Peace of Mind, Part III

By Robert Ringer

In Parts I and II of this article, I emphasized that stress is a self-imposed mental state. In today’s Part III, as well as in Parts IV and V, I’m going to suggest some healthy thoughts that I believe will help you use the power of your mind to overcome a stressful mind-set. Toward that end, I strongly encourage you to employ the two mental tools described below.

Shake the habit of fretting and stewing about problems that don’t exist.

It’s amazing how many people live in a “what if” world. Projecting medical problems is an excellent and all-too-common example of this. My doctor once told me that medical students are notorious for imagining that they’ve contracted some terrible disease.

The reason, of course, is that they study diseases on a daily basis. Because they are trained to be constantly on the lookout for the life-threatening symptoms they are learning about, it’s understandable that they would sometimes imagine they have some of those same symptoms.

Can there be a better definition of joy than the feeling you have when the results of your prostate exam, colonoscopy, pap smear, or mammogram come back negative? Until you get that thumbs-up feedback from your doctor or lab, it’s very easy for your mind to play tricks on you and stress you to the limit. It’s a classic example of being stressed over a problem that doesn’t exist. The problem becomes real only if, and when, the results come back positive.

This is precisely what happened to me some years ago when I was told that my PSA reading was slightly on the high side. I had recently watched a couple of shows on television about prostate cancer, and a 20/20 segment by Hugh Downs put me over the top.

To make a long story short, I began sweating heavily at night, my left leg was tingling, and I lost my appetite. I found myself lying in bed and thinking about what a prostate operation would be like, how much pain would be involved, how much recuperation time would be required — and if I would even survive.

Guess what? My symptoms were 100 percent self-induced. When I visited a second urologist, everything checked out perfectly — including a PSA reading on the low side.

On reflection, however, I’m glad I had that experience, because it taught me how easy it is to induce stress — and even medical symptoms — through the power of the mind. If you excessively dwell on bad things that might happen in your life — medical or otherwise — you only succeed in increasing the chances of their actually happening.

In the words of Thomas Carlyle, “Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.” In other words, focus on today’s problems, because, in most cases, that’s a full-time job. The late Tony Snow was an incredibly inspiring example of this kind of attitude.

Recognize that for every negative, there’s an offsetting positive.

In Million Dollar Habits, I discuss a principle that I refer to as the Natural Law of Balance. In pointing out that the universe is in balance, I use such examples as electrons and protons, night and day, male and female, hot and cold, and life and death. The reality is that for every positive, there’s an offsetting negative, and for every negative, there’s an offsetting positive. Balance is the natural order of the universe.

The nice thing about it is that when you understand and believe in universal balance, it gives you the mind-set to look quickly and automatically for the offsetting positive in every negative situation. Put another way, think of every negative occurrence as nothing more than an illusion hiding something of value to you. As Richard Bach so eloquently put it in his book Illusion, “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly.”

In Part IV of this article, I’ll be covering three additional thought processes that I know, from personal experience, are capable of reducing the amount of stress in your life and bringing about peace of mind.