Work Stress: Does Your Job Lack “Soul”?

Does your job lack soul? If yes, you probably feel stressed out and miserable a lot of the time, right? And you’re also probably not living the quality of life you deserve.

Well you’re not alone. Work has lost its soul for many people, including those in high paying jobs. Work without soul is work that lacks a loving connection to life. It’s work that involves little if any meaningful connection to other people.

The great Russian writer Dostoevsky explained why work without soul can be so distressing and demoralizing. He put it this way: “Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence.”

The shifting patterns of work brought on by globalization and outsourcing have left many people struggling with feeling overworked, underpaid and undervalued in meaningless jobs. As a result, many people are suffering from a combination of stress, anxiety and depression.

Unfortunately studies show that workplace stress can make your mind miserable and your body ill. It drives many serious problems, more so than any other life stressor, including money, marriage or family problems.

Levels Never Seen Before

Job stress is now at levels never seen before. Men and women are working longer and harder for less money and with less job security and less “job say so” than ever before.

Many people think that outsourcing to countries like India has left American and western European workers cheated while benefiting Indian workers tremendously. But a closer look tells a different story.

Indians working long hours answering telephone calls from America and Europe now show signs of chronic job stress: heart disease, insomnia, musculoskeletal pain and injury, depression and serious family problems.

Stress Hormones are the Culprit: People Just Wear Out

If your work places great demands on you, but offers you little or no control over when and how you do it, then find another job. Because “high demand, low control” work is the worst.

Any kind of ongoing job stress can wear you down and make you ill. But research shows that a high demand, low control work situation can flood your system with stress hormones every day.

What You Need to Do

You can help yourself tremendously if you learn how to do two things relating to stress hormones: 1) prevent them from leaking into your system on a regular basis and 2) flush them from your blood and tissues so they don’t linger and cause harm.

If you learn how to do these two things, you won’t have to be dependent on medications with side effects that take the joy out of your life. With the right “know how” and support, you can learn how to do it easily. Once you feel good and in control again, you can find ways to bring soul back into your work life.

Stress Relief: The “Pack” is Coming

Most of us are hungry to connect to who we deeply are, a connection often made difficult by our family and cultural conditioning. Conditioning sets limits that can keep us trapped in an identity that often swims in a sea of stress hormones-because it’s too small for who we truly are. And living in confinement is very stressful indeed.

Stress Ruins Lives

Valuing and preserving our health and well-being are important parts of a life lived with love, courage, wisdom and passion. As the Buddha said: “Health is the greatest gift”, a gift that we should not take for granted. We need to take care of our health because it’s a priceless asset.

We harvest the greatest treasures of a well-lived, loved, and understood life in the last third of our journey here. To be around for that harvest, we need to know how to safeguard our health and well-being and if we’re serious about doing that-then understanding and controlling stress needs to be at the top of our “things to do” list. Stress ruins lives.

“Chronic stress kills. People wear down. Stress is linked to the six leading causes of death….

Drs. Lyle H. Miller, and Alma Dell Smith, Senior Stress Researchers

Stress related illnesses cause more deaths yearly than deaths resulting from all other causes combined. Our health care system is really a disease care system, so it doesn’t work to prevent stress related illnesses before they occur-it treats them only after they arise.

This is What Stress is Really About

Stress is a biochemical event that involves powerful hormones: cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine. When our “inner pharmacy” releases these stress hormones into our body too often or for too long, they become toxic poisons that can make us anxious, depressed and ill. They can even kill us.

The World Health Organization now recognizes stress as the number one health problem in industrialized nations. And as Dr. Paul Rosch, world renowned medical scientist and president of the American Institute of Stress, noted ”

“Stress is taking a terrible toll on the nation’s health and economy. It is a heavy contributor to heart disease, cancer, respiratory distress, lupus and many other life threatening illnesses.”

Studies show that two-thirds of the visits to primary care medical physicians in this country are driven by stress. More than 100 million people are taking weekly medication to manage stress, medication which is for most people unnecessary and which can cause serious side effects and addiction.

Consider this: An article published in the Journal of the American Medical, Association, written by public health expert Dr. Barbara Starfield, identified doctors and hospitals as the third leading cause of death in America.

