stress prevention through appropriate preparation
There are hundreds of thousands of tips, suggestions, courses and books on stress-management on the internet but only a very few remind us of a proven method of stress-prevention used for at least 2300 years: appropriate preparation.
Facilitating workshops on negotiation techniques I have seen hundreds of time how nervous and stressed were those who did not prepare thoroughly. As a student I was very calm if I was prepared for an exam – which in fact was seldom the case.
Life’s top ten “stressors”
- Death of spouse
- Divorce
- Marital separation; marital reconciliation
- Death of close family member
- Changing residences
- Personal injury or illness
- Marriage
- Loss of job
- Change in financial state
- Prison
need not stress us at all if we are adequately prepared .
Who can prepare us for these events? Our schools do not do this at all, our families very seldom. Two philosophical schools, both about 2300 years old, were created just for furnishing the appropriate tools with which they prepared their adepts to face life’s top and bottom “stressors” and yet stay stress-free.
I mean the Stoics and the Epicureans. Their goals and followers were rather different but the tools and methods they used were rather similar – and most of them are just as valid today as they were 2300 years ago.
For Living the Good Life Stress-Free: Orientation
We all need orientation to guide us from pain to pleasure, from stress to happiness, from confusion to clarity. Who gives us what kind of orientation today in which form with what intent?
We learn very early which way to turn our face to get milk from mother’s breast or avoid a slap from mother’s hand, where to go for food, comfort, company and when to stop touching a hot stove. Our senses and our physical environment teach us what is good and healthy for us by producing a feeling of pleasure. What is bad for our health produces disgust. Pleasure and pain are the basic stop-and-go signals for our individual survival.
This would be enough if we weren’t so very social. But humans cannot survive on their own and therefore the social group will also teach us what is good and bad for the survival of the group. The group’s teachings might differ from what we learned through our direct sense feedback. Your senses tell you to devour all the food but if you don’t share it with (some of) your group members they might punish you and not share with you their food the next time.
So you learn to work out your survival strategies balancing your individual needs as felt by your drives and tastes with the group values as experienced through daily practice, learning conflict and expectation management. This is hard enough and it takes years to find your place in the group in such a way that you can still live also according to your personal drives and tastes.
Your job to find orientation will get even more difficult or even impossible if your social environment keeps on sending you ambiguous messages by, e.g., commanding you not to lie but at the same time everybody lying to you about a life after death.
As a consequence you will be disoriented and will try to work out strategies to get along within this system. You can choose to conform to the system and pretend to follow its rules, being incongruent with your own inner beliefs. Or you can choose “to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing” become incongruent with the value system and acceptable behavior patterns of your social environment. In both cases you will ruin your mental and possibly also your physical health. You will perceive the most widespread incongruities mostly as conscience conflicts and stress.
What can you do if you don’t wish stress to ruin your health and happiness ? What other options can you have?
You could find a value system linked to behavior patterns and corresponding lifestyles in a congruent manner. In other words you might seek and find people who walk their talk and their thoughts, words and acts are congruent not only among themselves but they resonate with your own deepest needs as well.
I have good news for you: There is such a proven and viable model of pragmatic and easy to follow values system. It is the 2300-years-old practical Epicurean philosophy. It makes it easy to be honest and happy at the same time. It has been hushed up and defamed by the competing philosophies and worldviews of the Platonist, Stoic, Skeptic as well as Christian theoreticians and theologians but it never stopped giving simple practical orientation to reasonable, rational and honest people. For an enormously long period of 800 years, from 300 BCE till 500 CE (almost four times longer than the existence of the US!), it was even the most widespread worldview and lifestyle of the non-fanatical, pragmatic middle class of the Greek and Roman world.
Professional philosophers mostly know how relevant Epicurean attitudes, worldview and life conduct are today and how many of our stress-related and ecological problems would be solved if we only adopted and applied them. Unfortunately they don’t know how to say all this in simple language that is understandable also for everybody. The overwhelming majority of psychologists and sociologists, educators and life coaches has either never heard about Epicureanism or if they did, they erroneously believe that it is about eating and drinking. Anyway they are churning out ever “new” happiness recipes, as if re-inventing the wheel every week.
