Stress Free

Manoj Krishna used to be a spine surgeon and left that career to start the Human Wisdom Project (humanwisdom.me). His first book, Understanding Me, Understanding You, was translated into four languages. He has a long-standing interest in how our minds work. He feels passionately about the need for all of us to explore and understand our inner spaces, because this awakens life-changing wisdom, which can help us understand and overcome stress. He lives in Yorkshire.

Published by ClearTree Press, Yarm, England.

Cleartreepress.com

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Copyright © Manoj Krishna 2022.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The author’s website is humanwisdom.me

ISBN-13 978-0-9956833-9-6

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the many teachers whose writings have inspired me. In particular, the writings of J. Krishnamurti (1895–1986) have been very insightful and can be found at jkrishnamurti.org.

I have mentioned several facts in the book and I am grateful to those who have collated them. I have not referenced them, but they can be easily validated through a search engine.

I am also grateful to the many friends and family members who have provided feedback and with whom I have held long discussions.

For Sanjay and Shubadha

Contents

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

YOU ARE NOT ALONE

WHY BOTHER? STRESS DAMAGES OUR HEALTH

EXTERNAL CAUSES OF STRESS

IS STRESS CAUSED BY THE EVENT OR OUR REACTION TO IT?

THE ART OF UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

INNER CAUSES OF STRESS

THE NATURE OF STRESS

HOW DO WE RESPOND TO STRESS?

HOW CAN WE AVOID STRESS?

THE ROLE OF MEDITATION AND STILLNESS

HOW CAN WE RESPOND TO STRESS WITH INTELLIGENCE?

LETTER TO A FRIEND

Glossary of terms

FOREWORD

I had been a spine

surgeon for many years. One day I was driving back from a long day of surgery and heard the sound of children screaming on the radio. A hospital they had been in had been bombed, somewhere in the Middle East. In that moment, I had an insight that I felt could make a difference and that is when I made the decision to leave medicine, write my first book, Understanding Me, Understanding You, and start the Human Wisdom Project – to share this understanding with others. The idea was simple. Since many of our problems including stress and conflict between different groups of people, first begin with our thinking, the solution lies in understanding ourselves and how our minds work.

With this new direction in life, I began in education, thinking that if we could educate a new generation of children with this understanding, which leads to wisdom, we could transform their lives and change the world. I made an amazing discovery. They already had this wisdom, and it was just waiting to be awakened in them. Wherever I went, the topic people always wanted me to speak about – was stress. I did some polling during these talks (using software that allows people to answer questions anonymously), and between 70–80% of people I met said that they were moderately or severely stressed, and one in three said that they had suffered a mental health problem in the previous year. I believe much of this emotional distress is avoidable if we can meet life with this wisdom.

I have shared this understanding with the people I have met over the last few years and their feedback has encouraged me to write this book, and share this with you.

It encapsulates everything I have learnt on a journey of questioning life and learning about myself, which began when I first joined medical school, 40 years ago. I read widely, and am grateful to all those human beings who have gone before, over thousands of years, who have explored the human mind and shared what they learnt. I realised on the way that real transformation comes not from following others, but from undertaking the journey of enquiry for oneself. I think it is possible for everyone to do this.

I write this book not as a specialist, but as an ordinary human being, like you, who is just asking questions of the life we live. In many ways, this was an advantage because it left me free to explore widely and not be anchored in one particular philosophy or ideology. I have applied this enquiry-based approach to the many stressful situations I have encountered over the years, both professionally and personally, and have found it transformative. It has helped me deal with people and life’s challenges in a completely fresh way and avoid so much suffering as a result. You do not need a degree in psychology or philosophy to question the life you live or to benefit from the wisdom that you can discover by doing so. People who have shared the most profound insights have sometimes never been to college or university.

People ask me if I miss my surgical career, and they are surprised when I say that I do not. When you live with a passion for something, your heart is always full, wherever you are.

INTRODUCTION

Dear Reader,

Stress gets in the way

of our happiness. I have spoken in over 50 institutions over the last two years, and of the many things I have learnt, one stands out to me. There is one thing that everyone wants – to be happy. Despite this, a massive 80% of us report being moderately or severely stressed. Why have we not been able to use our fantastic intellect to resolve this problem?

Some months ago, I attended an educational conference. A father stood up and spoke about his son, who had gone to university a few months before, and had never come back. He had struggled with his courses, had mental health issues, and had taken his own life. I wish I could say that this story is unique, but unfortunately, it is all too common. This and other similar stories moved me deeply. I believe that with a deeper understanding of the nature of stress, tragedies like this are avoidable.

