

Consider, for instance, the wearing of the correct clothes and shoes. John and Susan were going to visit Susan’s parents. John, who had met and lived with Susan in Australia, hadn’t yet met her parents who lived in central London and this first meeting was to be at a dinner party in their honour. Since it was the middle of a summer heatwave and they had been told that the occasion was not formal John wore a beautiful Batik shirt, smart light-coloured linen trousers and beautifully tooled leather sandals, an outfit that would have been perfect at a similar dinner had it occurred in the Australian township where he grew up.

Susan’s parents were mortified when he appeared in sandals and without socks on. They considered the evening ruined and endured it in an embarrassment of wondering what their friends would think of him. John, unaware of the social rules he was flouting, had a wonderful evening and expressed himself delighted with them as he drove home with Susan. Susan, used to John’s choices of clothing, was unsure of the reasons for her parents’ distress yet felt stressed by the tension in the air all evening. As her mother said afterwards, the shirt and light trousers were bad enough, but no-one, absolutely no-one, went to a dinner party in sandals.

Consider, however, what would have been happening had Susan been Japanese and taken John home to visit her Japanese parents. They would have felt stressed and mortified if he had worn shoes at all.

Many times when you feel stressed it is the result of things and events that are occurring in a way that does not fit in with your upbringing and expectations. If you can change these filters, change the way you view things, you can change your experience of stress.

Had Susan’s parents acknowledged that the man was more important than his clothes and had they assumed that their friends would have understood that what he wore was correct within John’s world and that he was not belittling them by dressing down, they need not have felt stressed and could have had a wonderful evening.

A western woman of conventional upbringing, used to covering her breasts at all times, could feel highly stressed when taken to a topless beach by her latest boyfriend. Yet had she been brought up in any one of many other cultures where it was perfectly natural for her to bare her breasts, such exposure could have seemed perfectly normal to her.

If events fall within your expectations of what is right, normal and safe, based on your culture and your upbringing, they probably don’t stress you. If they fall outside those expectations you probably do find them stressful.

Individual filters

The third type of filtering is done on an individual basis and there are at least three sub-filters in this group, namely, generalization, deletion and distortion.

Generalizing

The filters you apply through generalizing involve taking one experience that is bad and assuming that all such similar experiences will be bad. This then causes you to feel stressed.

Martha was a strong woman who helped her husband in the hardware store they owned. Her delight in the evenings was to take their large and strong labrador, Chappie, for a walk. When her city-bred sister, Jennifer, came to stay there was more work to be done so she asked Jennifer to walk the dog. All went well for the first week. Then on the eighth day Chappie found a smell that excited him and he took off with the lightly-built Jennifer clinging to his lead and desperately trying to keep up. Eventually she had to let go and returned home, after searching high and low, shaken and embarrassed, without him. Chappie, needless to say, was waiting quietly at the front door. From then on Jennifer refused to walk him at all saying: ‘He always runs away when I take him, I’m not strong enough to hold him.’

In this way she generalized from the one event that stressed her, ignoring the previous seven successful walks, to create a feeling of stress whenever she was faced with a large dog.

Jim was frequently called on to present material to the board of directors of the company for which he worked. All went well for his first year in the job. Then at one meeting he got confused by the questions being thrown at him and got his figures muddled up. In a lather of embarrassment he extricated himself as well as he could and went back to his office. From then on he felt thoroughly stressed and developed tension headaches during the days prior to a board meeting knowing that he ‘always got his figures muddled at board meetings’.

Deletion

Deletion is the second kind of individual filtering. In this you ignore certain things that happen and focus on others. You may ignore the good things and then feel stressed because you are aware of their absence.

Mrs G. had come to my office several times complaining of many health problems, all of which she attributed to stress, and largely to the stress of her marriage.

‘My husband no longer cares,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t care how I’m feeling and he thinks I’m stupid. He either ignores me or contradicts what I say and argues with me. I can’t cope with the children, he undermines my authority and I can’t keep going this way.’

