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A Recipe for Personal Peace

 

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For 7 ½ years I taught drug- and behaviorally-addicted parolees in California life skills. It was a 120-hour course that consisted of four components: one was the disease concept of addiction; there was recovery, or behavior modification; there was building healthy relationships with healthy people; and stress and anger management. That’s the component that I would like to specifically address in this podcast.

While teaching this part of the curriculum, I developed a strategy that I refer to as a “Recipe for Peace.” To better understand this recipe for peace, I’d like to first share with you what our curriculum suggested was the process for anger. I used two metaphors for describing the process for anger to my students. One was an ‘anger stew.’ The meat and potatoes of anger stew is stress. The carrots and onions are triggering thoughts. The two main triggering thoughts are ‘shoulds’ and ‘blames.’ So the recipe works something like this: If a person is highly stressed and they can find somebody to blame for what’s going on in their life, it gives that highly stressed person an excuse, a rationalization, to act out in some dysfunctional, destructive, angry way. Likewise, if a person is highly stressed and they can find somebody that they think should be doing something and isn’t, or shouldn’t be doing something and is, it also gives them the rationalization to act out in some angry fashion. So again, the recipe for anger is stress plus triggering thoughts equals anger.

Now the constructive opposites for this anger recipe, what I call the recipe for peace, goes like this: Proactive stress management plus personal responsibility and acceptance equals peace. So let’s look at this recipe for peace in more detail.

To help my students better understand the connection between stress and anger, I gave them another metaphor. I suggested that they try to see themselves as balloons, and the air in the balloon is the stress. Every day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they are either putting more air into their balloon until they pop, or taking air out. The proactive stress management aspect of the peace recipe is just about that. Taking air out of the balloon. It’s important to understand that there’s no such thing as no stress. A certain amount of stress is necessary just for us to be able to stand. We call it ‘muscle tension.’ We’ve all seen babies who can’t even hold their heads up; that’s no stress – that’s no muscle tension. In future podcasts we’ll discuss this in much greater detail, but I would like to give you five simple things that you can do right now to reduce the stress in your life so that you can get further and further away from living on the edge of anger.

The fastest and easiest thing that you can do to be proactive in your stress management is deep breathing. To prove this point to you, let’s do an exercise really quickly. Keep track of your pulse for 15 seconds. Then multiply that number by four. … Ok, now take three long, slow, deep breaths. … Now take your pulse again for 15 seconds and multiply that number by four. … In the vast majority of instances when I have done this exercise with my students, they found that their pulse rates dropped – significantly in some cases – just by taking three deep breaths. When they took five deep breaths, their pulse rate dropped even more. So the most immediate thing we can do to reduce the stress in our lives is deep breathing. Something that works for me is that I have environmental cues that remind me to stop and take a couple of moments to re-center myself. Currently I’m working at a grade school with developmentally disabled kids. And as you might imagine in a grade school, bells are ringing all the time. So every time I hear a bell, I stop, take a couple of deep breaths, and that re-centers me. That re-focuses me. It allows me to reduce any stress that I might have acquired since the last bell rang.

There are other fundamental things that we can do, such as eating healthy, taking vitamins, getting exercise, getting the proper amount of sleep. If any or all of these behaviors are things that you are currently doing in your life, then I’m sure that you are well aware of the benefits. However, if you’ve had difficulty instituting these behaviors into your life, a previous podcast entitled “You Can Change Without Growing, But You Can’t Grow Without Changing” provide processes so that you can begin to institute these healthy behaviors.

The most beneficial thing we can do for ourselves is to have healthy relationships with healthy people. Dr. Drew Pinsky in his book, Cracked, suggested that healthy people use their relationships to regulate their emotions. Healthy people do not bottle up their emotions and then explode later because somebody isn’t doing something that they think they should be doing. Proactively managing our stress also benefits us in other ways. It keeps us healthy. If you look at the word ‘disease’ – d-i-s-e-a-s-e – disease – it’s in the word – dis-ease. Not at ease. The more stressed we are, the more sick we become. Stress is a major contributing factor for everything from the common cold to cancer.

Another debilitating aspect of being highly stressed is that it constricts our reticular activating system – the part of the brain that helps us see options. The more stressed we are, the less options we see. Conversely, the less stressed we are, we begin to see not only the black and the white, but all of the gray in between. Future podcasts will be devoted to processes, that when practiced, can have a profound impact on the quality and quantity of one’s personal peace.

The second aspect in the recipe for peace is personal responsibility. The December podcast entitled “Putting a Man on the Moon” is entirely dedicated to personal responsibility – being responsible for our actions, our thoughts and our feelings.

The third component in the recipe for peace is acceptance of oneself and acceptance of others. Acceptance is closely aligned with personal responsibility. It’s very important to understand that people change their behavior only when they see the benefit in changing their behavior. We can’t make people do anything that they don’t want to do. How many hours of our lives have we spent trying to convince somebody to do something that they didn’t really see the benefit in doing. How much stress and anxiety have we brought upon ourselves engaging in this fruitless endeavor? People change when they see the need to change. And we need to accept that. Personal responsibility in relation to the acceptance of others rests in how long do we allow ourselves to be exposed to behaviors and attitudes that we do not believe serve our best interest. If we have friends and family or acquaintances whose behavior we allow to adversely affect us, it is our responsibility to protect ourselves. And in some cases that may mean ending relationships. But we have to take the responsibility for being as healthy and as peace-filled as we can possibly be.

It’s been my experience that being accepting and tolerant of other people is often easier than being accepting and tolerant of ourselves. Acceptance of ourselves requires that we learn to forgive ourselves for our past transgressions. One of the videos that I used to show in my class was a Les Brown video. And in this video he said, “If you wouldn’t do it today, you’re convicting an innocent person.” When I heard that the first time, it was like a lightning bolt struck me out of the sky. I realized at that moment that I was beating myself up for things that I hadn’t done in 10, 15, 20 years. And that I’m a different person today. And there’s no good point to me holding myself emotionally hostage to behaviors that I haven’t done in 20 years. One idea can change your life, and that single sentence, “If you wouldn’t do it today, you’re convicting an innocent person,” enabled me to set down baggage that I’ve been carrying around with me for most of my life.

Many of my students when talking about stress and anger management had the misconception that once they had completed that part of the curriculum that they would never be angry again. Perfection is not the goal. Perfection is impossible. Jesus Christ, the Christian physical embodiment of peace and tolerance, snapped when he saw that money changers had turned the temple into a marketplace. The goal is to have reasonable responses. And lower stress levels allow a person to do just that – have a reasonable response. Something other than the ‘fight or flight’ mentality.

It is my belief, and I have seen it work in my life and the lives of others, that the recipe for peace is proactive stress management plus personal responsibility and acceptance of ourselves and others. When these three behaviors and attitudes are practiced we begin to develop more peace within ourselves, which ultimately leads to more peace in the world. We are responsible for creating the peace in our lives. And it doesn’t take much imagination to see that world peace can become a reality when each person finds peace within their own heart.