What Is Stress? A New Definition Of Stress For The 21st Century

What is stress?

This is the question we will be looking at today and I will share a new definition of stress that helps me to look at stress in a more manageable way.

The essential skill of the twenty first century is the ability to effectively process life. And those who are stressed, are stressed not because their life is stressful, but because they have an ineffective system for processing life.

Over the past few years it seems as if 'all you can eat' buffets have become hugely popular. They sell the promise of unlimited food, yet really who can eat more than one normal sized dinner?

Even though the opportunity is to eat all you can, our digestive capacity limits our consumption.

In just the same way our emotional digestive system limits our consumption of life. So we can only experience as much as we're able to consume.

Life may bring us an unending and unlimited array of experiences, like the ultimate 'all you can eat' buffet. However because we clog ourselves up with undigested emotions about what happened yesterday, last week and what may happen next week, we do not have the ability to take in many new fresh experiences.

Everyday we have hundreds of opportunities pass in front of us. People that would make great Lovers, Friends. Business opportunities that could fulfill us, bring us great wealth. Activities that would thrill us. People, situations and books that hold the solutions we seek. Yet we are so consumed with our ex, our shitty job, our poverty and our boring life that we don't even notice that these possibilities exist.

The twentieth century made more progress over the material world than the rest of the entire preceding 7,000 years since Civilizations first began. It changed the entire nature of possibilities that we can envisage for our lives. It made these social changes largely through advances in manufacturing processes.

A manufacturing process is the sequence of events that have to happen for raw materials to be turned out into a finished product that someone wants to buy. At the start of the twentieth century, few cars a day were made. It was a time consuming, labor intensive and expensive process. By the start of the twenty first century the incremental time and expense of each car's production was a fraction of what it had been and many millions a year were produced.

Streamlined production in all areas has made what was once prohibitively expensive to become consumed by the mainstream Consumer.

Yet what is to come in our century will make the changes in the last look positively pedestrian. The skill of the twenty-first century will not be the processing of physical resources.

Growth in all of it's forms. Personal, economic, social and spiritual is limited by consumption. If we don't have the ability to pay it attention, we won't buy, interact with it or learn from it.

Just as the body needs the nutrients from food to feed it's growth, our mind needs the experiences that life brings to grow to the next level of evolution.

And so growth is limited by our ability to process and digest the events of life emotionally and free our attention to consume more.

So the skill of the twenty first century will be the speed with which we can digest experiences. How quickly we can get over feelings of anger, frustration, bitterness and disappointment.

Almost always we do get over these feelings. However we usually hold onto them for days or weeks. Just as a clogged up physical digestion brings problems and affects the bodies ability to maintain health so too does a clogged up emotional system.

Your mind needs fresh thoughts as much as your body needs fresh nutrients. There is a constant supply of fresh ideas and experiences clamoring to be digested, but the bottlenecks in emotional digestion are causing a pile up which feels overwhelming.

We have to update our process of digesting life to get up to speed with todays pace of life. This digestive system, like the physical processing of goods, has a specific process. A sequence of tasks that have to be passed through to achieve the polished, finished product.

The finished product, in this instance will be the experience broken down to stored meanings and memories. Cleared from conscious attention, but available to recall from your stored databank of past experiences whenever necessary.

The defining skill to thrive in the twenty first century will be the speed of moving an experience from present to past. It is this ability that determines the velocity of your life experience. Meaning the number of experiences you encounter. Which really is a measure of your openness and acceptance of life. Which amounts to the central question of life...

Am I here to devour life or cringe and hide from life?

So the faster you can process negative experiences, the quicker you remove them from your experience and move on. And it tends to be negative experiences that grip your attention for longer, whereas more pleasant experiences typically zip through. Part of the joy from them comes from their freshness.

So back to my implied opening promise, a definition of stress.

Stress is the conscious awareness of a thought.

Why so? Isn't that a little extreme?

Because when we are enthralled with life we lose self consciousness and don't stop to be aware of what we are thinking. And because once we hold a conscious thought we start to limit our capacity. And what starts limiting our capacity is the origin of stress. If you've read any traditional views of stress, you'll be aware that stress is about exceeding the individual's capacity to cope.

It is easy to stop a fire when it is just a spark, but very difficult once it has turned into a raging inferno.

So the key to managing stress is to never let it build up to a state where you lose your ability to think clearly and deal with things. Developing a more effective Emotional Digestive System is advanced stress management. It avoids stress building up and taking control of your emotional wellbeing.

But isn't it necessary to think?

Of course. But the quicker you can get the thought of your mind, the quicker you are free to fully engage with the next situation. What happens too often is we are still thinking about the last scene, when the play of life has moved on to the next scene.

In the next few weeks we will be discussing how to develop a better system to digest life...