Stress, Life, and how to not let them control you (part 2)

Last post I spoke of how the Ch'i can affect our bodies and our moods. It is this affect on our being that effects those who are around us. We as human beings are social creatures and crave, nay require interaction with other people. A problem that occurs, with some of us, is that in our search for a connection with someone else, we morph our beliefs, emotions, and very thoughts to what others around us believe, feel, or think.  In an article written by Dr. Athena Staik, (http://blogs.psychcentral.com/relationships/2011/06/the-secret-to-being-authentically-you-part-1/) she says: "Life is a learning journey. We are each unique beings living in a world surrounded by unique others, with whom, paradoxically, we also share a lot in common. The best and perhaps only way to really understand others is to know and understand ourselves." One method of understanding ourselves is through meditation.

There are as many ways to meditate, as there are people in the world.  The reason for this is due to what is in the paragraph above, our uniqueness.  Meditation is simply a state of mind. It is a tool used to achieve an insight into what is our center. Finding what is in the center of our "uniqueness", keeps us grounded into what makes us an individual.  It helps us to not get lost in other people's beliefs, emotions, or thoughts. If everyday you reach into yourself for a little sense of peace, then all the stresses you come into contact with will be more manageable.  Think about this way, that stress is your belief of what you think others require of you. You would have no stress if you were in control of what was required of you. This is not a revelation, but no one can control you but you. Your thoughts, your ideas, your actions, and mostly your decisions are all controlled by you.  A therapist once told me that all we can control is our thoughts, our emotions, and our actions.  Sounds like the same idea.  But these are not new ideas, thousands of years ago a great philosopher Lao Tzu said; "“When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you.”  This is the state meditation assists us in acquiring.  

If you have never tried mediation, start by simply sitting somewhere fairly quiet.  Sit with your legs crossed for balance, if you can, or just sit. Close your eyes, and don't think.  Now I know you are probably saying, I can't just sit and not think.  I had the same problems when I started, my mind was not able to shut down my thoughts.  So, focus your thoughts on your breathing. Breathe in your nose and out your mouth, and count your breathes.  Each cycle of breath is inhaling through your nose, and exhaling through your mouth. That is one breath.  Focus your thoughts on visualizing a white number on a black background.  As you take each breath, focus only on the number.  See it in your mind as if you were looking at it on a page.  Allow the number to change as you breathe.  Your breaths must be slow, allow yourself to let go and just see the number as you breathe.  Do this until you are able to focus solely on the number with no other thoughts creeping in.  It may not happen the first few times you meditate.  It will happen eventually though, remember the point is not to have a goal or destination, but the trip itself.  Relax, breathe, and enjoy the ride.

Stress, Life, and how to not let them control you (part 1)

As we live through everyday life, we have stress factors that can affect us at every turn. Work, money, bills, relationships, and children are all factors that can cause us stress in our lives. We can not control whether we have stress, but we can control how we allow the stress to affect us. 

I have studied traditional chinese medicine and believe in Ch'i.  Ch'i is the life-force which many people call energy, holy spirit, or feelings.  Regardless of what you may want to name it, it is the driving force which resides in all of us. Ch'i flows through our body like blood through our bloodstream. It flows along what is called meridians. Meridians are the lines or pathways similar to our veins and arteries.  Ch'i can affect our emotional state.  It can make us angry, happy, sad as well as many other emotions when it is not flowing properly. Ch'i can also affect our physical bodies.  Blockages in our Ch'i can cause sore muscles, illnesses, and many other physical issues. Learning to clear those blockages can also treat many of those illnesses and other issues. There are many ways to treat blockages in our Ch'i, acupuncture being one of the more well known methods, as well as acupressure, massage, herbal remedies, and meditation.

