Imagine that every single time you blink, around seven people would have died as a direct or indirect result of stress.
According to the Center for Disease Control/National Institute on Occupational Safety & Health, the workplace is the number one cause of life stress. The CDC reports 110 million people die every year as a direct result of stress. That is seven people every 2 seconds.
When I read this statement, I started becoming a lot conscious of the stress we go through every single day.
When does the average person today start stressing?
Well let’s go back to the moment right before they go to bed. They usually stress about hitting the snooze button, and anticipating feeling drained and tired the next morning. You go to sleep with the intention of waking up on the wrong side of the bed. Your alarm goes off, and if you magically did not hit the snooze button to have a fifteen-minute peaceful retreat before a long stressful day of work, you decide get up cause you have to. Obligations are what got you out of bed, and with obligations comes stress.
Since the phone is already in your hand, you might as well check your notifications.
Now I know phones are a blessing to have. Technology has revolutionized the way we interact with the world. As a digital entrepreneur, I know exactly what I’m talking about. Before I could afford a good computer, I used to do all the work on my phone. My usage was averaging a staggering ten hours a day! At this rate, I would spend almost half of my life looking at the screen of my phone.
When I got a laptop, I switched all my work there, yet I was still averaging six or seven hour of daily phone usage. There isn’t enough awareness in the world about phone addiction and its mental health implications.
Research has found that when we get a message from someone, the moment we glimpse at the phone and see it, we usually get a burst of dopamine in our body. Now let me tell you, that your body f*cking loves it. You will automatically want more. But what happens when you wake up, and look at your phone, to see that you got no notifications?
Your body is going to feel that there’s something wrong going on. You feel disappointed that you didn’t get this dopamine hit that you were expecting.
Now your body is feeling the disappointment, and it doesn’t like it. You have to find a way to compensate for those bad feelings right? So what do you do? You start stressing about getting rid of that feeling of disappointment.
Seconds after we wake up, we start our day with a bit of stress that can snowball into many stressful events throughout the day.
Let’s imagine for a second, that you are a car. Your brain is driving the car, and your body is the engine. You hit the gas and start driving, but a few seconds later you start hearing the engine roaring.
The car is a manual, and so is your brain.
If you don’t shift gears and keep hitting the gas pedal, the engine is going to roar louder and louder till it breaks!
Now a beautiful thing happens when you become conscious of what’s happening. If you can hear the engine struggling, you remember to take the conscious decision of shifting gears. In reality, our conscious bran is too focused on creating our reality that we can barely hear our subconscious engine beginning to stress.
It’s hard to stand still for a moment and become conscious of the emotional state you started your day with. You’re late to work or school, and you’re feeling the urge to go pour your stress into a hot cup of a coffee. The emotions go unnoticed yet in effect.
Creation starts when you look at your phone in the morning, and if you feel stress building up, you take a conscious decision to focus on accepting and releasing. You focus on creating a different outcome to a habitual state of mind.
I’ve struggled with stress most of my life, but when I found that sweet balance of stress and creation a lot of things started to change. We all have problems and obligations. Yet only a small percentage of people would manage to balance between the state of stress and the state of creation.
There’s a beautiful thing that happens when you get into that state of creation. In the midst of stressful events that are giving you a bad day, you make a conscious decision to create a different outcome.
A state of creation, I came to realize, is the utmost blessing that each and every one of us have.
People who used my programs witnessed those habitual states of creation when they understood three simple ideas:
- Emotional Intelligence is a skill that can be developed.
- Neuroplasticity gives you the ability to rewire your brain and create a new state of mind.
- Learning creates awareness, and awareness creates application.
I decided to make a complete training program that covers those topics and many more. 3500 people tried the training program and it drastically changed the way they interacted with stress. They were able to access their inner state of creation to change the outcomes of their reality.