Eventually I decided I needed to see them both together so she brought Mr G. in with her on her next visit. He sat in a chair beside her and rested his arm along the back of hers in a protective gesture. As he introduced himself he explained that he was worried about his wife’s health and willing to do anything he could to help.

For the first 10 minutes she spoke and I asked questions. Mr G. remained quiet but observed her and me closely with obvious concern for her showing on his face. Eventually Mrs G. said, ‘And I’ve had a headache every single day with the stress of it all.’

‘No, dear, you didn’t have a headache at the weekend, remember, we remarked on it.’

‘There you are,’ she said angrily, leaning towards me, ‘see what I mean, he doesn’t care and he contradicts me all the time.’

One look at Mr G.’s face showed his progression from happy optimism that she had been headache-free for the weekend to resignation at her outburst.

She had followed her habit of filtering out the care he was expressing by his body language and the 10 minutes during which he had listened to every word she said without a contradiction. Her filtering and her expectations were leading her to have the type of experience she expected to have. It was going to be another bad day.

Distortions

Distortions are probably the easiest type of filtering to describe. Your boss gives you a bunch of flowers, delighted with the work you have done and you think ‘what does he want from me now’. Or the children come home from school with a present for you and you wonder what crime they have committed. Perhaps you are invited to a party and think ‘they’ve only asked me because they feel they must’. Or perhaps you are not invited because they have only asked their friends who are interested in music. You’re not, and yet you choose to assume they don’t like you enough to want you.

There are more ways of distorting situations, remarks, looks and so forth than there are people. We all do it all the time; it is impossible not to. No-one can be totally objective; we are all biased by our past experiences.

Good and bad days 2

Think back to the good day and the bad day that started this section and we will see how filters could apply to them.

On the bad day you have woken up late, you’ve tripped getting out of bed, run the cold instead of the hot tap in the shower, burnt the toast and discovered the milk was sour. Expecting the rest of the day to be full of problems, you filtered out of your mind the green traffic lights through which you sailed and focused on the red ones that stopped you. You ignored the smiles on the faces of the happy people you met and focused on the people who were cross. You hurried past the friendly check-out girls in the first two shops and then were stressed when you were kept waiting by the slow girl in the shoe shop who was new at the job. The pleasant ‘good morning, have you time to come in for a coffee?’ from a usually quiet neighbour could have set you wondering what she wanted to complain about when all she wanted was to cheer you up a bit. You could then have gone home safe in the knowledge that the day had been as awful as you had known it would be from the start and spent the evening complaining of the stress you were under, saying: ‘I knew it was going to be a bad day from the start. All the traffic lights were red [generalization from a few], no-one smiled at me [deletion], the shop assistants were hopeless [deletion] and the neighbour probably wants me to baby-sit [distortion].’

On the other hand, consider the good day. The clothes you wanted to wear were all clean, the sun shone, you caught your bus and got to work exactly on time and decided that this was going to be a great day. In this case you would have ignored the office cross-patch [deletion] and enjoyed the humour of the new junior. You would have focused on all the things that went right [deletion of the problems] and been sufficiently relaxed that when the boss complained of errors in your work you showed your concern for the extra pressure he was under to make him so touchy [a distortion in your favour].

Coming home you could have described the pleasant day you’d had and anticipated the chat you would have with the neighbour who had asked you to drop in, not realizing that she felt guilty for not including you in her recent dinner party [a distortion, again in your favour].

The person having the bad day would have been aware of all the problems in the office of the second, happy, person and the second person would have been aware of all the green traffic lights and smiling assistants in the day of the first, unhappy person. Same day, different people, different experiences, the final result depending on your expectations as to how the day would be. Your stress level depended on your expectations and on your filtering.

