Success Tip: Alter Your Perceptions To Reduce Stress Levels

Your life each day can be viewed as a stream of connected events - some positive and some not so positive. The not-so-positive or negative events can cause great stress, but they have only the stress-producing power over you that you assign to them. Separate your perceptions, opinions, and value judgments of a negative event from the event. Affirm to yourself, “It’s just an event” and you will avoid triggering stress reactions.

Because time proceeds in one direction only, you do not have the power or the option to change the outcome of an event. But you have total power to choose how or whether you will respond or react to the event, thereby influencing succeeding events and outcomes. It is likely that, because of different beliefs, values, and opinions, four people who see exactly the same event will relate and react to it totally differently. But beliefs, values, and opinions are always in the mind, not in the event. Use that knowledge to separate your emotions from the events that occur in your life.

Probably 80 percent of the stress you experience during your life is created solely by how you use your mind. Learn to use your mind correctly, and your stress level will be automatically reduced. Use your mind as you always have and as those around you do, and your stress level will continue to build up until your body breaks down. Therefore, your goal is to stop reacting mentally and emotionally to what is going on around you, to perceive each new situation as just a neutral event. Then you can choose unemotionally what response to make. Your life stays under your control.

Daily life in today’s world is full of potentially stress-triggering events. The more active you are in your life, the busier you get, the more challenges you accept, and the more goals you set, the greater your potential for stress. Yet your stress level is something over which you can exercise almost total control, should you choose to.

To reduce stress, don’t make value judgments about people or events. A value judgment occurs when you inject strong opinions, beliefs, or feelings into or about an event. Value judgments include: good or bad, just or unjust, right or wrong, pleasant or sickening. None of these value judgments exists in the event itself, but only in how your mind chooses to perceive the event. The moment you begin to inject negative opinions, feelings, or beliefs into the event, you automatically stir up negative stress-producing emotions. Make a negative value judgment about the outcome of an event, an experience, or even another person and you end up upset and full of stress.