The Stress Solution Page 5

  MOVEMENT: You’ll want to prime your body physically. Think skipping, t’ai chi or yoga (see here in the chapter on exercise for more details).

  MINDSET: Send your thoughts in a positive direction. Think gratitude, affirmations or loving kindness meditation.

  It is good practice to have a golden hour each morning without your mobile phone on. By doing this, your mind will continue to process what you dreamed about the night before, rather than being jerked into the horrible realities of news and social media. Allow it to wander and you will often come up with some super-creative ideas, whether they are for work, play or lead you towards solving nagging problems in your wider life.

  Chapter 3

  HOW TO LIVE MORE

  Two summers ago a CFO of a local plastics company came to see me in my surgery. Simon was in his early fifties, was feeling stressed and depressed, and had been for at least eighteen months. His diet was fine, without being amazing, but his job was unrewarding and taxing. As we were talking, I asked him if there was a hobby that he had enjoyed doing when he was a boy. He looked slightly uncomfortable before eventually admitting he had enjoyed playing with an electric train set. ‘Do you still have it?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh God, I don’t know.’ He smiled and thought for a moment. ‘It’s in boxes up in the attic somewhere.’

  ‘I wonder if you could do me a favour?’ I said. ‘Get it out on Sunday. Set it up and see how you feel.’

  He took the suggestion surprisingly well but never came back to the surgery for a follow-up. I managed to find out what had happened only by chance, a few months later when I was leaving my surgery to do a home visit and I crossed paths with his wife in the car park.

  ‘He’s getting quotes for a big shed at the bottom of our garden. I’ve never seen Simon so excited,’ she said. ‘It’s for his train set. He’s obsessed with it.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘That’s amazing!’

  ‘Oh, it’s brilliant,’ came the reply. ‘I feel like I’ve got the man I married back again. Boyish enthusiasm, you know? He’s on eBay looking for collectors’ items, reading all the magazines, getting excited about the postman knocking on the door. He’s got this childlike joy that I’d forgotten he could have. It’s lovely, it really is.’

  I was overjoyed to hear this. Simon had plugged a gaping hole in his life that, if things had turned out slightly differently, might have easily ended up being filled with alcohol, junk food, sugar or antidepressants. But what, exactly, was that ‘hole’? What was Simon, and all the millions of adults just like him, actually missing?

  IKIGAI

  This is a profound and complex question and goes to the very roots of the human condition. One compelling answer to it can be found in Japan. There, they’d be likely to say that Simon had been missing his ikigai. The word ikigai comes from iku, meaning ‘to live’, and gai which means ‘reason’. While it may sound similar to the French concept of raison d’être, there’s actually quite a bit more to it. Traditionally, a person who has found their ikigai has found something to do with their life that meets the following four criteria:

  1. Something you love

  2. Something you’re good at

  3. Something the world needs

  4. Something you can make money from

  I have a patient who is forty-three years old and a writer. He lives with his wife and two dogs and they have chosen not to have children. He spends his days writing. He loves it, he’s quite good at it, he writes insightful pieces that make the world a better place and he makes money from it. His whole life is about his writing. Even when he’s walking the dogs, he’s thinking about his work, dictating thoughts and ideas into an app on his phone. How many of us are this lucky? Not many, for sure. How many of us could radically reorganize our lives and families so that we could live this way? Even fewer. Achieving ikigai, as defined by these four criteria, is a huge ask.

  It would have been an even lovelier story if Simon could have somehow found a way to make a living by opening a shop for collectors in the high street and quit his job. But just because he hasn’t achieved all four aspects of ikigai, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t made progress. He’s discovered his passion, his mission, his joy. Sadly, many of us aren’t even trying to achieve this. It does appear, however, that this is starting to change. Millennials and Gen-Xers are developing a reputation for seeking out professions based upon a sense of purpose and an active desire to do good in the world. Many of them say that doing something they’re passionate about is a long-term goal. The twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries have brought us many benefits, but so much of it has been material. We’re only just beginning to grasp the fact that things don’t make us happy. They’re a drain. It’s what we do that truly changes the texture and structure of our lives.

  L.I.V.E.

  Unless you’re very young and are lucky enough to have the resources and opportunities to enable you to pursue your passion in such a way that it becomes your job, achieving ikigai, as judged by the above criteria, is probably an unrealistic goal. This is why I’ve taken the core insights from this wonderful philosophy, combined it with everything I’ve learned over nearly two decades of helping my patients heal and thrive and formulated my own progressive solution. I call it L.I.V.E. and it has four core elements:

  LOVE. INTENTION. VISION. ENGAGEMENT.

  L.I.V.E.

  The first involves doing something you love, the second is about living with intent, the third is developing and working towards a long-term vision, and the final one is about engaging with the world around you. I’m not expecting you to find just one pursuit that manages to cover all four elements.

