“Understanding one’s own nature and living intelligently with clues and aids that we get through out life can go a long way in reducing modern-day stress.”
Stress in particularly a modern problem. A proper understanding of life will clear our minds and pave the way to get rid of stress once and for all.
Peaceful Co-existence
Lets define stress as the absence of peace. Peaceful coexistence is possible and essential. Stress is not actually caused by external factors alone. It is because of our own attitude. For example, consider a screen on which a movie is projected. The screen does not burn when there is a fire in the movie. The screen is unaffected by the events in the movie. Further, in fact there can be no movie without a screen.
Similarly, changes can only take place against an unchanging background. The cause of happiness and unhappiness is dependant on us, and not on external factors. An office-goer is piqued by the rain, but a farmer welcomes it. The participants must be guided by dispassion and enquiry. We have n control over events, but we certainly can control our response to them.
Vaulting mind
A pole-vaulter in action typifies the power of the mind. When questioned, how he cleared the bar at a great height, his answer was, ” I put the mind above the bar and then my body followed.”
Stress and Attitude
Stress is related to the attitude one has for events. We may not be able to change the external conditions but certainly we can change the internal conditioning through excercise, proper diet and relaxation. This helps in proper functioning of all organs under the intelligent control of mind.
Lets take this as an analogy of a car, maintaining the body-mind vehicle by proper fuel (food), lubrication (exercise), cooling down (sleep) and above all, taking care of the driver (mind).
Every second of our life we do breath and yet, we do many activities, we never pay attention to our breathing. Exercises reminds us to breath the correct way, which is the best way to avoid stress. With slow, steady and deep breathing the mind automatically becomes calm and our response to situations is without any negativity.
Self-evaluation, the key
It is important to do a self-evaluation of one’s nature based on few important factors. Recognising one’s own nature, one will know how to deal with oneself in combating stress.
Sree's blog on better management 