The Anatomy of Stress

What causes stress? Many things, including, real or perceived, job, family and financial pressures. Our mind and body are an interdependent unit: the mindbody. If we worry too much about financial catastrophe, for example, the primitive part of our brain can misinterpret our worry as actual financial failure and then stress hormones will be released as part of an “emergency alert” reaction.

There are two switches on our body’s involuntary nervous system: one is for ordinary housekeeping chores; the other is for emergency situations.

The ordinary housekeeping switch controls the normal processes of our body such as breathing, digestion and metabolism. The emergency switch is designed to enable us to survive in the face life threatening emergencies by triggering our body’s “stress response,” also known as the “Fight or Flight Response.”

When the emergency switch triggers, powerful hormones flow into our body through a process set in motion by our reactive brain. Our reactive brain cues the master gland of our endocrine system that we are in danger and then another phase of the Fight or Flight Response is set into motion.

What’s Your View?

An often overlooked, but critical, factor in understanding and controlling stress related illness is to address our perceptual tendencies to view life situations as stressful. The way we see things determines our “view.” View defines reality. If we tend to view life events as stressful, they will be.

Stress provoking perceptual tendencies can result from unhealed past wounds or if we are not honoring what we truly want and love in life.

So your own personal growth, as well as your related efforts to safeguard your health, oblige you to become a serious student of your conditioned “views”, of your conditioned patterns of perception. It can be hard to see ourselves clearly and to accept what we see. That’s why this level of inner work needs is best done from a deeply relaxed and self-assured state of mind. From what we call “The Stress Free State”.

The Fast Acting Stress Relief Pack

After more than 30 years of work in the best of the western and eastern science and well-being traditions, I created a powerful resource to break free from toxic stress-”The Fast Acting Stress Relief Pack”.

The Pack includes 6 of the most powerful stress relief techniques you’ll find anywhere. They’re derived from the best of western mindbody and medical science and the eastern meditation and healing traditions. The Pack includes a crystal clear manual and 18 audios that set up and guide you step by step through each practice so you get its powerful benefits.

“The Fast Acting Stress Relief Pack” also will create the positive conditions within your mind and body that bring inner balance, well-being and longevity. The Pack trains you to live from the Stress Free State,^TM a state of relaxed calm, awareness and self-assurance, a state that flushes stress hormones out of your blood and leaves you feeling renewed and in balance.

Working Without “Soul”

Americans suffer from a great deal of work related stress. We work three months longer than the Germans every year and one month longer than the Japanese. And we sleep 90 minutes less a night than did our grandparents.

But it’s not just working too long that causes Americans work stress. For many of Americans, their work lack “soul”. It lacks soul in the sense that it lacks a loving connection to life itself and to other people. We do what we feel that we “should do or must do” instead of what we “want and love to do”. This is a set up for stress and the health problems associated with what I call the-not-such-a-good-life.

These are tough times and in the short term we have to pay the bills. But we shouldn’t forget a long term vision for our work.

As Confucius told us:

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

And as the Buddha added:

“Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart, give yourself to it.”

The fact is that our soul, our inner life, aches at “just for money” work that lacks depth and meaning. Such work has no connection to all-important “inner spark” that can only be found within our deepest nature. We need to connect to our deepest nature, find our inner spark and set our life ablaze with what we want and love.

When you discover, stabilize and live from the “Stress Free State”, you’ll be able to find your inner spark and set your life on fire.

Get the “Fast Acting Stress Relief Pack” now and start moving into the Stress Free State.

If the Pack is not available on the site yet, then send me an e-mail at drjim@MesicsTraining.com and I’ll make sure you’ll get access to it.

Personal Growth: Therapy and Choosing a Therapist

Have you ever felt stuck, confused and unsure of yourself? As if you’re in territory you have no map for and so you feel lost and uncertain without any clear sense of direction. Or perhaps you’ve felt that the bright colors in your life have begun to fade and you feel like you’re living as a character in a book someone else has written.

If you are like most people, then life will indeed send you your fair share of difficulties and situations that you can’t understand or change on your own. Trying to figure out and resolve some of your problems alone can be like trying to pick up a board you’re standing on.