  It’s completely OK to try to hit each one through different pursuits and activities in your life. You may not be able to hit each one immediately, either – that is fine. Take Simon, for example. When I first met him he was disillusioned and stressed out with his job. When I suggested that he do something he loved, he started playing with his train set, which gave him his lust for life back. Interestingly, he came in to see me just a few weeks ago about something completely unrelated and told me how much more enjoyment and fulfilment he is now getting from his job. By doing something that he loved, it nourished him on the inside. This then allowed him to reframe and reflect on his job in a different way. He was now able to see that his job was an opportunity to engage with others in wider society, as well as fulfilling the important role of feeding his family. When he had no passion in his life, he couldn’t see this.

  Every aspect of the L.I.V.E. framework is connected. Once you get started, I believe you’re likely to find that your life becomes brimming with meaning and purpose. You’ll be happier, calmer, less reactive and, perhaps most crucially, way more resilient in the face of those inescapable daily MSDs. I don’t know of a better way of transforming your life, and yourself, than this.

  LOVE: DO SOMETHING YOU LOVE

  A few years ago I found myself going through a very dark time. I was caring for my sick father and working long hours in a stressful, busy practice. During that period I had a brief respite on a stag do up in Edinburgh. That weekend I happened to meet someone who lived just around the corner from me. He told me he used to play a lot of golf in his teenage days but hadn’t picked up his clubs in over a decade. I’d always been curious about the sport but hadn’t played much myself. After a couple of pints, we made a pact that we’d get together as soon as we could and start to play regularly.

  When I got home and looked at my diary I realized that the only way I could honour my promise was to arrive at the course at 6.15 on Saturday mornings and play for just two hours. But what a difference it made. As I got more and more into it, I started to notice that, no matter how stressful my week had been, everything felt better in the days that followed the game. I’d be less reactive to the MSDs that were flying at me because I’d given myself a bit of meaning-nourishment and allowed my emotional brain to switch off. In the downtime of my commute, instead of ruminating, I
’d be picturing the green, the slopes and all the techniques that I was determined to master during our next session. I’d spend every spare minute reading golf magazines, practising my swing in the mirror or visualizing the course. Golf books piled up beside my bed. I’d wake up thinking about my new passion.

  This first element of L.I.V.E. is to do with your reason for getting up in the morning. It doesn’t have to be your job. It doesn’t have to be your children. As important as career and family undoubtedly are, often our thoughts about them are too enmeshed with our responsibilities towards them. This is about something that brings joy and feeds you internally which you want to do for intrinsic pleasure rather than to gain social media likes. Preferably, it’s also something you can get in touch with every single day, even if it’s spending twenty minutes on an internet forum with friendly, like-minded people or sitting down with paper and pencil, planning exactly what you’re going to do when you next get the opportunity to throw a few hours at it.

  I want you to find something that you’re thinking about doing because you want to do it, not because you need to. Don’t worry if finding out what it is takes a while and you try a few pastimes that hold promise but, ultimately, don’t set you on fire. Discovering what we don’t like is part of the process of realizing what we do like. And try not to post about it on social media. You’ll find the joy and pleasure stay with you for longer if you make this just about you.

  If you pursue potential new passions without judging yourself in the process, you may well discover that what brings you true joy is something creative. It could be painting, dancing, drawing, playing a musical instrument, singing, knitting or even sculpting. Society teaches us that some people are ‘creative types’ but, actually, we’re all naturally creative. The problem is that the adult world, with all its anxieties and responsibilities, stifles it. I wholeheartedly agree with the legendary painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso, who once said, ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when you grow up.’ Modern life tries to make us into consumers rather than creators. I often reflect on the balance between these two opposing forces. I’m convinced that the underlying cause of so much of our stress these days is the constant pressure to consume more than we create.

  One clue that you’ve found the thing you love is that time, and even your sense of self, will seem to vanish when you’re busy with it. Psychologists call this ‘flow state’. It encourages the growth of your rational brain because, when you’re fully immersed in something, it’s extremely difficult for your emotional brain to take over and trigger a whirlpool of negative thoughts. Kids, when they’re completely taken up with the games they’re playing, are a great example of being in flow. The distinguished psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who originally coined the term, believed that you can only really achieve flow when you’re challenged. His work showed that, when we’re in flow, we experience less stress.

  INTENTION: DO SOMETHING WITH INTENT

  Most of us live day to day without much thought, on the never-ending treadmill of life, putting one foot robotically in front of the other. This second element to L.I.V.E. is all about trying to break out of that trance at least once a day. It’s about being more attentive and learning to take pleasure in the small things. Consider what happens when we do something as simple as making a cup of tea. We flick the switch on the kettle, drop a tea bag into a mug and wait impatiently until the kettle boils, then splash a bit of milk in and get out of there.

  Compare that to the Japanese, who have complex rituals that have evolved around the making of tea. While I realize that modern Japanese people aren’t ritualizing every cup of tea they make, and I’m not expecting you to follow these ancient rites in practice, I would like you to mimic them in spirit.

