Stress is an automated process and it is emotion-centric. When the emotion is highly dominant, the thinking brain is completely bypassed. That is the reason, a person cannot think straight in a stressed out situation. Can we change the stress response by the intervention of thinking brain? The answer is NO if we leave the automation freely. But, with sensitivity training, it is possible to dynamically alter the stress response as it unfolds in real time. There is a thin line of a gap between the trigger and response. One can exploit this region.
In between response and experience is space. Experience has no inherent meaning to it. Meaning is outside the experience & it comes from our mind. How we assign the meaning to the experience has an effect on our feeling. If the experience generates a bad feeling then it is important to work on the alternate possibilities of the “meaning” that we assign to the experience. This is the way the thinking brain helps in changing the stress response.
The entire process of experience, assigning meaning & responding to the experience have become so integral that all of those activities incoherence as one entity. It is so automatically programmed that we don’t even realise that there are individual components to the experience i.e the experience in itself as well as the meaning of the experience. The meaning is assigned straight from our own faith & belief structure.
Practice method:
In order to have the less stressful effect of the experiences of life, it is good to follow this practice method.
1. Pick the experience that causes the stress
2. Bring it to your mind, the event/people responsible for this experience
3. Find out the meaning that you have automatically assigned to this experience
4. Now, look for 3 more alternative meanings to this experience
5. If all the alternatives generate negative feeling then specifically generate a more positive meaning to the event.
6. Now, substitute this meaning for the experience to have a positive feeling.
No comments:
Post a Comment