subject: Causes of stress [print this page] In technically advanced societies, stress is the biggest nemesis of human productivity, health and happiness. Stress is responsible for almost 70% of all physical illness and high rates of anxiety and depression among the general population. India can assume its place as a world leader without meeting the same calamitous fate.
Stress arises anytime there is an unacceptable disparity between your expectations and your experience. When this happens, fear rises, and the stress response is activated. When people think of stress, they often think of traumatic events like a natural disaster. However, in technical societies, the most common and deadly stress factor is "fear of failure". Here, stress is a problem of opportunity, competition is king, and the social expectation is that people will make gains in wealth, power and prestige. When we fail to meet this expectation, or even if we think we will fall, we get stress. It is an established scientific fact that you will succumb to stress if you expect things to get worse, even if conditions do not deteriorate. Western nations have unbridled stress due to runaway hopes and greed, unmitigated by any larger purpose. For most people, the purpose of life is to find happiness. If we think material success will make us happy, and if we expect it will be hard or impossible to get it, we will be maximally stressed. If instead, we focus on achieving harmony within ourselves and with God as the ultimate source of happiness, our experience is very different. As expectations go up or down in relation to current conditions, we do not succumb to stress because we are not attached to our expectations - we take our lead from God.
Our connection to spirit provides us with the power we need to pursue our goals for worldly success with greater ease and efficienty, and actively assists us with the realization of our own noble dreams. In the end, we discover that communion with God brings the death of stress, and more happiness than we dared dream of.
