8.23.2013

Where Does Stress Come From?

"People say modern life is stressful. Stress is not a characteristic of life or times, but of people. Stress does not come from the environment, it comes from the mind of the individual under stress. We make certain assumptions about the world, and we become attached to those assumptions. We suffer from thinking. We worked too hard to learn our ideas about the world to give them up. Like poker players who have already lost too much, we desperately double the bet in hopes of forcing fate to give us a good card. We think about things too much and too seriously and we suffer a great deal from trying to make the world match our thinking. We com-plain about how the world fails to live up to our expectations. We think about how life doesn't live up to its billing, and how it should, and how it is rotten that it doesn't, and how we should somehow fix it. Many people think themselves to death.

In order to survive, we have to apply what we have learned from experience. But it is equally true that in order to thrive—in order to stay alive—we have to overcome continually what we have previously learned. If we don't somehow get rescued from our assumptions about life, they devour us. Rescue involves recognizing that the assumptions we so stubbornly cling to as truths are, in fact, decisions we have made about what "should be true" based on past experiences."

-Brad Blanton, Radical Honesty



Related Posts:

  • A Relationship Should Free You “Nasasakal ako.” “He’s too controlling.” “It’s like I can’t breathe in this relationship.” “We always talk about her, and then she gets mad if I suddenly feel like spending a d… Read More
  • Failing Exams week is almost over for us here at UST. Some are sighing, some are planning to go see a movie or spa date or whatever with friends as a form of celebration, because hey, w… Read More
  • Christie (Part One)  There she is.   She was wearing the yellow sun dress her mom bought her for her 21st birthday. I could remember her grinning when she opened the box, and the l… Read More
  • I mean seriouslyI'M NOT A 1D FAN. God knows sanity of this entire species will cease to exist before I even watch a One Direction music video on Youtube. I don't hate them, and frankly they have s… Read More
  • Asian Science Guy"To me it is truly remarkable that on a single sheet of paper one can write down the laws that govern all known physical phenomena, covering forty-three orders of magnitude, from t… Read More

1 comment: