What's taking place during stress is actually much simpler than a transaction between stressful life events and you. There aren't two parties involved in stress. There is only one - your own mind.
You can't tell yourself that your stress is produced in your head and feel better. You still need to learn how to create a change.
You might think that shifting your thoughts is as easy as setting your mind to it. But stressful thoughts aren't held in place through choice or will power. They're held in place through perceived truth value.
The less you think counterfactually, the less you experience stress. Stress, in this light, isn't a bad thing. It's simply a warning system telling you that your mind has lost touch with what's real.
To believe that your husband, wife, parents, kids, boss, job, bank account, or body is even partly responsible for your emotions, to think that there are bullets 'out there' that you have to contend with, that there are stressful life events to overcome, is to miss something vital.
Look closer at the stress in your own life and you can identify that negative emotions are always built on counterfactual statements.
People around the world now complain about stressors everyday, and the word shows up throughout professional and lay literature. But in reality there is no such thing as a stressor. Why not? Because nothing has the inherent power to provoke stress.
It's time we learned the truth about stress. It's time we identified the thoughts that actually create our stress and learned to dismantle them one by one.
