Peace of Mind, Part I

By Robert Ringer

Some months ago, following a keynote address I had given, a middle-aged lady approached me and asked if she could speak with me for a few minutes. I told her I’d be more than happy to speak with her, whereupon she began to share with me the difficulty she was experiencing in trying to cope with stress.

Her demeanor was hyper — talking very fast, highly animated, and tending to offer answers to her own questions. We spoke for about ten minutes, and during that short period of time her cellphone not only rang three times, but with each ring she interrupted our discussion to answer it. While I was taken aback by her cellphone compulsion, I didn’t take it personally. I felt pretty certain that it was a way of life for her.

The woman explained that she was a single mother with two boys, ages eleven and thirteen. Her husband had left her several years ago for another woman, and, though she had a full-time job, she was having a very difficult time making ends meet.

In a frustrated tone, she listed the causes of her stress. She told me that her apartment was always “a mess,” because between her job obligations, commuting back and forth to work, grocery shopping, cooking, endlessly chauffeuring her boys, and more, she didn’t have time to straighten it let alone clean it. She was talking at such a rapid pace that it appeared she was afraid she would not get in everything that she wanted to say.

Obviously, I wasn’t able to give this woman much concrete advice in just ten minutes, but I did emphasize one important point to her. I told her that in relating her situation to me, she could have been describing any one of millions of women who find themselves in pretty much the same circumstances day in and day out.

Or, for that matter, men. Most men are overloaded with work and obligations that often push them to the brink. The majority of men I talk to are stressed and frustrated by a lack of that ever-dwindling commodity — time.

Since my brief chat with that frazzled woman, I’ve given a lot of thought to the widespread problem of stress. It’s a menace that knows no racial, ethnic, religious, or gender boundaries. Clearly, it is endemic in modern Western culture.

However, I’ve come to the conclusion that children, job, lack of time, and other frazzling issues that most of us have to deal with are not the underlying causes of stress. Rather, I am convinced that stress is a self-imposed mental state.

Stress is the antithesis of serenity, peace of mind, and tranquility. Which is why an important factor in reducing stress is to strive for peace of mind. You cannot simultaneously experience tranquility and stress.

So, how do you capture that elusive mental state known as peace of mind? A good start is to recognize that true peace of mind does not shift with changing circumstances. If you have peace of mind, you can handle both adversity and good fortune with calm confidence.

In other words, true peace of mind gives you the strength to stay on course in the face of adversity. What I’m saying here is that you live within your mind. It is not events that shape your world. It’s your thought processes.

To paraphrase something Dale Carnegie said more than fifty years ago, as you and I pass through the decades of life, sadness and misfortune will cross our paths. This is a truism that would be difficult to argue against.

Fear, loneliness, rejection, illness, death, financial failure, and loss of love are just a few examples of the kinds of sadness and misfortune we all have to deal with from time to time. Where we differ is how each of us handles the negatives that come into our lives. This, in turn, goes a long way toward determining whether our lives will be stressful or tranquil.

In Part II of this article, I’ll be discussing the importance of “living right” as a key factor in reducing the amount of stress in your life.