I will endeavour to make the practical Epicurean happiness guidance available for everyone who needs orientation but cannot accept childish myths or spiritual hocus-pocus supplied by organizations, groups or individuals with the aim of turning you into a docile instrument for their profit/power increasing machinery. Re-discovering the Epicurean system of values, attitudes and behaviour patterns might make you feel reborn in a friendly and sustainable world, enabling you to live in harmony with yourself and with your social and natural environment.
my professional amateurism
For my professional amateurism I use the definitions of:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/amateur
amateur
-noun
| 1. | a person who engages in a study, sport, or other activity for pleasure rather than for financial benefit or professional reasons. |
| 2. | an athlete who has never competed for payment or for a monetary prize. |
| 3. | a person inexperienced or unskilled in a particular activity: Hunting lions is not for amateurs. |
| 4. | a person who admires something; devotee; fan: an amateur of the cinema. |
professional
| 1. | following an occupation as a means of livelihood or for gain: a professional builder. |
| 2. | of, pertaining to, or connected with a profession: professional studies. |
| 3. | appropriate to a profession: professional objectivity. |
| 4. | engaged in one of the learned professions: A lawyer is a professional person. |
| 5. | following as a business an occupation ordinarily engaged in as a pastime: a professional golfer. |
| 6. | making a business or constant practice of something not properly to be regarded as a business: “A salesman,” he said, “is a professional optimist.” |
| 7. | undertaken or engaged in as a means of livelihood or for gain: professional baseball. |
| 8. | of or for a professional person or his or her place of business or work: a professional apartment; professional equipment. |
| 9. | done by a professional; expert: professional car repairs. |
Using “amateur” in its sense #1 and “professional” in its sense # 5 above I should say that being a dedicated stressFREEDOMguide is being a professional amateur: I’m doing it for pleasure rather than for financial benefit or professional reasons. following as a business an occupation ordinarily engaged in as a pastime, likea professional golfer.
Or using the original meaning of the root words: (profitērī to declare publicly, and amātor lover, equiv. to amā- (s. of amāre to love) + -tor ) I openly declare that I love to do what I’m doing: get people stress-FREE.
speed limit on the German autobahn for more stress-FREEDOM
A skateboarding extreme sportsman alarmed police by barreling down a stretch of the German autobahn at 100 kilometers per hour. The stunt made him a YouTube star and also the target of prosecutors. see full article:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,579013,00.html
My suggestions for making the German Autobahn safer and stress-FREE are:
1. Germany should adopt finally a speed limit – like every other single state. In order to preserve the spirit of adventure the limit should be fixed at
- 200 km/h (124 mph)for cars and
- 100 km/h (62 mph) for skateboarders.
2. The traffic should change from the right to the left side of the roads. This transitions should be made gradually:
- first the heavy trucks
- then the skateboarders
- at last the rest
stress-FREE cuisine: cat-food system adapted for humans?
Adapting the cat-food system for humans might make the preparation of daily 3-5 meals really stress-FREE and sustainable – was my first thought while reading the last issue of the German TEST magazine’s cat-food test results. The German language link:
http://www.test.de/themen/haus-garten/test/-Katzenfutter/1708060/1708060/1709973/
Everybody would know how many calories they need of which nutrients (carbohydrates, fats, fiber, minerals, proteins, vitamins, and water) and we could buy our breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack and dessert cans for weeks ahead. Cooking would not be a burden any more: you could do it only when you really felt like. (Well it could not be an excuse, either…)
reported to the police for eating sausages
Being a popular comedian in Germany has not protected Hape Kerkeling from being reported to the police for eating sausages while driving:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,566998,00.html
Now what can I expect, not being popular and not being – at least consciously – a commedian, next time I am going to drive relaxed and stres-FREE at 200 km/h on the autobahn in lederhosen, eating sausages and drinking bear with the radio playing polkas at 100 dB?
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