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Reduce Stress With Present Moment Awareness

It’s happening again; tension in your shoulders squeezing you, stomach clenching, and that familiar vice grip of pressure in your head. Here comes the stress and overwhelm, visiting you with the same familiar list of stressful thoughts.

Great teachers like Buddha, or in our day Eckhart Tolle, offer present moment awareness as a way to reduce stress, release anger and improve health. We’ve all heard how wonderfully healing it is to be in present moment awareness with its seemingly illusive calm, so how do we get there?

Our mind unceasingly interprets the never-ending flow of information pouring into our brain. Every day, we experience upwards of 10,000 of these interpretations as thoughts, many of them running like a newsreel ticker, repeating the same stressful stories.

To fully experience the present moment we must find a way hush those thoughts, even for just a minute.

A quick, easy way to release the grip of stressful thoughts is with a gratitude practice. Gratitude instantly shifts the focus out of our head full of thoughts, and gets us back into the present moment.

Most of us weren’t taught a gratitude habit, instead we’re encouraged to consume a daily diet of bad news; things going wrong, diseases we could develop, and dangerous conflicts. We’re conditioned to stress by an unrelenting flow of information telling us to worry.

The primitive part of our brain that insured our survival kept us focused on danger; ignoring a rustle in the grass could result in becoming another predator’s next meal! Today, that part of our brain still functions, but instead of the tiger in the grass, we react to the stories stalking us; the tanking economy, the deteriorating environment, or the personal conflict we keep replaying in our mind. When we can’t turn it off, that fear brain overwhelms us with chronic stress.

The good news is that fear and gratitude can not occur together! It’s impossible for the mind to think stressful, fearful thoughts and be grateful at the same time! Gratitude quiets the fear brain and snaps us back into the peace of the present moment.

Gratitude Formula

First, find one thing that fills you with thankfulness. It can be the smallest of things; your brain will respond positively without caring about the size or value of your choice. Dwell for a few moments on why you are grateful for this thing, then let the why settle to the background of your gratefulness, like the blue sky on a softly clouded summer’s day.

Now, make a statement of gratitude: I am grateful for ____________.

For a few minutes repeat your gratefulness statement to yourself. Remember there is a subtle difference between thinking about gratitude and practicing gratitude. Let yourself feel grateful.

You can change your wording, such as; I am so thankful for______, or thank you so much for______, but stay with a simple phrase.You can thank yourself, your higher power, God, Gods or Goddess, it doesn’t matter as long as you feel grateful.

Are you so stressed you can’t come up with something? If you are reading this you are probably in the top percentage of the world population that has clean running water, food, and a bed. Are you able to take a breath? Focus on being thankful for your breath, softly repeating the word yes on your in-breath, and thank you on your out-breath.

After practicing your gratitude statement for a few minutes, notice how you feel. Are you more relaxed and calm? Did your muscles relax, even slightly, and your mind slow down? When practicing gratitude, your brain floods with specific neurotransmitters, the good stuff that creates pleasant feelings and counteracts stress!

When you feel stressful thoughts taking you out of the present moment, use this gratitude practice to bring yourself back. Keep a gratitude journal. Practice gratitude statements every day. Besides bringing you back to the present moment, reducing stress and increasing positive brain chemicals, you may find there is an abundance of things to be grateful for in your life, coloring your world with joy and peace!

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Focus on the Present – Do You Remember What ‘Now’ Feels Like For You?

No less than Abraham Maslow said, “The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.”

Here are some words associated with the present (in case you aren’t quite sure what that means): immediate, this instant, here and now, time being, today, nowadays, moment, now, in this moment, current… I don’t want to get too philosophical (far be it from me), but this moment is over… and we’re on to the next one. Oops that one is over. Next…oh, it’s over, too. Well, here comes another.

The present really is PRESENT – right now. This minute. Today. You can certainly expand it just a bit, but the gist of this is that many of us are missing a great deal of what is happening now because we are focused beyond or around and behind what is happening now.

Let’s get a few visuals for this concept – and use these to be reminded of some of your own.

  • First, think about when you have been at a party and you are talking with someone, but that person is forever looking beyond you, over your shoulder, to the back of himself, or essentially any other place but right into your eyes. How do you feel when that happens? Not too great. Of course, if we are doing that to someone else, they aren’t feeling very important and we are missing whatever it is that he or she is saying and the entire experience of that conversation.
  • A personal one occurred for me one morning several years ago when I was driving from Tonopah, NV to Goldfield, NV. It was about 6 a.m. I was not in a good mood. I was tired because my room had been noisy. I had eaten a dreadful breakfast. I was driving about an hour to the location for the workshop I was going to do and I knew that the conditions for this workshop were not going to be ideal…and I was worried about that. So, I was just generally grousing around in my head. But, then, I came around a corner and experienced what I have since found a name for – and that is aesthetic arrest. The beauty and majesty of this valley in these early morning hours – well, I don’t have the language to describe it. But I experienced an in-the-moment, moment. I was brought right back to NOW through that experience and everything else faded away.
  • One more example…and this is back when I was a professor. Now, as many of you know, I don’t have children and that’s by choice so you don’t need to feel sad for me. Anyway, I had been presenting at a conference in Louisville, traveled to Lexington to see my family and stayed at my brother’s house. At that time, he and his wife had three young children – maybe 7, 6 and 4. I had taken a bunch of work to do with me while I was there…because of course, I always had work to do being a faculty member. Alas…it was not to be. Here’s how I went back and told my graduate classes at the university about it the next week. I told them, “I get it. Those of you who say that you are having trouble finding time to study or to get your research done – and it’s because of your children. I get it. They demand, in the most positive way, attention now and as a human being, you happily give it to them.” So that was another, NOW experience for me.

