SpaceAgeSage

What triggers your fears, insecurities, and anxieties? What stresses you out? Once you know, what can you do about it? How do these triggers that create stress happen and how can they be “deactivated?”

It’s hard to relax and take life in stride with poise and confidence if our minds are full of emotional land mines waiting to be triggered. The worst part is that our reactions or our investment in our stress rob us of emotional energy, whittle down our health, and ruin our resiliency to adversity. What you put your attention on grows. If you are focused on stressful matters, then they are fed, not your inner well-being. How can we be strong, creative, loving, kind, and dynamic if our internal resources keep being eaten by stress?

1. Dr. Wayne Dyer’s approach

First, we need to understand the source of the triggers. According to Dr. Wayne Dyer, much of our inner turmoil comes from an ego that can only see success from:

• What we do
  If we judge ourselves successful by what we do (produce/fulfill a duty/work), we stress about how we are doing, what we are doing, and if we are doing enough.

• What we have
  If we judge ourselves on what we have, we stress about the quality, the quantity, and the security of what we have.

• What other people think of us
  If we judge ourselves by what people think of us, we are at the mercy of others’ opinions and stress over what they might be thinking, what they say, or what they fail to say to us.

2) Enneagram system

According to the nine personality types of the Enneagram system, we may stress based on what our inner messages tell us about our relationship to the world. In The Wisdom of the Enneagram, Don Riso and Russ Hudson explain that each personality type reacts to an inner message. The message (by type) tells us that:

Type #1 — It is not OK to make mistakes

Type #2 — It is not OK to have our own needs

Type #3 — It is not OK to have our own feelings and identity

Type #4 — It is not OK to be too functional or too happy

Type #5 — It is not OK to comfortable in the world

Type #6 — It is not OK to trust ourselves

Type #7 — It is not OK to depend on anyone for anything

Type #8 — It is not OK to vulnerable or to trust anyone

Type #9 — It is not OK to assert ourselves

Each one of these messages can cause stress because they are rooted in insecurity, and they hold us back from fully embracing life. Unfortunately, risks, failure, asking to have our needs met, or opening up to others cause us needless stress because we think we have to be independent enough, tough-minded enough, and perfect enough to avoid potential ridicule or rejection. In our culture, the value of failure and the lessons it helps us learn are sadly negated by fear of looking bad, foolish, or inept.

3) Societal and cultural stressors

According to modern research on stress, our anxieties can come from four areas:

• People: family, co-workers, friends, bosses, strangers who irritate (bad drivers, rude line-breakers at the bank), etc.
  This type of stress stems from the nature and interaction of relationships, our negative perceptions and judgment of others, our irrational expectations, our lack of trust, and our unhealed emotional wounds.
• Environment or situations: life changes, decisions, divorces, job loss, deadlines, demands on time or money, noise (neighbor blasting tunes), adverse weather, etc.
  There is comfort in the known and the knowable, so when life throws us a curve ball or cranks up its intensity, we can find our stress levels rising.
• Health and wellness: poor eating habits, mid-life crisis, illness, menopause, PMS, pregnancy, substance abuse, chronic pain, weight problems, etc.
  Face it, no one likes to feel poorly or to live with a drastically reduced level of well-being. When such times hit, they can overwhelm our coping mechanisms and cause stress.
• Perceptions of self: I can’t, I’m not good enough, It makes me uncomfortable, It’s not what I’m wired for, I won’t succeed, I am afraid …
  As I noted in my last two posts, these ways of defining ourselves and our interactions with the world hold us back, but they can also make us stressed from both the wheel-spinning they create in our lives and the negative emotional energy they taint our thoughts and actions with.

Now that we have a better understanding of the root causes of stress, we can take a look at some unique ways to reduce stress in my next post.

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While situations, encounters or events may seem intrinsically “stressful,” it is truly how an individual perceives and reacts to an event that determines whether or not the stress response is activated.
~ Institute of HeartMath, Research Overview ~

Photo credit:  speech path girl

Tags: anxiety, Dyer, Enneagram, insecurity, stress, stress triggers