Once again the holidays are upon us, and of course that means friends, family, good cheer—and stress. Stress goes with the holidays like pumpkin pie with whipped cream, like mashed potatoes with gravy, like egg with nog. The harried shopping excursions, crowds, and for some, even family visits, can throw us headlong into a bottomless abyss of stress. The holidays it seems are a well-oiled stress machine, churning it out by the truck load.

So what are we to do? How can we manage, minimize, or even all together banish stress from our lives during the bustling holiday season? The easiest way is to simply leave town. Go live in a cave for a couple of months and wait it out. But for some of us, this just doesn’t seem a reasonable strategy. Nor is it, by the way, the way of the yogi. The yogic answer is about transcending our suffering, not running away from it.

First off, it helps to have an understanding about what stress is, how it affects us, what gives rise to it, and how we can choose to contribute to it, or not. We all know that stress is undesirable. When under its affects, we feel bad and in high doses, it’s bad for us: a whole range of illnesses can be caused by chronic stress.

What we call stress is actually caused by the functioning of our inborn “fight or flight” response. This instinctual response evolved out of our need to react to the mortal dangers of living among wild animals in an untamed environment. It involves the sympathetic nervous system which is responsible for preparing our bodies to fight or flee from an aggressor. To do this, the sympathetic system, shifts the priorities of the body away from those not immediately needed, like digestion, and to those that are likely to be needed in combat, like increasing heart rate, respiration and muscle tone.

While this system served us well thousands of years ago, it is, at best, outdated today. For unfortunately, the sympathetic nervous system responds identically regardless of whether we are faced with a hungry saber-toothed tiger or the lagging fourth-quarter results of a sales forecast. While one may argue that the sales forecast is nearly as important to a modern person as outwitting a tiger was in days gone by, the real problem has to do with the duration of the perceived threat. While the danger of the tiger would pass in a matter of moments, stress brought on by business, family, or money can go on indefinitely. This chronic stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system leads to hypertension, depleted energy levels, and depressed immune function, just to name a few.

In short, it appears as though we aren’t wired properly for the environment we live in. So then, what are we to do? We still must cope with our daily lives, and if the sympathetic nervous system operates automatically, it seems we have little ability to affect our stress levels. Well, fortunately there is a loophole (you’ve gotta love loopholes). Specifically, the stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system is affected dramatically by our emotional response to the perceived threat. In other words, our reaction to an external stimulus is much more important than the external stimulus itself. This explains why some people can thrive in the same environment that may turn others into a quivering heap of protoplasm.

Said another way, if we begin to identify stressors as challenges rather than threats, we can limit the effects of the sympathetic nervous system thereby eliminating many of the physiological problems associated with chronic stress. While this all sounds fine and dandy on paper, shifting our reactions to stressful events is not as easy as it may seem. To do understand how to do this, we need to dig a bit deeper.

What we are still missing is the understanding of how exactly the sympathetic nervous system is triggered to begin with. Three factors are involved, each of which play a part in creating the bodily reactions that give rise to feelings of being stressed and their potentially harmful physiological effects.

Perceived relevance: What does this have to do with me?
There is going to be a blizzard in Flagstaff today.
Person 1: “Oh no, don’t we have to go through Flagstaff on our way to Grandma’s?!”
Person 2: “That’s nice, I’m only going to Scottsdale.”

Expectations: How does the news measure up to my expectations?
There is going to be a blizzard in Flagstaff today.
Person 1: “That’s going to add two hours to our trip. I can’t sit in the car that long!”
Person 2: “Yeah, it happens every year. Cheese Nip?”

Projections: How the mind has a tendency to create stories, worries, and “what if” scenarios about the past or future.
There is going to be a blizzard in Flagstaff today.
Person 1: “Oh my God! I heard about this couple that accidentally drove off the side of the road in a snow storm. They got covered over by a snow plow and when they found them in the spring, they were both dead, but the woman had eaten part of the family dog to try to stay alive. Do you think the visibility will be that bad? How old are the windshield wipers? Uh, can Scruffy come along?”
Person 2: “Interesting. Hey, I’m going to get a cup of coffee, do you want anything?”

While each of these three plays a part in creating stress, we can only affect two. Something is relevant to our situation or it is not, about this we have no choice, but we are able to very directly affect our expectations and our projections—our tendency for our mind to spin off in wild stories that create worry and fear.

