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In the last chapter we considered the possibility that you create for yourself the type of life and experience that you expect to have. It was suggested that you may do this by the way you view what happens in your life and the ways in which you filter it by generalizations, deletions and distortions. We also considered the possibility that, by your words and actions, you influence the people and events around you as your words and deeds impact on them. Further, for the more adventurous, it was suggested that you may, by thought power alone, actually influence events.

These are interesting ideas and can have a lot to do with the way you manage stress. Let’s consider now some ways in which they can be put into practice.

What to do

If you consider the above ideas as theories but do nothing with them, they won’t help you to reduce your stress levels. You may say you believe in the ideas but that in your case there is nothing you can do. Your stresses are different, they are real, and all you can do is endure them. I have found, while seeing patients, that it takes courage to face these possibilities, the possibility that you are, in some way, contributing to your experience of stress. At the same time, I have found that when people do make the necessary changes, their lives can become exciting, wonderful and stress-free.

If you claim to believe and accept all that is said, yet say that your case is different and that the ideas wouldn’t work for you, it will be easy for you to do nothing, or to do so little that you remain stressed, thus further proving that these ideas do not and will not work for you. They do, they will and they can, but you must remain open-minded. You must also put the ideas into practice as actively and consistently as you can.

I recall a seminar in which I was to give the second of four two-hour talks on the power of thought in relation to health to a group of about 300 people who all had cancer. They were all well-read in the ideas that I was about to present regarding the ability of human beings to use the power of their minds to change their physical health. Furthermore, the previous speaker had given an excellent compilation of the many times in the medical health literature in which positive health outcomes had occurred in people with cancer who had a positive mental attitude and vice versa.

As I started I wondered how I could make my session interesting and not leave them feeling bored and claiming that they had heard all I had to say many times before and that I had given them nothing new or useful. Finally I decided to ask a few questions.

My question ‘Wasn’t the last speaker excellent?’ produced claps, cheers and positive acknowledgements.

My next question ‘How many of you believe the information he gave and do believe that by your own mental attitude you can change your life?’ brought such a huge show of hands that I asked the opposite question.

‘How many of you do not believe that your thoughts can make any difference?’ This brought a show of about three hands only.

My next question was ‘How many of you are currently leading a life that is exactly the way you want it?’ No hands went up. This was not surprising since they all had cancer or were accompanying someone with cancer.

I had made sure that everyone looked around at the responses to each question so it was easy to make my concluding remark.

‘I don’t believe you.’

After a suitable pause, during which time no-one said a word, I continued. ‘Either your life is the way you want it to be or you do not really believe that you can change your life and your state of health by the way that you think and behave.’ This had the effect of shaking them up. Some protested, others started to ask questions. It is certain that they listened to the talk with a more active and open mind than they would have done otherwise. I ask you to read the rest of this book in a similar way.

You may well be saying, at this point, that it is all very well for other people to be happy optimists, but you just don’t feel like that and you do feel stressed, and the world is a tough place, and indeed you cannot cope, nor can you change the way things are by plastering a false smile on your face. After all, if it was that easy you probably wouldn’t be reading this book at all. If this is what you feel then I suggest you should be willing to suspend your disbelief and come along with us to see where we’re going. After all, nothing else has worked for you, has it?

If you do not change the directions in which you are headed, you will land up where you are going.

Taking control of your life

It is now time to take a leap forward. Be willing to accept the following assumptions and come with me as we find out where they lead. You owe it to yourself don’t you? You’ve been feeling stressed for a long time. What if, just possibly, these ideas could be the basis by which you can find ways of eliminating stress from your life? Let’s go. Here are the assumptions.

1 By your thoughts you have created the experience you have each day.

You have generated the assumptions that lead you to believe people do or don’t like you, that your employees do or don’t respect you, that you can or can’t trust people, that your family does or doesn’t appreciate you or that you are a success or a failure.

2 What you choose to think about yourself becomes the truth. Your truth is your world view. It has little to do with an (impossible) objective reality.

If you dress up and feel terrific you go to the party and have a ball, feeling glamorous and admired. Even if you go home and realize your petticoat was showing and you had a ladder in your tights it didn’t spoil the fun you had at the time.

On the other hand, if you were convinced that your white underclothes were showing through your black dress in the strobe lighting you would have had a ghastly time, even if, afterwards, you realized they weren’t. I’m sure you can think of examples of such situations in your life.

3 Your present situation is the result of your own thoughts and actions and the decisions you have made in the past. You are the creator of your present situation.