Meditation is also a method of maintaining and controlling our Ch'i.  Meditation is used as a way to help us deal with the everyday struggles which affect our physical and mental well-being. There are various forms of meditation that are used by people, and you may use it and not even know it.  Have you ever sat and taken five minutes to just relax and breathe?  That is a form of mediation. Meditate is defined by Webster's dictionary as the engagement of thought or contemplation.  Many people believe that meditation is a religious, fake, or new age farce. Many people that don't understand meditation see it as pointless with no beneficial purpose. People that pray are mediating, sitting to relax and clear your mind is meditating.  Whether you do these things to feel better emotionally or to be more focused it is still a form of meditation.  Once you can view meditation as a tool used widely and not within the confines of a belief system or far-fetched  new age remedy, you can begin to allow the benefits of a balanced Ch'i help with the stresses that affect you everyday.

This will be a three part series, in the next series I will go over meditation principles and practices, methods of mediation,  and patterns to help deal with different emotional states.

Happiness: Choice or Condition?

I sometimes like to put a random quote on my facebook page and today's quote stirred a thought.  The quote was: "Happiness depends upon ourselves. - Aristotle".  Now what you can take from Aristotle is that happiness is a choice that we choose to either be happy or not be happy. This made me wonder is happiness truly a choice, or is it a condition of our environment and social status? I started doing some research on happiness beliefs and came across this article: "Choosing Happiness in Our Lives Revisited". (http://psychcentral.com/lib/2007/choosing-happiness-in-our-lives-revisited/)

I believe that happiness is a choice because it is our choice to be happy with our lives regardless of the situation we are in at the moment. But you must choose. You may either choose happiness or misery. But a choice is always made. Here is an excerpt from the article I found interesting when Dr. John Grohol talks about it being easier than you think to choose happiness:

It is only as complicated as we make it. Sometimes we make things more complex than they are, because we grope around in the dark for excuses not to be happy. You heard me. Some people don’t want to be happy, but can’t admit that to themselves. They wouldn’t know what kind of life to live, or what kind of person to be if they gave up their past hurts, their past failures, and their past choices. While we are all the product of our histories, we are not beholden to keep repeating them over and over again unless we so choose. Many of us, fearful of the unknown, choose what is known, even if it’s misery and unhappiness.

Our past is what has brought us to where you currently are today, but it is your choices today that will take you to where you are tomorrow. Don't think about what has happened to you, and that you will never get past that point.  Think about what you want from tomorrow, and look forward. Change is the only constant, and your choices will help whatever changes are going to occur to be positive. You have to make the choice though because no one can make that choice for you. Your relationships with friends, family, and significant others will blossom if you allow yourself to accept changes and be positive about them. So the only real question here is, will you let your happiness be a choice or a condition?

Maintaining a Healthy Relationship

I have spoken many times about how technology can hinder a relationship and is a cause of cheating in many relationships. But it CAN be used to help a relationship and cause it to grow.  Today we spend much of our time checking our Facebook status, or Tweeting what we are doing at the moment. We may not realize it, but  throughout the day we are doing things that are necessary to our own evolution. We are interacting socially, looking for acceptance, and trying to be validated. Whether that validation is through our work, family, or among society as a whole. What most of us want is to matter to at least one person. So in a relationship take a minute to text your loved one, set a status update, or tweet during the day a little note letting them know you are thinking of them. Doing something small like continually over time is the same as watering your plants everyday. Over time you will watch your relationship grow. Jealousy and other killers will subside, and you both will be stronger.

Connection

Ok, so I noticed the other day, while I was taking a break from class, that people are so connected to their phones they have become an extension of our physical bodies. While on this break, every person but two of us had their phones out and were checking text messages, emails, facebook, and twitter. I ask myself, why? Why have we become a society that must connect with people through the invisible world of technology rather than speak to each other in this realm of reality.  Does knowing what someone put on their facebook status really mean you know them or that you are a part of their lives? When did we seperate from making time for the people that matter to us in our lives?  Why is it necessary to feign connection through an avenue that breeds disconnection. How many friends you have on Facebook does not make you popular. How many people following you on Twitter does not mean you are famous. Have we as people evolved to the point of not needing to be in the physical world with others? It makes me think that we as a society are moving toward what was exemplified in the movie Wall-E. We would rather comment to each other through Facebook, or texting than actually be together and share an expierence. This article also got me to thinking about what I observed the other day.