Our suffering is very real, and so much of it is avoidable, if only we had a deeper understanding of the nature of stress, its origins in our thinking, and had strategies to manage ours intelligently. This book aims to explore and understand the origins of stress in our thinking and suggest that this understanding can help us meet life with serenity, prevent us from getting stressed in the first place, and deal with it more effectively if we do. We are also going to explore how we can respond to the stressors of life with intelligence and in such a way that we do not try and distract ourselves from our feelings using food, alcohol, or drugs, which can cause problems of their own.

This understanding of ourselves and how our minds work awakens our own intelligence and leads to wisdom. By intelligence I do not just mean being smart or being able to memorise information, but rather an intelligence that emerges from a deeper understanding of our inner spaces, from an insight into how our minds work. This intelligence is a combination of self-awareness and self-knowledge, an ability to notice our thoughts and feelings clearly, and understand the many patterns of thinking behind them. This ability to see clearly, without judgement, leads to wisdom, which can change our lives.

For myself, this wisdom is alive when I notice that I am not listening to someone because I am, instead, thinking of something I want to say. Or when, in an argument, I notice that both of us are attached to our points of view, and we are just generating more heat than light, or, finally, when I come to an understanding that though you and I may have different religious beliefs, the nature of belief is the same in both of us. It is also alive when I get hurt by something you have done, and can see that it is my own unmet expectation that is causing my pain, so the actual cause of my pain lies within myself.

All human beings share the same underlying processes or patterns of thinking. Deep down, our minds function in similar ways. For example, all of us have many emotional needs that we are not aware of, but which operate behind the scenes, shaping our thinking and our behaviour. One of them is the need to feel important, for example. If we are not made to feel important when we expect to be, we can get stressed and blame the other person for hurting us. Being aware of our sense of hurt and pausing to explore what caused it, will reveal our need to feel important operating in the background. We accept this without judgement. This awareness allows us to respond to our hurt in an intelligent way, not by blaming the other person but by asking why we want to feel important in the first place, and exploring that further. There are many similar processes of thinking that operate in the background. Understanding them and seeing how they impact our life allows us to respond to life with intelligence.

We learn to swim, so when challenges come, we do not drown. Much as we try to exert control over our lives, life is inherently unpredictable, so we have to be prepared. Monumental challenges can come at any time, take any form, and will, of course, keep coming. And with challenge comes pressure, and yes, stress – possibly more than we may feel we are capable of handling. Understanding the nature of stress is the first step in allowing us to meet the challenges of life with calm. It is like learning how to swim, so that when the challenge comes, we have the ability to swim right through it to the other side. I believe everyone is capable of observing the many hidden patterns of thinking that are behind the stress we feel. Everyone in a group who starts swimming lessons will have different levels of natural ability and will learn to swim at a different rate, but everyone eventually learns to swim.

Our current model in society for dealing with mental health problems is to say, Shout for help if you are drowning and we will throw you a life jacket. You only get the life jacket if you are seriously in danger. Resources are limited, and sometimes there are not enough life jackets for everyone who needs them. In some situations, a drowning person is so distressed that they have no energy to shout for help.

Most people look for solutions to stress after it has occurred. That is natural. Sometimes the challenges of life can catch us unawares and severely limit our ability to respond in any meaningful way – or we may respond in ways that are harmful to our long-term health, by taking drugs, for example. Long-term stress can also reduce our ability to cope. When we do seek assistance, the help that is offered is usually designed to deal with the symptoms of stress rather than the root cause. Prevention is so much easier and so much more effective. Acquiring a deeper understanding of the root causes of stress in our thinking (which can help us avoid them in many cases, and respond more appropriately in others), is the focus of this book.

However, exploring the underlying causes of stress in our thinking is challenging because it means that we have to take responsibility for the stress we feel – and not blame others for it. Every instinct we have says that what we feel is someone else’s fault. It is much easier for us to blame others for our stress, and if we are watchful, we will notice that this also brings a subtle form of pleasure. This book is based on the premise that though the external triggers of stress may vary, the beginnings of stress lie within ourselves, in our thinking. Stress lies in our reaction to an event and not in the event itself, though the two may appear to be linked. The benefit of taking responsibility for our feelings is that this can empower us to do something about our stress, without waiting for the situation to change.

Let me illustrate some key ideas with some analogies.