You may argue that much that has happened to you has been outside your control. Maybe that seems true. However, at every step you did have other options. They may have been totally unacceptable options, but you did have them. You may have wanted one career but bowed to parental pressures and gone into another one. You may have wanted to travel but been unwilling to give up your job. You may not have wanted to move to the country when your husband was transferred but preferred to go rather than separate. You may not have wanted to marry your girlfriend when she got pregnant but preferred to do so than to incur your parents’ wrath. Whatever the situation there were other options. The one you followed was, ultimately, your choice.

If you hold to this belief it leaves you in a position of power. It leaves you secure in the belief that you have control of your life, you had control in the past and, best of all, you have control of your future. In turn it leaves you in control of your stresses and tells you quite clearly that you can alter them.

Having said this, you may still be unconvinced and want to argue that you are not in control so let me ask you a question. Can you be absolutely sure that you are not in control of your life? Can you be certain that, no matter what you do, the good and bad things that are going to happen to you will happen anyway?

If you are not sure either way, not sure that you are in control and yet not absolutely sure that you are not in control, you have a decision to make. If you cannot be sure either way you could be wrong whichever option you choose. For most people, believing that they do have control of their lives is a positive belief system, believing that they don’t have control is a negative belief system and leaves them powerless. Wouldn’t it be better to be wrong in choosing a positive belief than to be wrong in choosing a negative belief system?

If indeed we are not in total control of our lives then you can either believe that, in which case the outlook for positive change to your stress levels is indeed grim, or you can disbelieve it. If you refuse to believe that you are not in control you will at least feel more positive and optimistic as you try to take charge of things and mould them your way.

On the other hand, if you are in fact in control and you believe this you can act positively, whereas if you choose not to believe it you will miss out on a lot of positive changes you could have made.

Since this may be a little complicated to grasp let me put it another way. There are four options:

1 If the truth is that you are not in control and you believe it then there is little you can do to change your stress levels and you might as well give up right now.

2 If the truth is that you are in control and you believe this then you can change your stress levels, starting right now. It is the two other options that are important.

3 If you are not in control but choose to believe you are, you are in a much better situation than either 1 or 4 (below).

4 If you choose to believe that you are not in control when in fact you are, you will as a result miss out on a lot of the positive decisions you could have made and benefits you could have achieved.

In other words, the most useful belief system is the one that says you are, in fact, in control of your life, of your thoughts, of all that occurs around you and of the amount of stress that you choose to experience. Since this is the most useful belief system to have, let’s hold to it and work with it, particularly since there is much evidence to support it.

If you feel you cannot do this I suggest you be willing to work with the ideas for the duration of this book and act ‘as if’ it were true and see where this leads you. The alternative is to give up at this point, stop reading and say that you can do nothing about the amount of stress you are experiencing.

Limiting thoughts

Everyone has some negative thoughts about themselves, at least some of the time. You may believe you are not good enough, not attractive enough, not unselfish enough. You may think you are too tall, too fat, too stupid, too slow, too impatient. You may think you can’t sing, can’t draw, aren’t artistic, aren’t intelligent, aren’t capable. You may think you handle money badly, handle people badly, make decisions badly and so forth.

Underlying all these surface negative beliefs that you have about yourself there will be one that is the biggest, worst and most painful to contemplate. We will call this your Ultimate Negative Belief or UNB. The irony is that this Ultimate Negative Belief you have is never true. It is a belief that you have built for yourself based on past experiences, yet in an outward objective sense it is not true. Isn’t that nice to know? After many years of working with patients in this way I have not yet found one whose UNB was based on fact. They have all been based on inappropriate but understandable interpretations made by people in response to situations that arose earlier in their life.

One of your tasks, in reducing the stress in your life, is to identify your own UNB. We will do this fully a little later on. For now consider what limiting or negative beliefs you have. They may be thoughts about yourself, they may be thoughts about other people, outside events, objects or the world around you. Stop reading right now, find a pen and paper and make a list of all the limiting or negative thoughts you have about yourself and about your life. They may include any or all of the following:

• I’m not good enough.

• People always let me down.

• I could never do so and so.

• Other people have all the luck.

• I’m no good at numbers.

• I can’t sing in tune.

• For the next 10 years I’ll have to deal with the mortgage.

• I’m a poor parent.

• Things always get on top of me.

Write your own list now.

Simply having these limiting thoughts can be stressful. The consequences of thinking them, day after day, can be even more stressful.

Mr T. came to see me because of the stress he experienced both at home and at work. In time we came round to the concept of limiting beliefs and, on his next visit, he produced the following list:

• I’ve reached the top of my profession.

• I’ll never earn more money than I do now.

• I can’t leave this job, I’m too old to get another.