Your reality

In these examples several things are clear. The day doesn’t exist independently of you. Objectively it is neither a good nor a bad day. The day, in these examples, was what the person involved chose to make of it. The first person focused on so many of the things that weren’t perfect that she created for herself a great deal of stress and aggravation. No matter what happened during the day, good or bad, she had focused on the bad and was feeling thoroughly stressed and unhappy. Her neck muscles were tense and sore, the spasms in her blood vessels had created a headache and when she sat down to dinner she was so uptight she got indigestion. All these problems she put down to the stress in her life. When a friend told her to take up yoga or go to relaxation classes she glowered at him muttering that it was all very well for him, he didn’t have to deal with the stresses she had.

When a colleague phoned the woman who’d had the good day and talked about the office cross-patch and the boss who was never satisfied she would have been surprised to find that her friend had hardly noticed these and that she was still happy and relaxed and looking forward to a good dinner and an enjoyable evening.

Filters exist. If you can make them work in your favour rather than against you, you can have a happy and relaxed day instead of a tense and stressful day. It is your choice.

A friend who I’ll call Sara is a perenially happy optimist. Living in a different city I see her only occasionally but speak to her on the phone often. On one of our Christmas get-togethers she mentioned what a wonderful year it had been for her. I stared at her in surprise. She had her own business, a pleasant daytime restaurant, and it had suffered a major fire as a result of the faulty wiring about which she had several times complained to the landlord. Later burglars had broken into her house and stolen her TV, video machine and a lot of clothing. Her boyfriend of several years had left her and a car crash had left her unable to compete in the dancing competition for which she had been training.

Interested to see her reaction I listed all these things for her. She looked a little surprised and then reluctantly admitted that all those things had happened.

‘However,’ she said, ‘I felt good most of the year and lots of good things came out of it.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, look at the restaurant now. I may have lost three months of business but at least I had a bit of a holiday in that time. It is now newly decorated and looks fantastic and business is picking up again. I got insurance money for the things that were stolen so I now have a new model TV and video, and you know how I love to buy clothes and keep complaining that I have no room for them in the wardrobes. I miss Bob but I must admit I’m enjoying the freedom after five years with him and look at my lovely new car.’

‘What about the dancing that you had to give up?’

Here she had the grace to look a bit sheepish.

‘I think I was really glad of the excuse not to compete. I only really took it up for fun, then I got talked into competing. I suppose I was glad of the excuse to give it up, and look at all the free time it has given me for my painting.’

Can’t you just hear how someone else might have described the year? It could have gone something like this;

‘This has been a dreadful year, thank goodness it’s over. It’s been one stress after another. I lost a lot of money while the restaurant was closed, I had no money coming in and now it’s barely paying its way. Burglaries are so stressful, you feel as if you’ve been violated. All those lovely clothes I lost, I could never replace them. And as for Bob, it just shows, you can’t trust men, some little thing and they up and leave you. As for that idiot in the other car, because of him I’m scared every time I drive and I’ve missed out on dancing. I’ll bet I could have won the competition too, and now my social life is nothing at all.’

It was, or would have been, the same year for both people. The events didn’t change but the interpretation and focus did and so did the experience of stress. Whatever happens around you, your personal experience depends totally on the filters you apply and the attitude you choose to take through that day or year and into the next. This is what determines your level and feeling of stress.

Creating

Now, let’s go back to the beginning of this chapter. I suggested there were two possible reasons why an anticipated good day would follow expectations and an anticipated bad one would do the same. We have discussed the first possibility, the possibility of filtering, the possibility that you filter out all events that don’t fit in with your expectations of the way the day will be.

The second possibility is that, by the very conviction of your expectations, you somehow actually create the type of day you expect to have. Let’s assume both days were your days.

On the anticipated bad day you were already in a bad mood when you left home. When you scowl at shop assistants they tend to scowl back at you. When you show a newcomer to the job that you are cross and impatient they are likely to get more confused and take even longer to get their job done. By the time you stomped into your neighbour’s house for coffee you could have been such poor company that her behaviour to you would have been affected and she might indeed have brought up the problem of the noise your children were making just to show you that she too had stresses to deal with.