  I want you to do something each day, no matter how small, with real mindful intent. Examples might include cooking a meal without distraction, or having a shower while being mindful of the warm water flowing down your body, or brushing your teeth while paying full attention to the sensation you feel on each and every tooth, or making a cup of tea while mindfully watching the steam rise as you slowly pour water into the cup. I believe that when we start paying attention to the small things, the big things start looking after themselves.

  In the years leading up to his death, my father began a daily intent practice almost accidentally. Throughout his entire life, he’d never shown any interest in domestic pets. But when he was stuck at home, unable to work or do much else, the neighbour’s cat would often come and sit on our drive to bask in the sun. One day Dad gave him a bowl of milk and the cat quickly got used to this and would come for his treat. Dad began to look forward to this simple pleasure. Some days, he’d be up early, waiting by the door, looking out for the cat. Even though his vision was failing, he was frail and he couldn’t move around much, he’d always hobble to the fridge and pour out the milk. He’d often spill some of it on the kitchen floor, but that didn’t matter. The broad smile on his face triggered by this simple, intent-ful act was a joy to witness. I’m convinced it’s little things like this that helped him cope with being chained to a hospital haemodialysis machine three times a week, for so long.

  VISION: DEVELOP A LONG-TERM VISION

  While intent is about meaning and purpose on the day-to-day level, this third element of the L.I.V.E framework is to do with the long-term roadmap of your life. In his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who survived the horrors of Auschwitz, writes powerfully about the critical importance of having a long-term goal. ‘Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfilment,’ he wrote. For Frankl, the difference between those who survived and those who didn’t was that sense of purpose and that long-term goal. He focused on what he needed to do, which was complete his manuscript, and lived.

  Your brain is smarter than you probably realize. It’s always planning ahead. If you have a specific and clear long-term vision, it will always be helping you get there. It’s easy to underestimate how important this is. When we know the ‘why’ of our lives, we automatically reduce our stress load. Research indicates that we’re able to endure short-term struggles with much more resilience if they’re helping us achieve our long-term goals.

  I’d like you to write down a goal that you would like to achieve over the next twelve months. Think about what you want and the steps you’ll need to take to achieve it. And then, most importantly of all, take that first step. You have to take action, no matter how small it is.

  ENGAGEMENT: DO SOMETHING THAT MAKES YOU ENGAGE WITH OTHERS

  When she was thirty-six years old a patient of mine, Amanda, quit her hectic job in sales in order to raise her first child. Three years later, she gave birth to a second child. This baby, a daughter called Billie, had trouble feeding and soon developed behavioural problems. This meant that Amanda was fully caught up in dramas of everyday life as a mother for seven or eight years, until Billie was old enough to attend school. Suddenly Amanda found she had spare time. But rather than this being the start of the new, more chilled-out and happier period in her life she’d long imagined, she started bickering with her husband. Before she knew it, she was battling psychological problems which I was worried might potentially develop into an eating disorder.

  When I talked to her in my surgery it seemed clear that Amanda was missing a very big something. She told me she didn’t know who she was any more. I spoke to her about potential creative pursuits she might enjoy, but nothing seemed to grab her. Then, one day at the school drop-off she met another mother who was looking for someone to help her with her fledgling online business. She was after someone who could proofread copy that would go online. Amanda volunteered. It was only two or three hours a week, and it didn’t pay anything more than a weekly batch of home-made flapjacks, but soon everything started to change. Amanda felt wanted and useful and that she was doing something meaningful for someone
else, someone who really needed her help. Interestingly, her attitude to her home life quickly improved too. It became apparent that a lot of the angst she’d experienced at home with her partner was coming from a deep dissatisfaction with other parts of her life.

  I believe the thing Amanda needed so badly was engagement. True fulfilment is so often in the giving. Humans are social animals and we are often at our happiest when we’re acting in the service of others.

  I’d like you to do at least one thing every day for someone else. And no cheating – I mean something extra that you don’t have to do. It could be making a cup of tea for a new colleague in the office, saying hello to the cashier in the supermarket and asking how they are, picking up some litter in the street or holding a door open for someone. These small acts of kindness will boost your self-esteem and help infuse your daily life with purpose. As time goes on, you’ll begin to significantly reframe your sense of self as you come to view your existence as profoundly valuable. If this final core element gives you the buzz I think it will, you might consider taking up some voluntary work.

  LEARN TO L.I.V.E. TO LIVE

  If everything is information, then the best thing you can tell your body and brain is that your days are useful and rich and that, despite inevitable hiccups and difficulties, you are thriving. Without any purpose or meaning in your life, you can end up being blown about like leaves, buffeted by life’s endless MSDs. If you practise the 3 Habits of Calm (affirmations, reframing and gratitude), schedule your time and begin working with the L.I.V.E. framework (love, intention, vision and engagement), I believe you will start to live a life that’s profoundly less stressful. Finding your purpose isn’t about adopting some grand project. It’s not about changing the world, becoming a millionaire entrepreneur or writing a bestselling novel. It’s simply about making a bit of space in your day to nourish the thing that most needs looking after and which you’ve probably been neglecting for too many years: you.