FOMO Addiction: The Fear of Missing Out

from World of Psychology by John M Grohol PsyD

As serendipity often strikes randomly, I was reading an article in The New York Times by Jenna Wortham the other day at the same time I was reading the chapter in Sherry Turkle’s new book, Alone Together about people who fear they are missing out.
Teens and adults text while driving, because the possibility of a social connection is more important than their own lives (and the lives of others). They interrupt one call to take another, even when they don’t know who’s on the other line (but to be honest, we’ve been doing this for years before caller ID). They check their Twitter stream while on a date, because something more interesting or entertaining just might be happening.
It’s not “interruption,” it’s connection. But wait a minute… it’s not really “connection” either. It’s the potential for simply a different connection. It may be better, it may be worse — we just don’t know until we check.
We are so connected with one another through our Twitter streams and Foursquare check-ins, through our Facebook and LinkedIn updates, that we can’t just be alone anymore. The fear of missing out (FOMO) — on something more fun, on a social date that might just happen on the spur of the moment — is so intense, even when we’ve decided to disconnect, we still connect just once more, just to make sure.
Like the old-school Crackberry addict, we’re now all in the grip of “FOMO addiction” ^* — the fear of missing out on something or someone more interesting, exciting or better than what we’re currently doing.

Connected to this fear of missing out on something better that’s going on without you are these fake personas we promote on websites like Facebook. I say “fake” because we often present only the best side of our lives on social networking sites. After all, who wants to be “friends” with someone who’s always posting depressing status updates and who seems to be doing nothing interesting in their lives?
So they are indeed fake, because instead of us being completely real, many (most?) of us censor what we post to our social media profile these days. The people on Facebook are often simply their idealized selves — with a bit of misery thrown in from time to time to “keep it real.”

A friend who works in advertising told me that she felt fine about her life — until she opened Facebook. “Then I’m thinking, ‘I am 28, with three roommates, and oh, it looks like you have a precious baby and a mortgage,’ ” she said. “And then I wanna die.”
On those occasions, she said, her knee-jerk reaction is often to post an account of a cool thing she has done, or to upload a particularly fun picture from her weekend. This may make her feel better — but it can generate FOMO in another unsuspecting person.

Or as Sherry Turkle notes,

“Sometimes you don’t have time for your friends except if they’re online,” is a common complaint. [...]
When is downtime, when is stillness? The text-driven world of rapid response does not make self-reflection impossible, but does little to cultivate it.

Turkle’s descriptions of some of the teens who’ve told her their story is downright scary. Teens who believe they need to be available 24/7 to their friends, because, you know, someone might get dumped or into an argument with their parents. They need instant gratification and solace. Nobody can wait anymore — not because they can’t — but because they don’t need to.
After all, if you could eat all the ice cream sundaes in the world without any serious repercussions (like weight gain or being sick), why wouldn’t you? That’s how many of us our nowadays ingesting social media and technology — taking in as much as we can, simply because we think we can.
But it’s a lie we’re telling ourselves. Humans weren’t built this way.
Turkle nails it on the head with this comment in the article:

“In a way, there’s an immaturity to our relationship with technology,” she said. “It’s still evolving.”