On the anticipated good day you would have smiled at everyone you met, been pleasant to the people in the office and generally created good humour around you. Even a cross boss responds positively to a happy smiling member of his staff and is likely to have been less cross than he would have been had you been grumbling about the stresses in your life.

Martin is a typical example of the way your attitude can create your outcome. He had a good position in the city, in the head office of the company. Then he was asked to go to an industrial area and head up a section of the company that was in trouble. He hated it. The position was beneath him, he missed the acknowledgement of his peers, the whole organization was sluggish, his staff were suspicious of him, corning in from outside with new ideas, and they took his appointment as a criticism from head office.

As a result Martin started to complain of the stress he was under. He became cross in the office and barked at the staff when they were too slow. Although excellent in his technical area he had trouble motivating the people in the plant and the outside contractors. Each day he was met with resistance.

‘It’s no good,’ Martin thought. ‘None of them like me, and I don’t like them much.’ So he settled down to endure and make the best of it, getting an ulcer in the process.

Then he noticed a new man in administration. Each time they met the man smiled at him and hoped he was having a good day. Tentatively Martin started to smile back. Then he started to smile at other people, and they smiled back. Gradually he became more optimistic about the future until one day he realized how much more supportive his staff were and how much more relaxed he felt.

As his own behaviour and expectations had changed so had the world around him. He had significantly lowered his experience of stress by his change of attitude and the results this change had produced. Again he is an example of the way your thoughts and your attitudes can change your experience and thereby change your stress level.

Can your thoughts change the world?

For the adventurous, who like to explore further, there is yet another possibility to consider. Your thoughts may, as we have seen, influence other people and events by the way you look, speak and behave and the impact this has on others. It is also possible that there are other more subtle effects. We talk of vibes. You can probably think of a time when you picked up on what someone else was thinking. Perhaps you were about to phone them when they rang you. Perhaps you were about to invite them to stay when they phoned and said they were coming to town and could you spare a room for the night. Perhaps, with your thoughts, you can actually change the world, change your experiences and thus further create or reduce the stress in your life.

Before you retort that this is a bit far-fetched consider the following. Many of today’s atomic physicists and related scientists are coming to the belief that thought has an effect on the way sub-atomic particles function (e.g. Fritjof Capra in The Turning Point, Flamingo, 1983). If this is so then thought also has an effect on atoms and the way they function. These in turn affect the way whole molecules function and molecules can affect the way your tissue and thus your body, including your brain, functions. Therefore it is possible that your thoughts can affect the physical substances of your body, other people’s bodies and the objects in the world around you.

This in turn means it is possible that your thoughts can indeed affect objects as well as people and, by your thoughts, you can change what occurs in your life and therefore your stress levels. Indeed some atomic physicists have suggested that matter is the lowest form of consciousness.

Remember too that, with the work of Einstein, we know that energy and matter are interchangeable. If this is taken to its logical conclusion then it is indeed possible that by the energy of your thoughts you can affect physical matter and the way it behaves. As far back as 1935 this seemingly modern concept was expressed thus by Dr Alexis Carrel in his book Man, The Unknown. ‘The mind is hidden within the living matter … completely neglected by physiologists and economists, almost unnoticed by physicians. Yet it is the most colossal power of this world.’ He also wrote ‘Each state of consciousness probably has a corresponding organic expression ... Thought can generate organic lesions ...’

James Jeans in The Mysterious Universe (Macmillan, 1930) said ‘Today there is a wide measure of agreement ... that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.’

In these quotations we have the concept that different thoughts, or experiences of stress, can generate specific health problems, and the concept that you can use the power of your mind to alter the world around you, as well as your perception of that world, and thus your experience of stress.

This is not a necessary belief to have. You don’t have to believe that your mind has the power to change matter to be able to reduce your stress or to handle the ideas in the rest of the book. But if you are willing to consider the idea that your thoughts can have a physical effect it is worth considering the possibility of this way of reducing the stress you experience and it gives you another powerful tool with which to work.

Your thoughts are enormously powerful. Use this creative power to create a stress-free life rather than a stressful life.