My Best Stress Reducer

Stress is cre­ated by our imag­i­na­tion and elim­i­nated by it. The same men­tal mech­a­nism that makes you feel hor­ri­ble can make you feel won­der­ful. When peo­ple catch onto this, the addic­tion issues in the world will drop at an amaz­ing rate. The prob­lem and the cure are worked by this one cen­tral dynamic. All you have to do to prove this to your­self is to lis­ten to peo­ple talk about their favorite foot­ball team. If the team wins, they are happy; if the team loses they are sad. To the out­side observer the win or loss means noth­ing, so there is no stress to the observer. The vil­lage idiot may be in emo­tional pain (but prob­a­bly not) but it is prob­a­bly an emo­tional pain dif­fer­ent than yours. Think about it. You are both on the planet. Pain is more a choice than we would ever want to admit.

True enough, it is not what hap­pens to you that mat­ters as much as how you see it, but to make that phrase work; you have to make friends with your own imag­i­na­tion. There is an art to that. It begins in bet­ter self-talk and pos­i­tive cre­ative imagery, but it also has to include a phi­los­o­phy of life that embraces mys­tery over analy­sis. That is the best philo­sophic stress reducer you will prob­a­bly ever find. Here is how it works: part of the mind is a prob­lem solver always look­ing for a prob­lem to solve. It gets greedy (and is attached to the ego) and it thinks it needs to turn every­thing into a prob­lem. It ignores the fact that it requires way too much emo­tional energy. It is happy to drain the last ounce of energy out of you by being “right” about some­thing that truly does not matter.

Analy­sis is a tool — not a way of life that goes as far as it promises. Quite frankly, it can chase off every friend you have and your fam­ily too. We just got through a cen­tury of extreme reduc­tion­ism. The myth of it has been that if we could just reduce every­thing to ulti­mately pri­mary ele­ments, we could con­trol life. All of the efforts have only taken us to deeper lev­els of mys­tery. The pieces mat­ter, but the whole is found by fol­low­ing the never-ending trail of the mys­tery — not by cat­e­go­riz­ing the observ­able parts.

Here I am! Bil­lions of mol­e­cules and cells! Not! We are mys­te­ri­ously more than a sum of the parts. Unspool your DNA and you have still only just got­ten started. There is a bet­ter way: Limit the time you spend on analy­sis and spend more time sniff­ing flow­ers and watch­ing sun­sets. Choose the mys­tery pill over the ana­lyt­i­cal one and see if you do not find life more sat­is­fy­ing. Invite your imag­i­na­tion to see and feel the difference.