Expectations

Let’s start with expectations. First let us agree that expectations are nothing but thoughts. They are not fixed, and can be—in fact, often time are—changed. For example, there was a time in my life that I expected to be paid $3.00 per hour, but since that time, my expectation has changed (although unfortunately my actual pay rate seems to have remained constant).

Now, visualize yourself driving on a freeway, the traffic has begun to back up and is now moving 30 miles an hour. How do you feel? Frustrated, right? And why? Your frustration has nothing to do with the fact that you are moving 30 mph: if you were in a school zone and moving 30 mph, you’d be perfectly happy. But because on the freeway, you expect to be moving 65 miles per hour you feel stressed. So stress then arises as a result of the discrepancy between our expectations and our experience. When they match, or the discrepancy is in our favor, we’re happy; when otherwise we’re not.

This phenomenon leaves us with two choices: 1) To let go of our expectations which we’ve already agreed are nothing but somewhat arbitrary thoughts that can and do change regularly or 2) To attempt to manage everything and everybody in the world in order to ensure that all events correspond to our expectations. And of course being intelligent, logical creatures, we all choose the latter. This is the beginning of our problem.

In order to manage stress vis a vis our expectations we then need to recognize that our anxiety and frustration is to a large extent self inflicted. We choose to hold on to expectations in the face of a reality that manifests quite differently. In other words, my frustration does not come from the fact that I’m making $3.00 per hour; my frustration comes from the fact that I’m making $3.00 per hour and I think that I should be making $15.00.

All we have to do then is to let go of our expectations, right? Well, almost. As with nearly all yogic practices, we endeavor not to change, but rather to study the process. If we simply seek to dispose of our expectations we’ll soon find ourselves with a bucket-full of expectations and yet another expectation that says we should have no expectations. In other words we’ll have added yet another expectation to our expectations, taking us even deeper into the mire.

So the alternative is to simply bring the process into the light of our awareness, to become aware of how our expectations are affecting our life. As we begin to realize more and more deeply that a certain type of thinking gives rise to stress and anxiety, transformation begins to occur spontaneously and effortlessly.

Projections

How many times have we all been faced with impending change only to spend hours going over every possible scenario, worrying how it will affect our finances, our relationships, only to have everything work out just fine. This is in essence the problem of projection. It is a colossal waste of time, and one that creates torrents of unnecessary worry and despair.

Projections are not so different from expectations. In fact, projection occurs when we take expectation and live them out in the mind as versions of future or past. We take our expectations of how things should turn out, and then run them through various imagined scenarios many of which leave us feeling anxious and stressed out. Projecting takes the worst elements of expectation and inserts them in precisely the right place to create stress. And once again it’s completely of our own doing!

Like expectations, the solution to projections comes from taming the mind. Letting go of expectations and remaining present to what is are both effective techniques to transcend the effects of projection. And many of the practices of yoga are specifically designed to do such work. Asana, pranayama, meditation, and chanting, just to name a few are all practices that tame the mind.

But again, the understanding of the process, seeing how our habits contribute to our worrying and stress, lends power to these practices and speeds transformation. As it becomes clear that certain behaviors lead to unhappiness, those behaviors begin to drop away on their own. We need to do nothing against them. The simple practice of remaining consciously aware of how we are, and how that makes us feel is the key.

So it seems it all boils down to three things: let go, remain present, and pay attention. Letting go of expectations frees us from the frustration that arises when they are not met. We cease setting ourselves up. Remaining present, with what is, keeps us out of the realm of fantasy worries and concerns. By embracing what is, here and now, and letting tomorrow take care of itself, we transcend the anxieties caused by our overactive imaginations. And lastly, by paying attention we reveal how our mental habits are the true culprits in creating anxiety and stress.

A tall order, I know, but with just a bit of practice, you’ll be amazed at how quickly stress can be banished, transforming your holi-daze back into your holidays.

Love & blessings,

E

Yogi E, a.k.a. Eric Walrabenstein is the founder and director of Yoga Pura in Phoenix, AZ. He is the architect of Yoga Pura’s year-long Advanced Studies Program and trains yoga teachers nationally. E regularly travels the country holding workshops on the process of enlightenment and translating ancient yogic truths for daily living. He is currently at work on a book on unreasonable happiness.

Copyright 2005, Eric Walrabenstein, all rights reserved.