It was 9 am, and I was already tired… No, correction: exhausted.

So I went back to bed, really curious what was the reason.

I asked and muscle tested questions…

I noticed that I was not breathing deeply: in fact I could not. The breath would not go through.

So I doubled up on the question: what is the cause of this inability to take a deep breath? Health, concerns, each individually, and all said no.

Then I asked: feeling under pressure… stress.

And yes, that was it.

I asked: do I have any reason to feel under pressure… and the answer was “no”.

In that very moment the breath came back, and the tiredness was gone… It is back now a little… as I am writing it, and with it the tight shoulders…

So I ask again: Do I have a reason to feel under pressure? And the answer is again “no”.

But, it seems, I need to deal with the residual tension of the shoulders… luckily I have moves to do that.

Now, how often does this happen to you? That you feel under pressure, and you get tight, and you can’t breathe deeply?

If my experience of you is any indication: all the time, or often.

To me this was the first time this whole year… that is why it was a novelty, and I am sharing it.

So what did I do?

I did not resist. I am feeling whatever I am feeling. If I am feeling it, it is caused by something, so let’s find out what?

When you ask inquiring questions, you fully express that you are not resisting. Piling up resistance on the top of stress is like a double whammy… a true killer.

In my inquiry I found that I feel under pressure, and there is neither an inner nor an outer reason for that, although I did find a few things I screwed up this morning, and I am missing 24 pictures on one of my websites…

But all that is not enough reason to be pressed.

So, how do you get stressed? How do I get stressed?

One major factor is self-imposed overwhelm.

Overwhelm is all over the place.

• You can overwhelm your stomach by eating more than what it can comfortably process… One fistful of solid, one fistful of liquid, on fistful of air… is the ideal.I have found that if I am not practicing foresight and have the food ready when hunger attacks, always out of the blue, then I may start to eat whatever… and overwhelm my stomach…
• Another way you can overwhelm your digestion is to eat incompatible food: carbs and proteins… sandwiches are big culprit here.While you are very young, you may be able to get away with that, but not over 40… And at my age, approaching 70, you really need to pay attention.

  Of course different blood type people, different dosha types have different strength of stomach acid… Your frequent heartburn should be your indicator of weak stomach acid.

• You can overwhelm your senses… too hectic, too fast, too changing… too many pictures, too much said… and you’ll likely have nightmares in addition to the tight shoulders, and the blurry eyes.
• You can cause overwhelm by multi-tasking… I’ll give you an exercise about that later in this article
• And then, lastly, you can misweight how much time, attention and glycogen you have in any given day… and put too much on your plate…I have three, maybe four good hours a day, the rest I would not call good… in this regard.

  My glycogen storage is full when I get up, and I do the best work then.

  If I am distracted, then my day is quite shot: my creativity, my ability to hold the disparate thoughts necessary to be creative are diminished on mundane stuff, I did not want to do… I was “forced” to do.

  Having students all over the world is difficult in this regard: some students need me in the morning. My morning.

Anyway: no matter which overwhelm is your predominant stressor, the solutions are

1. Learning to say “no,” or at least “not now”…
2. Foresight and preparation
3. Clarity of what is important to you… I mean really important to you. The more what is important is inner driven, the easier life is, and the less overwhelmed you’ll be, the less stress you’ll have.If you make outside circumstances, being liked, looking, good, being respected, valued, or worldly success your masters: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Said George Bernard Shaw, and this one quote is all you need to become stressless, unharried, unhurried, and centered.

Here is a “trick” I learned in Landmark on how to handle a hectic place… where people interrupt you, whether on the phone, in email, text message, or personally:

1. Before you “answer the call”, stop fully doing what you are doing. This means telling the “thing” or person, that you’ll be right back…
2. Then turn fully to the interruption… make it physical, make it a grand gesture, don’t take what you’d been doing with you. Handle whatever there is to handle… fully.
3. Then consciously and mindfully STOP fully that, so you don’t carry it back, or further to your day. If you need to pause, and see what you need to do so it is complete, for now, take a note, think it over, make a call, write an email, send a text… do it before you return to the activity that was interrupted.
4. Then, when done, turn, physically, to the activity you left minutes before, and give it your full attention.

Now, pay attention: this is a lot like food combining: don’t mix things that don’t belong together… or you’ll be ineffective in all of them. That is what we call multi-tasking. Reduces your already flagging intelligence by 30%.

In your comment, please tell me what you learned, for yourself, in this article…

Thank you.

Read the original article: Stress, pressure, and overwhelm… no wonder you are tired!