• My new boss doesn’t like me.

• My colleagues don’t respect me the way they did.

• The children have gone their separate ways, you can’t expect them to stay close.

• The other grandparents have more to offer the grandchildren than we do.

• My wife and I don’t communicate any more. She keeps spending money we haven’t got.

• I’m getting angina like my father, I’m likely to have a heart attack.

• We’re too old to move to the country.

• We can’t afford to travel.

• I’m too old to do many of the things I had planned but haven’t yet done.

• When I retire, we’ll have to learn to manage on the pension. This means that life will be very restricted when I retire.

Is it any wonder Mr T. felt stressed? With all these Limiting Beliefs he was facing one perceived stress after another. I suggested that he change them.

‘I can’t change them,’ he said, ‘they’re true. I have reached the top of the profession, we don’t have enough money, I am too old to do many of the things I would have liked to do.’

‘Only if you think so,’ I said and then kept quiet while he let that sink in.

‘You mean if I think differently then things might change?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t know. It seems too easy.’

I suggested we take the beliefs one at a time. With regard to his profession, was there more he could do? He agreed he could in fact go higher, his equal-ranked colleague had just been promoted.

‘But they don’t need two senior executives,’ he said.

‘How do you know? They might expand, they might want you somewhere else.’

He still looked thoughtful, so I continued, ‘If you are convinced there is no future there for you, you will feel stressed; if you choose to believe there are good things ahead, (a) you will look for them, (b) you may even create them, and (c) you will feel good in the process.’

I decided to leave work and focus on his home life.

‘You and your wife don’t communicate any more?’

‘No. She’s not interested in what I do and she’s all involved with her bowls and her women friends. We have nothing to say to each other in the evenings.’

‘When did you last share the things you do at work with her?’

‘She wouldn’t be interested.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Well…’

‘How about giving it a try?’

He agreed that he could, and that he would also try to take an interest in what she did.

We went through the other restrictions he was placing on himself.

When he came back a fortnight later he reported that having talked things over with his wife he had found she had been growing depressed because he didn’t share things with her any more and that she felt this was because he had lost interest in her. She was delighted when he started sharing again. At work he had suggested a new project and his ideas were being considered.

The real point here is that if you decide to limit your horizons with these thoughts then they are limits, and therefore stresses. If you choose not to believe in them, if you choose to believe you can change things any way you want, you will feel more positive and optimistic. After all, you can’t be absolutely sure you can’t change things, so why choose to believe it? Choose to believe that you can and ‘…. thinking can make it so’. Your subconscious has a way of making your thoughts come true, not your goals and dreams necessarily, especially if they are vague hopes rather than definite aims, but your deeper thoughts and beliefs.

One of my Limiting Beliefs was that I couldn’t sing in tune. When I started running the workshops, which involved group singing, I found I had to sing out to lead the way or no-one else would so I prefaced the song with a self-defensive ‘Come on everyone, sing, it doesn’t matter if you’re in tune or not. If I hit the right note it is purely by accident so if I’m prepared to sing out you’d better be too, and for your own sakes you’d better drown my voice out.’

Not only did everyone feel a lot more comfortable but after a while I found I actually was hitting the right note more often than not. Relaxing does wonderful things for your vocal cords.

Some of your Limiting Beliefs may not involve you directly. They may include

• ‘men don’t cry’,

• ‘women are paid less than men’,

• ‘single parents are social misfits’,

• ‘there are more single women around than single men’,

• ‘you can’t make a living as an artist’,

• ‘you can’t rely on other people’,

• ‘if you haven’t been to university you can’t expect to get a good job’,

• ‘it’s impossible to get a job in the current economic climate’.

Again, thinking will make it so. Men do cry, I’ve seen them and so, probably, have you. There are some very well-paid women; there could be more if they believed sufficiently in themselves. You can be a well-paid artist under the right circumstances. There are jobs to be had, even in a depression. These things may happen less often than you would like but they do happen. The point is that while you have these Limiting Beliefs your deeds and actions are likely to contribute to them. Further, these Limiting Beliefs are putting restrictions on your life and you are feeling stressed by them. If you weren’t stressed by them, they wouldn’t come in the Limiting category. A belief like women aren’t violent’ may be stressful if you are a woman and feel like hitting out but think you have to suppress this. But if it makes you feel safe rather than stressed, it is a useful belief to have and not limiting.

Your ultimate negative belief

Your Ultimate Negative Belief has already been referred to. It is the biggie. It is the major stumbling block on your road to a happy and stress-free life. We will discuss it further, but later. If you want to pursue it now, turn to the chapter on Affirmations. There you will learn both how to find your Ultimate Negative Belief and how to antidote it with a Positive Alternative Belief.