I hope these make sense and help to illustrate the ‘present’ for you. Take some time right now (in the PRESENT) to see remember some of the times when you were ‘knocked back to now’ – and really understood about the present. I have no doubt but that you can come up with several.

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Presenting Yourself With Confidence – How to Break Out of Your Shell

Imagine a royal court. You have the king, the dukes, the prince, the peasants and everyone in-between. Each of us has the equivalent to a royal court that resides in our heads. We populate the roles of the court with people we know and ourselves. Depending on our role and depending on the role of whomever it is we are interacting with, we act differently. Daily interactions always go through this thought process. If you’ve given yourself the role of peasant, you will always be expecting people to put you down. If, however, you’ve given yourself the role of a king, you don’t expect to ever be put down. The way one views oneself has been influenced by a myriad of factors, but most importantly by the people one surrounds oneself by. The trick to the whole game of life is figuring out which role you’ve given yourself and deciding if that’s the role you want to have. You can choose any role you want, but whatever role you choose becomes your reality.

When someone treats you in a way that isn’t congruent with your self-assigned role, your ego get’s shaken. You can physically feel the effects when that happens. That’s called “fight or flight.” I’m sure you’ve heard of it. I just find it amazing that the body reacts as if it is in physical danger when the ego is rattled.

The word “ego” has to be the most misused word in the English language. It’s been associated with “megalomania,” “vanity,” and a bunch of other negative concepts. According to Freud, it actually just represents the conscious, instead of the unconscious, mind. If a challenge to the conscious mind causes a physical reaction, it stands to reason that you can control the physical world through your conscious thoughts. I could take it a step further and posit that you must change your thoughts before you can change your physical reality. If we consider this as truth, then we aren’t reacting to our environments, we are creating them!

Once, I walked into a friend’s house that needed to be cleaned badly. His name is Charlie. I wouldn’t say he was up to hoarder status, but he definitely needed a hand. I realized that I could help change the situation in that house; and, without sounding condescending; I offered to hire Charlie a maid service. The thought of a maid service coming in to help clean up bothered Charlie to the point of physical agitation. Why would somebody with a dirty house be so against a paid maid service? I would have loved such a luxury.

The answer to that riddle lies in the internal role my friend has given himself… not exactly king. My offer to have a paid service come and clean things challenged his role, thereby challenging his ego, and causing him physical discomfort. Having a maid come in and clean would mean that the role he had given himself was false… that he wasn’t privileged enough to have a service like that. These are the types of life changing thought processes that need to be considered when attempting to unlock your inner swag. Have you given yourself the wrong role? Are you a peasant or are you upwardly mobile? If you’ve given yourself the wrong role, you need to change it and now.

If Charlie had already made the conscious decision to change the way he views himself in relation to his environment, he wouldn’t have resisted the notion of having a paid maid service come in and clean. He would have already been agitated at the sight of such a dirty house and would have been waiting for the opportunity to gather enough resources to get it fixed up. If he had done the internal work before the chance presented itself, he would have been able to benefit from it. If he previously visualized a clean house, it would have actualized at that moment. Daydreaming is, therefore, productive. Dream your reality into existence.

Some people just aren’t ready to view the world in a different way than they always have and they miss out on life because of it. Charlie could have challenged his own ego and upgraded his environment; but instead chose the lazy route and stayed in his comfort zone. It’s much better to step outside of the comfort zone, even if it means asking for help or thinking of oneself in a different light. To do it any other way is to cheat oneself. Do not wait around to be swallowed up by an environment you’ve created. That’s never a good look.

Ask yourself, “What role have I given myself?” You are not your role. You never were. You never will be. Your role is just a hat you wear, that’s all. Becoming the best person you can possibly be involves assessing your perspective. You can’t become the person you want to be if you don’t start with a basic understanding of who you are. Just like a general going to war against an enemy, you must assess the obstacles that stand in the way of you unlocking your personal potential. The first of those obstacles is your ego.

Everyone has doubts and insecurities about themselves… some are natural, but most are shaped by those around us. The art of finding yourself in all of that involves, oddly enough, finding yourself in those around you. People project their own insecurities onto you. You absorb those interactions and then they become a part of your personality. You really are the sum of the people around you. They help shape the way you view yourself and the way you view the world. You are the flesh and blood representation of all the thoughts, emotions, and views you have absorbed from those around you.

It’s important to be conscious about which notions you allow yourself to absorb and which you allow to “pass.” Once you allow a certain belief to enter your mind and become a fixture, you will begin to mirror that belief and your entire reality will bend in order to make room for it. Renovating your house of cards is just as time-consuming and uncomfortable as renovating your physical house. It hurts, but that’s the only way to truly grow.

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