Consider the example of a traffic jam. Is it the traffic that is causing our stress, or our reaction to it? If the traffic jam was causing stress, then it would affect everyone equally. However, not everyone in a traffic jam is stressed, and those that are, experience it to different degrees. It follows that it must be our reaction to being stuck in traffic that is the cause. Of course, quite often our mind does not observe this distinction, and so, we instead think that it is the external situation that is the true catalyst for our feelings of distress.

Once we have established that our stress is mostly caused by our reaction to an event, the next question is – how do we find out where that reaction comes from?

When a car breaks down, we look under the bonnet to see what the problem with the engine is. Once we identify the cause, the solution is self-evident; the oil may need to be topped up, for example. Most car engines follow similar principles, so if I can understand how one works, I can understand them all. Similarly, when we are stressed, it is worth looking within to find out what is behind it, and once we find the root cause, the solution is clear. To look within, all we have is our intelligence. How we explore our inner spaces is key to the discoveries we will make, and that is explored in some depth in the book.

Rather than just treating the symptoms of stress, if we can find the root cause, we can end it at its root, as the following analogy makes clear.

A child has a fever and you go to see the doctor. A good doctor will understand that the fever is a symptom of an underlying disease, and by finding out what that disease is, the treatment can be targeted and effective. If a child has meningitis and you do not diagnose that accurately, it can be fatal in a few hours. Similarly, you could say stress is a symptom of a dysfunction in our thinking, and we can deal with it most effectively by understanding the actual cause. If we just treat the symptoms, the patterns of stress will keep repeating themselves in our lives.

Understanding the origins of a problem points us to the solution. Sometimes little effort is required and if a problem is seen clearly then action follows quickly. For example, we know that sunshine is essential for life, but the day we discovered that too much exposure could cause skin cancer, we automatically started applying suncream when we went to a beach. At other times, even if we see a problem clearly, more patience, perseverance, and commitment may be required to bring about sustained change. For example, if you have a well-established habit of drinking too much alcohol, then changing that needs more perseverance, but the core approach is the same. It needs us to explore the nature of our habits, how they come about and get established, and also explore the emotional needs that drinking fulfils and ask if those needs can be met in a different way. We may need to face up to an emotional pain we feel, or accept a situation as it is, or come to terms with our own emptiness, or rebuild our relationships. This may not apply in all cases, though. For example, if you are, say, being physically abused by someone else. In that case the appropriate response is to remove yourself from that situation and get help. These approaches are not prescriptive, per se; understanding the origins of a problem in our thinking presents us with options we can explore to determine the best course of action for ourselves.

One other advantage of understanding ourselves is that it becomes much easier for us to understand others, and that can improve the quality of all our relationships.

We think our stress is unique to us, but these feelings, like anger, envy, sadness, anxiety, and emotional pain, are the same in all human beings, as are the internal patterns of thinking – usually hidden from our awareness – that give rise to them. Aside from our physical appearance, the main difference between us is the content of our memory. Just as our hearts function in similar ways, the human mind also functions in the same way in all of us, but that fact is hidden from our view. You may have lost a pet, and I may have lost my job, but the feeling of sadness we feel is the same. You may be stressed because you are waiting for an exam result, and I am stressed because I am waiting for the results of a job interview, but the feeling of anxiety is the same. You may be looking forward to your next holiday, and I am looking forward to buying a new camera, but the nature of pleasure in us is the same. The internal mechanisms in our thinking that are behind our stress and sorrow are also the same. Exploring this process brings illumination, insight, and can result in a profound transformation. For example, the human mind is conditioned by all its past influences in such a way that we are usually not aware of it, and this determines our opinions and actions. Having an insight into this process can bring transformation.

In this book, I have used the widest possible meaning of the word stress, to describe the distress and pain we feel in our inner spaces. We call this by different names depending on the context, including unhappiness, stress, anxiety, sadness, or worry. Though each of us associates these words with different meanings, they are worth exploring together because they have similar roots in our thinking and they all cause emotional distress.

We are going to explore the nature of stress together. We know water has certain properties: it is transparent; it is a liquid that turns into vapour at 100 degrees Celsius at sea level, and it freezes at zero degrees. These are universal facts about water. Similarly, we can explore the universal facts about stress regardless of who suffers from it and whatever may be its cause. Our response to stress is often unconscious and follows specific established patterns that we can explore together. For example, when we are stressed, we want to escape from it because it is like a fire in our mind. We can do this in a variety of ways, some of which, like alcohol and drugs, actually make things worse in the long-term.