Conscious and subconscious

We have talked about conscious thoughts. We have also talked about and alluded to deeper thoughts, thoughts that you perhaps haven’t brought to consciousness for many long years. It’s now time to take a closer look at the conscious and the subconscious minds and to consider their similarities and, more importantly, their differences.

Your conscious mind is where you do all your rational thinking. You plan, you consider, you analyse. You make decisions and you assess their results. With your conscious mind you keep yourself in line with reality, you try to be objective. Most people like to think they are rational human beings who can think and reason logically and act accordingly.

Your subconscious mind is subjective rather than objective. It relates to you personally. It is creative and intuitive. You can think of your subconscious as an entity that has your best interests, as it sees them, at heart, that is responsive to your logical thoughts and that assists you in creating a reality that conforms to your expectations.

If you think you’re going to be late for an appointment you will have the thought going round and round in your mind, ‘I’m going to be late’. Your subconscious picks this up and interprets it, not as a fear but as a statement of fact. Since it has your best interests at heart it then does all it can to make sure that reality works out the way you expect it to be and it makes you late. It may encourage you to do just one more task before leaving home or allow your mind to focus elsewhere so you forget something and have to go back for it, or it may take your conscious mind off where you’re going so you take a wrong turning. All or any of these things can make you late and your subconscious has done its job in making sure that your conscious prediction came true.

If your conscious mind keeps repeating that you’re unpopular and no-one loves you and your friends don’t really want you then your subconscious will make sure that you focus on the events and situations that conform with this view, thus again supporting your conscious mind with its view of reality.

Your subconscious mind will also make you behave in such a way that the outcome conforms to your world view. If you think you are unpopular you are likely to withdraw in social situations and keep to yourself, thus encouraging other people to leave you alone and proving, to you at least, your unpopularity.

The subconscious has little sense of humour. It is also very literal. Be careful of such phases as ‘I’ll die if I don’t get that job’. You just might.

Little Johnnie had just learnt to walk when granny came to stay. He insisted on carrying a plate of cakes to her at teatime. All was going well until granny saw what he was doing and said, in an endeavour to make him more careful, ‘Watch it, Johnnie, you’ll fall.’ He did just that. He watched it and then, as instructed, he fell.

Spend a few days listening to all the messages you feed into your subconscious. Are they serving you? Are they positive? Do you tell yourself you are happy or sad, successful or a failure, liked or disliked, good-looking or a mess, wealthy or poor, healthy or sick? The first step is to become aware of these messages, then to analyse them and then to change them as appropriate.

If you have a spotty face but lovely glossy hair you can either gaze into the mirror and say ‘what a mess’ or ‘how pretty/handsome’. If your subconscious gets the ‘mess’ message you are likely to do a lot of things in the day that will contribute to making you more of a mess. You may slouch, spill things, be careless with things that make your clothes and hands dirty or do a number of other things to increase your look of dishevelment. If, on the other hand, your subconscious gets the ‘pretty/handsome’ message it is likely to encourage you to act more cleanly and do things in such a way that you are neater and more elegant and generally contribute to your overall feeling of looking good.

It is not simply a question of focusing on the more positive aspects of your appearance, although this is a powerful tool in decreasing the stress you might otherwise feel about it. It is also important to encourage the unconscious actions and decisions you make that contribute to the desired end result of looking good rather than the unconscious actions that make you look dowdy.

It is valuable to know that the power of this subconscious mind, which is enormous, is yours for the asking. You don’t have to plead with it, pray to it, or bully and cajole it into doing what you want. All you have to do is recognize its capacity and programme it correctly and you will get the desired result.

The limiting factor in all this is yourself. If you choose to you can use the power of your subconscious to your own advantage. Equally, if you choose, you can use the power of your subconscious to keep you where you are and encourage all the things you fear. Which course will have you less stressed? Obviously the former course is the one that will lead to less stress. It is sad that so few people choose to use it. I repeat, the limiting factor is yourself. It is up to you what you choose to do and how you choose to think.

Fear of failure

So many people behave as if it is easier to predict failure and make that come true than to predict success and bring that about. The very notion of ‘touching wood’ tells us that we’re afraid our successes will be taken away from us, we’re afraid we’ll fail. There is a common fear that if you predict that something good is going to happen you are jeopardizing the positive outcome by even mentioning it; ‘touching wood’ is, in some way, supposed to undo the harm that could be caused by making the prediction.