I think that succinctly summarizes the problem — our relationship with technology is still in its infancy, and we’re still feeling our ways around it. We don’t quite know how to interact well — mindfully, meaningfully — with it. Count how many times you check your email or smartphone for messages, texts, status updates, etc. in a day. 10? 100? 1,000 or more? You may be surprised.
Technology that we’re at one with and that promotes social balance and harmony wouldn’t require such obsessive checking behavior, would it? It would understand and complement natural human social behavior. It would differentiate for us what’s important and what’s not (the idea of “smart agents” from a decade ago still resonates).
Teens think they “get it” — that technology is a natural extension of their social lives. But they’re mistaken — they’re still crafting their lives around the technology and the social connections they entice us with, rather than the other way around. They stay up all night waiting for the next status update. They interrupt a face-to-face conversation to make sure whatever’s going on elsewhere isn’t better. I wonder how this is a good way to promote future, strong social connections?
I have my doubts.
I believe, much to their detriment, that the makers of social networking technologies have some rough idea — but not in any nuanced or scientific way — how the tools and products they create are changing human behavior. (If these companies really wanted to take their efforts to the next stage, they should consider hiring some psychologists!) It’s an impulse control problem — we cannot easily control our impulse to “check” the technology to ensure something “more important” isn’t waiting our immediate attention.
The reality is that there are few things so truly important in life, they can’t wait. Sure, I understand it if you’re the President of the United States — you have a legitimate reason to check your texts during dinner. But everyone else, not so much. We’re succumbing to our FOMO when we do so.
Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a very real feeling that’s starting to permeate through our social relationships. The question is — will we ever settle for what we have, rather than cling to the fear that we may be missing out on something better? Social media like Facebook and Twitter are making this increasingly more difficult.

Read the full article: How Social Media Can Induce Feelings of ‘Missing Out’
* – I use the word “addiction” here firmly tongue in cheek, to emphasize how extreme some of these behaviors can be. I do not believe in FOMO addiction any more than I believe in Internet addiction.
Photo by hkarau.

 

If what is better is out there in cyberspace than what you are experiencing right now in the moment, aren't you really just isolating yourself even further from other people? Next time you are out at a restaurant, the mall, or in public in general...watch other people around you and see how many people you notice are living in the cyber world rather than here in this one.

Relationships and the Internet

I have been disturbed by the amount of people that often believe that if they are in a relationship, whether long or short term, it is ok to carry on an "emotional" connection with another person online. Why do so many people constitute cheating as only a physical act? Whether you are straight or gay carrying on an online relationship is cheating.

An article on World of Psychology (http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/03/23/does-the-internet-promote-or-damage-marriage/) illustrates many of the problems that occur when online affairs are acted upon in a committed relationship. The article discusses how online affairs effect a marriage, but I don't think it just applies to a marriage.  What is a marriage? It is nothing more than a commitment by one individual to another individual. That is a relationship. Two people in a committed relationship should, but often don't, consider themselves married.

I believe carrying on in an "emotional" relationship, is cheating. If your partner is not meeting your emotional needs, then communication is required between you and your spouse. Be honest with yourself first and figure out what it is you want to convey before starting your conversation so as to not be accusatory.  I have made the mistake of speaking before thinking and being accusatory.  The conversation will go bad, trust me. Here is another article that will help you plan how you want to say what it is you want to say: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rediscovering-love/201104/unequal-appetites

Don't turn to someone else, its just not worth it. If the person you are with is not what it is you want then end the relationship before starting a new one. Cheating is never acceptable.

Feeling off

I am the type of guy, not to sound cliche or "yeah right", that enjoys taking care of the people I love. I am in the military because I feel a very strong pull to protect and shield others from harm. Whether that harm be from outside or within. I go through alot of struggle when someone I know is hurting or may be harmed and I can not do anything to stop it. It's an internal struggle I go through that I feel like throws my entire world into upheaval. When someone is sick or is in pain I feel that same urge that brought me into the service to help them heal. I know I am not a miracle worker, but sometimes I do help. I always try to do what is right not in terms of religion or just the laws, but in the laws of the universe. I live my life by a code of honor and integrity, and that code makes me try everything within my power to do everything I can. 

We all find it frustrating when we want to accomplish something but can't when our end goal is beyond our control. Still I am trying to work out how to overcome that frustration within myself when situations outside of my control are in effect. If anyone reading this has an idea of ways to deal with the frustration please comment below.