The internal patterns of thinking that can give rise to stress are usually hidden from our awareness. By exploring them, we can learn how to respond with intelligence. There is a crucial difference between reacting and responding to a situation. A reactive response is not thought through and may even involve violence. What does responding with intelligence mean? It means that we do not react automatically to situations. We see what is happening both inside and outside of us clearly and can respond in the most appropriate way to that situation. In that response, there is clarity, compassion, and often, no emotional distress. It does not mean that we are passive and do nothing in life, or do not respond to injustice or abuse when we see it, for example. Instead, we respond with vibrant intelligence and an absence of emotional distress. When we are stressed, we cannot think clearly, and our mind’s capacity is limited. Responding with intelligence means that we have the energy to do the most appropriate next thing in that situation. This may mean doing nothing or taking action, but the action is not associated with fear or emotional pain.

The beauty of this approach is that no effort to change is required, the understanding itself is the driver of change. By effort I mean the energy you may spend ‘trying not to be stressed’. All we have to do is explore and understand what is going on in our inner spaces when we get stressed. This understanding gives rise to a different type of intelligence in us, and it is this intelligence that results in change without effort. Another way to consider this is that change comes from exploring a fact, in this case, the stress itself, and not from pursuing an ideal, which is the thought that says, I should not be stressed. I use the word intelligence in this book to mean a mind that has the ability to see itself clearly. Such clarity gives rise to wisdom. This is different from being clever, or being able to memorise and repeat knowledge, or have a number of degrees after our name, though all of these also have their place.

We know we need to eat well and exercise to look after our physical health, but how can we look after our mental health? When asked this question, we often do not know how to respond. It has rarely been explored as part of our formal education, which focused on helping us to get a job and be successful, but did little to prepare us for the emotional challenges of life. We were only taught about the world around us, but not about ourselves or how our minds work.

Beyond the emotional distress that stress causes, researchers are discovering new ways in which chronic or long-term stress can damage our physical health. It is estimated that more than half of the General Practitioner appointments in the UK are linked to emotional distress in some way. Chronic stress is associated with a shorter lifespan and is implicated in many health problems including heart disease, high blood pressure, and even cancer. If we want to protect our long-term health, it is important that we give our energy to exploring the fundamental cause of stress and to find out if we can live with a sense of peace.

NASA spends twenty billion dollars a year exploring outer space, and as a result, we have made extraordinary discoveries about our place in the universe. To begin this journey of understanding ourselves, we need to harness that sense of curiosity we have about the world around us and use it to explore our inner spaces. There are so many amazing discoveries to be made by exploring our inner spaces, which can transform our lives and make the world a better place. It leads to wisdom, which is essential for our happiness. This wisdom is only discovered by undertaking the journey of exploration ourselves. While there is much to be learnt from others and what can be formally taught, in the ultimate sense, there is no substitute for a direct, personal experience.

We are amazing at solving problems that we encounter in the world around us and have found cures for so many diseases. Why do we just accept the problems that emerge from our inner spaces, like stress, and assume that they have no solution? Perhaps it is because we have never even considered the possibility that a solution is possible or that there is an entire world inside us waiting to be explored, the understanding of which could transform the way we live.

We human beings are capable and ambitious when we set our minds on a particular goal. Most of these goals are in the world outside of us – to be famous, wealthy, to do something worthwhile, have great experiences, and so on. Perhaps we could bring the same energy and enthusiasm to exploring our inner spaces, and be excellent human beings who live with compassion and a sense of peace, who can meet the challenges of life without too much stress and have happy relationships.

I invite you to read this book with a spirit of learning and an open mind. This spirit of learning means being open to new ideas and willing to examine them freshly. The usual way in which our unconscious mind works is that we accept things that we already know and reject things that are different. We translate whatever we hear and try and interpret it in light of our pre-existing knowledge. Could you wake up to this process going on in the background and neither accept nor reject what is being said but examine it freshly for yourself with an open mind? This is essential if you want to get the most from this approach to understanding and dealing with stress in a new way.

You may benefit from keeping a journal as you go through the book and write your own thoughts in response to questions being explored. Writing taps into a different, more reflective part of our thinking.

Please do not accept anything you read in this book without examining it for yourself. It is only true if you see it clearly, in operation in your own life. Equally, please do not reject something because it feels different or ‘impractical’. All we are doing together is exploring and understanding the origins of stress in our thinking. This clarity brings change, and that happens mysteriously, without