It seems that in our society it is thought better not to predict success or a good time for yourself than to predict it and then not get it. It is more acceptable to predict that you have failed an exam and then be bashfully grateful when you have passed than to predict success. Many have a fear that if they predict and expect something good to happen and it doesn’t, people will think much less of them than if they had predicted a poor outcome initially. The saying ‘Pride goes before a fall’ says it all. Why not be proud? Why not be positive and hopeful?

Betty told me that she was always afraid of doing badly in the exams at school even though she was a good scholar and usually came in the top third of the class. While some of her close friends, who were also in the top third, were saying the work was easy and that they felt they’d done enough study, she couldn’t admit to them, or to herself, that she had done enough or that she was confident. Her greatest fear was appearing confident and then finding the result was worse than she had anticipated.

Even at the times when she felt she did know her work well she still couldn’t leave her books alone, fearing she’d overlooked something. She’d get into last-minute panics and rush back to check on facts. She’d create in her mind exam questions that she couldn’t answer and she’d get very stressed and tense in the days leading up to the exams. Even afterwards she would focus on all the things she hadn’t included in her answer. She hated hanging around with people discussing the papers and hearing the things they had put in and that she had omitted or done differently, fearing that they were right and she was wrong. She’d then tell people she was sure she’d failed. The results, when they finally came out, were an anticlimax. Invariably she had done well.

Her mother had brought her in to see me because Betty’s major school exams were looming at the end of the following year and she was afraid that the stress would be too much for her. I pointed out to Betty that it was fine to study hard. It was indeed silly to assume she knew everything she needed to know and to stop studying too early, but that it was also counter-productive to get over-stressed by focusing on the things she didn’t know.

During the tests and exams of the coming year she was to work just as hard as ever at her books, but she was gradually to start focusing on all the things she did know and to start assuring herself she could learn all her work in time and that she would do well in the exams as a result of her diligent efforts. In the few hours before each test or exam, when further study was impossible, she was told to start affirming to herself that she knew all she needed to know, that she had done her work well and that she would do well in the exam.

Note that she was not told simply to assume she had done enough work and that all would be well. She was not told to stop trying. The aim was to create a situation where she did study hard but where the extra, non-productive stress was removed from the situation.

The results were interesting. Both she and her mother reported that she was indeed less stressed. There were two added benefits that she had not foreseen. Firstly, she told me, study was becoming easier as she kept telling herself she was capable of learning and understanding all she needed. Secondly, she said that when it came to the actual exam she was able to answer the questions better both because she remembered more and because she was less stressed and was able to relax and think more clearly and formulate her answers better.

The period between doing the exams and getting the results had always been a trial for all the family. They were tense because Betty was tense; they were also tense because they kept hearing her say she had done badly. She was told to start affirming to herself, from the moment that she walked out of the exam room, that she had done well.

‘But what if I haven’t, what if I’m wrong?’ Her greatest fear raised its head again.

‘Then at least you’ll have spent the intervening time feeling happy rather than stressed,’ was my answer.

‘That’s like living in a fool’s paradise,’ she said anxiously.

‘Better than living in a fool’s hell as you do now, worrying when you have no need to.’ With this she agreed, albeit reluctantly.

As a result of harnessing her subconscious, by programming it for success rather than failure, she was not only less stressed but more successful too. She still found it hard to tell people she was sure she had done well, but at least she was able to stop bewailing how badly she had done.

It is worth repeating one important aspect of this. Notice one very important thing about the way Betty reprogrammed her subconscious. She did not go into the study period saying ‘I know enough. I know I’ll pass and do well.’ She included in all her affirmations both the concept that she was working hard and well and the concept that as a result she would do well in the exams.

In this she was in sharp contrast to Edward.

Edward had gone to a new and progressive university where the students were encouraged to set their own study patterns. He had been at a strict school and the new freedom was going to his head. Further, he had joined friends who were familiar with affirmations and their use and who spoke glibly about the power of the subconscious without really understanding it. He decided to copy them. His affirmations included ‘the work is easy’, ‘I am good and will pass all my exams’, ‘I’m tops, I’m successful and I’m competent’, and ‘when I need to remember what we did in class it will all come back to me simply and easily’.

On the face of it these are all very positive and empowering affirmations. Perhaps, when the power of his mind becomes strong enough, they will become sufficient to see him through the challenges of his life. However, in this instance they took the form of being relatively trivial thoughts and became an excuse not to study. He was surprised when he failed badly at the end of the first term, but he had learnt a valuable lesson about the subconscious.

Use the power of positive thoughts and your subconscious mind in combination with your conscious endeavours. Don’t dump the responsibility on to your subconscious and mess around.