5 Ways How to Avoid the Stress Trap

Dina Marais Marais Author

To be able to venture beyond your comfort zone into the unknown with ease is to find ways to avoid the stress trap with all its false trimmings.

To be able to venture beyond your comfort zone into the unknown with ease is to find ways to avoid the stress trap with all its false trimmings of safety and familiarity.

Stress is nothing but a mind-body state that consists of thinking about the worst-case scenarios and feeling the emotions of fear, doubt, and anger. When you experience stress on a regular basis, it becomes a state-of-being and the thoughts and emotions escalate to depression, guilt, shame, and hopeless-helpless.

In a state-of-being of hopeless-helpless, you think of stress situations as personal, pervasive, and permanent, and experiencing these emotions becomes an addiction.  It also becomes your subconscious comfort zone and your ego-mind organizes the circumstances in your life to stay inside your comfort zone.

As this becomes your story, you identify with it and your highest frames of self are: “I am a loser, I will never get out of this, I am just not capable of making something of myself,” etc.

Addicted to the Emotions and Drama of Stress

You get addicted to the drama of stress and especially the emotions of stress because of the benefit you get from them. Perhaps it spurs you into action. Perhaps it gives you permission to throw your toys out the cot and blame your partner, team, competition, government, economy for your circumstances.

In a distorted way, you get attention by playing the victim of people feeling sorry for you or fearing your aggression.

There is a payoff for succumbing to the stress trap. And for a moment you get relief, but that is short-lived with a hell of a price to pay because it not only deteriorates further down to emotions of fear, guilt, and shame.  You also attract circumstances that match your energy, confirm your beliefs, and set you up for the next round.

This is the stress trap  - your ego-mind orchestrates your circumstances so that you can experience the emotions you are addicted to.

Not a pretty picture, this journey of self-destruction. Do you agree?

By the way, whenever you venture out of your comfort zone, your stress thinking patterns will be activated. This happens at every level of expansion.

Why is it necessary to avoid experiencing stress?

The motivation behind avoiding experiencing stress is because it lowers your energy vibration frequency that changes your perception of the situation in a negative way.

However, the idea is not so much to avoid experiencing stress, but rather to get ahead of it. In other words, how do you keep yourself in a state-of-being of joy, self-gratification, gratitude, peace, and love?  And if you experience stress, effectively bounce back and not go down the rabbit hole. So let's look at the 5 Ways How to Avoid the Stress Trap.

1. Develop Self-Awareness

Of course, the first step is to develop alertness to thoughts and feelings that are not supporting you in being your best. This is key because without being sensitive to the initial thoughts and feelings of doubt, or insecurity, you will fall into the stress trap every time.

By entertaining these thoughts and feelings of doubt or insecurity, they will quickly build momentum to full-blown fear, and then it is difficult to bounce back from there. When this happens, the best thing is to do something completely different that makes you feel good.  Take a walk, meditate, take a nap and find things that you can appreciate.

2. Take Ownership of Your Mind

Realize that you are in charge of your thoughts and emotions. Nobody or nothing else is. Therefore you have the power to choose thoughts and emotions that serve you and bring the best out in you.

You can choose to change your perception of anything. Your default thought about anything is just that. A default way of looking at something that may not even come from you. You inherited it.

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Dr. Wayne Dyer.

3. Clear Your Assumptions

We are wired to make assumptions and draw conclusions, but they may not be necessarily true.  That’s how we learn. Your brain finds an associated or similar experience for every situation you are exposed to and then uses that experience as a reference for how to respond.

These referent experiences mostly are from the past and from childhood and are no longer relevant. Therefore the assumption you default to is false.

To use the premise of the principle that the thoughts and beliefs you have about anything may not be accurate gives you the opportunity to start weeding out the false assumptions giving your brain a software update.

When you remember to do this on a regular basis, it becomes a skill to pause your response and thus avoid the stress trap entirely.

Definitely a great idea to take on board. Do you agree?

4. Embrace the Unknown

This fear of the unknown goes hand in hand with the fear of losing control. Not having certainty makes us feel uncomfortable, to say the least. Most people rather take on the devil they know than the one they don’t.

However, to really overcome the hold that stress has on you is to change the way you look at the unknown. Instead of fearing the unknown is to see it as infinite possibilities.

Understand that everything that is known to you, everything that you have certainty about, is from the past. This is exactly the seat of stress and how you recreate the stress, is to predict the future from the stress of the past.

There is an infinite world of possibility beyond what you know and beyond your wildest dreams, if only you can open the door to that.  So if you take ownership of your mind, and change your assumption of the unknown from fear to certainty of infinite possibilities, how would that change things for you?

5. Practice Feeling Safe

In the end, it is all about feeling safe. We experience stress when we don’t feel safe. This is when we want to control everything so that we can feel safe.  Of course, that is impossible. We have no control over anything, except over our own thoughts, emotions, speech, and behaviour.

Feeling safe wherever you are, comes from within. It comes from using the power of your mind to feel safe no matter what happens.

When you have the self-awareness to recognize the thoughts and emotions of stress, and you exercise the ownership of your mind to welcome the unknown as the certainty of infinite possibilities, you immediately will feel safe.

And when you feel safe, you can handle anything.

To learn more, get my free guide on my website.

Categories: Entrepreneur, Manifest, mindset, Stress