That’s when psychotherapy can be incredibly valuable. Therapy can be a powerful way to get your life on track, reduce stress, solve problems and improve your health and well-being. But is it for you? Should you seek help from a psychotherapist?

MAKING THE DECISION CAN BE COMPLICATED

Making the decision to see a therapist can be difficult for a number of reasons. Let’s consider some of them together.

First, many people feel a loss of self-worth over the prospect of seeing a therapist. That’s not uncommon, especially in our culture. More than a few of us have bought into false and heroic notions about what it means to be a healthy or strong person, notions that view psychological stress and problems as signs of weakness. These ideas are nonsense—but they can be powerful nonsense.

Never assume that your psychological stress, problems or yearnings are evidence that you are lacking in any way. In truth, your difficulties can be a healthy signal that something important within you is calling for your attention. It takes intelligence, courage and character to respond to those calls.

The fact is that if we deny and avoid our emotional pain, we’ll pay a stiff price. Because if we deny our emotions, they can make us ill. And if we try to avoid our problems, they begin to set limits on what can actually happen in our life. Would you want to waste part of your life stuck in a self-image that’s too small for who you truly are?

Studies show that people who experience a successful psychotherapy not only feel better emotionally—they also have less stress and fewer life and health problems.

The same is true, by the way, for people who develop the capacity, through training, to work on their own psychology. This falls into the category of what we call “Mind-side Fitness”. More about that another time. For now, let’s get back to therapy.

If you do decide to go into therapy, you have to choose a therapist, a choice that can be a difficult task. Some suggestions: Do your best to play an active role in finding a good therapist. Become as well informed as possible. Don’t just passively accept someone else’s referral.

WHAT TO DO IN YOUR FIRST MEETINGS WITH A THERAPIST

During the initial therapy meetings, plan to learn a number of important things about your therapist. Because of your past passive roles with professionals, you might feel awkward making inquiries about a therapist’s education, training and experience. You should raise questions anyway.

If you ask questions respectfully, then a therapist should be willing and able to answer them easily. If she or he takes offense, then you know right away that you need to move on. And a therapist should be able to offer you a clear and brief answer to the question: what is psychotherapy?

There is no one correct answer. But really good therapists can usually tell you in plain English what therapy means to them. These therapists have digested their education and training into a personal vision of therapy that is well thought out, vital and alive.

It’s not a bad idea to ask if a therapist own therapy has been part of her training. Don’t ask for any details, just whether or not they’ve been in therapy. A therapists own experience in therapy is a critical part of her training. It’s hard to help someone get to a place you haven’t been to yourself.

QUESTIONS AND ISSUES YOU SHOULD CONSIDER

After you meet with a therapist, ask yourself these questions: What does it feel like to be with and talk to this person? Can I understand what they’re saying? Do I feel that what I have to say is understood in the way I meant it? Do I learn something of value during therapy sessions?

Many psychotherapy experiences begin with focused objectives in mind. For example, you may want to deal with stress or negotiate life changes such as a divorce, a marriage or a change in career. Therapy can also be an experience of uncovering and mastering habitual tendencies that leave you vulnerable to stress and recurring problems at work and in your relationships.

For some people, psychotherapy can go on for long periods as the work of therapy moves beyond the resolution of problems. Like lobsters shedding their shells that become too small to contain their growth, deep therapy involves you in the work of disengaging from your surface conditioning so that you can grow into more of who you deeply are.

You need to give a therapist the authority to work on your behalf. At times, they may challenge you to face things that are disagreeable. That’s part of what you pay them for. But they should be caring and respectful when they challenge you.

And you should never treat a therapist as an authority figure that you can’t question or challenge. And under no circumstances should you feel pressured to accept interpretations, directives or instructions that you don’t understand.

The word psychotherapy originally meant “healing of the soul or psyche”. At its best, therapy is a process of tending to and caring for our inner life. The goal is to create a “sound mind in a healthy body” and so enjoy a life that can be well lived, loved and understood.

At its best, therapy can be an exciting and courageous adventure of personal growth.