Your Gps for Less Stress: How Twelve Rules Can Take You Where You Want to Go

Copyright © 2014 Kenneth Shuster.

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-8873-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-8874-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-8872-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013922705

Balboa Press rev. date: 1/31/2014

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Rule #1 Be Responsible

Rule #2 Use Pleasure and Pain to Maximum Advantage

Rule #3 Do Not Allow Fear to Paralyze You

Rule #4 Take Action

Rule #5 Maximize Your Physical, Emotional & Mental Well-being

Rule #6 Do Not Beat Yourself Up Over Past Mistakes

Recap of rules 1-6

Rule #7 Make Positive Change Easy

Rule #8 Enjoy Compatible & Loving Relationships

Rule #9 Do Not Take On The Responsibilities of Others

Rule #10 Treat Every Human Being With Respect

Rule #11 Use Time and Money Efficiently

Rule #12 Develop a Religious or Spiritual Practice and an Attitude of Gratitude

Recap of rules 7-12

Afterward

About The Author

Bibliography

Preface

I wrote this book to help you deal with stress. It’s a safe bet you need help with this emotion even if you don’t feel it, because in today’s world stress is extremely widespread and far-reaching. You probably also wish your life could be better, at least in some areas, or you would not be reading this book. Maybe your particular issue is some serious and seemingly insurmountable problem, like unemployment, an inability to pay bills, an unhappy relationship, or a physical, emotional, or mental illness. Maybe the stress you feel is not due to such monumental challenges, but to other important ones, like how to better relate to your children, boss, spouse, lover, friends, or co-workers. Perhaps you simply want to be happier and less frustrated, angry, and disillusioned. I’d also be willing to bet that regardless of your particular problems, you’re tired of all the crap you have to deal with. This is understandable, because crap stands for criticism, rejection, assholes, and pain, and we all come up against these things from time to time. Whatever your issue is, you are not alone. We all suffer from stress. Indeed, the only place you’ll ever find anyone who doesn’t is in the cemetery! Well, I’m happy to tell you that you already have within yourself everything you need to successfully combat stress.—You just may not know how to do so. This is where Your GPS For Less Stress comes in. It will teach you how to reduce stress.

Never underestimate how important it is to reduce stress. Over the course of some twenty-five years of service as a rabbi and untold hours of adult, teenage, and couples counseling, I have come to believe that stress is responsible for most of the discord, anger, depression, frustration, and burn-out I see in people’s lives. In my personal life, it was an inability to deal with stress, or at least deal with it effectively, that made me an angry young man, then an angry middle-aged man, who was frustrated, demoralized, broke, helpless and hopeless. It destroyed important relationships, derailed my ambitions, and probably contributed to my Wegener’s Granulomatosis, a rare auto-immune disease. I’m positive that stress is directly responsible for the maximum weight of 368 pounds I foolishly placed on my five foot nine inch frame and dangerously carried around for years. Sure, I could blame my obesity on the fact that I stopped smoking. Everyone knows you gain weight when you stop smoking, right? I could also say it was because of the massive dosages of steroids I took to put my condition into remission, and who would dare second-guess a sick man who got fat trying to save his life?! Yet, because I haven’t smoked in over twenty years, and have not consumed steroids for over three years, were I to do this I would only be fooling myself. Moreover, excuses always do more harm than good—especially over the long-term! It is the lessons I have compiled in Your GPS For Less Stress that inspired me to take my stressed-out body to the gym most days of the week, exercise it, meditate it, and feed it with healthier food choices and more ambitious, inspiring dreams. I believe that the same way this book helped me address my stress, it can and will help you if you let it. But in order to be successful, just like I did, you’re going to have to trim your excuses and take serious and positive steps to turn your life around. You have already taken a huge step in that direction by committing to read this book.

Moreover, it is important to recognize that although encountering stress is simply a part of life and cannot be escaped, there is much you can do to insure it does not cause you to give up, lower your standards, lose your goals, derail your relationships, suffer a heart attack or stroke, wind up in the loony bill or hospital, or worse yet, dead! In fact, what you can do to most effectively manage stress is what this book is all about. It is why I wrote it. I felt that, although we must all occasionally suffer from it, in varying amounts, on multiple levels, and over many things, if I could help others deal with their stress, then what I have endured will not be in vain. What I found is that stress is really no different from other problems we all face. Just as our challenges are usually multi-faceted, there is likewise more than one form of stress. In fact, there is actually good stress.—Imagine that! Stress that is good for you! I also found that we bring a lot of stress on ourselves. In this, as in many life areas, we are our own worst enemy. One supreme irony in this, as you will see, is that we do this because we think it will help us. The good news is that if we have the power to be our worst enemy, we can also be our best friend and one way to do that is by reducing our stress.

Interestingly, stress has self-destructive mechanisms that can predictably trigger it in just about anybody, as well as realities that can combat and reduce it. I have distilled these stress combat suggestions into twelve rules that, if followed, almost guarantee you will experience the least amount of stress possible. In fact, I named this book Your GPS For Less Stress because, like the GPS in your car, its lessons will guide you to the happier, more productive, stress-reduced, and successful destination you want to arrive at. You owe it to yourself to learn these rules and turn them into habits so they can become a part of who you want to be.

Many people have helped me throughout my life. My late Grandmother Ella Scher believed in me and encouraged my dreams. Ingeborg Buium, whom I love very much, has always provided much needed motivation and support. My paternal grandfather Isaac arrived in America, alone and penniless, in 1917 at the age of fourteen. When he passed away over 60 years later, he had supported his family for close to four decades from his own business, helped raise two sons, and had earned the love and respect of his sons, their wives, six grandchildren, and innumerable nieces, nephews, cousins, and friends. His example motivates me every day. As does that of my friend and dentist Robert Kaufman. Next time you are tempted to complain about your commute, think about Robert who travels every month from Israel to New York in order to support his family!

However, the person who inspires me the most is my dear friend Joseph Gibney. Although Joe became paralyzed at a very young age, he managed to earn both college and law degrees and work for the Justice Department. More importantly, he has not become a sourpuss. Somehow, Joe continues to enjoy life and inspire others with his warm smile and pleasant demeanor. God bless you, Joe.

I am indebted to the many self-help experts and authors who paved a path before me and made it that much easier to formulate my contributions in this book. These include Jack Canfield, Og Mandino, Steve Pavlina, Anthony Robbins, and W. Clement Stone. Then there are truly remarkable individuals, like Chris Gardner, David Murdock, Liz Murray, Oprah Winfrey, and others you will learn about who somehow found it within themselves to surmount extraordinary obstacles to make a better life for themselves and to help others. They truly inspire me. I am grateful to the psychologist Izzy Kalman for his invaluable advice. Finally, I cannot adequately thank Pervin Taleyarkhan for her thoughtful and careful editing of the manuscript.

However, my greatest debt is to you for purchasing and reading this book. You may be a famous person whose name is found in headlines or on movie marquees. You may be a fireman who saves lives. You may be a doctor who tends to the sick. You may be a stay-at-home mom or dad whose efforts at raising a family make all the difference. You may be an immigrant who came to these shores at great risk to yourself to make a better life for your family. You may be a cab driver, laundress, restaurant server, politician, author, housepainter, or religious leader. You may be a stepparent who, amazingly and altruistically, is raising someone else’s child as your own. You may be a student, a drifter, or just someone at loose ends who has yet to find a way to serve. Whatever role you presently play in the great tapestry of humankind and regardless of how much money you make, opportunities you have, or where you live. Regardless of what color your skin is, how old you are, what language you speak, or what religious or political views you hold, you are already a success. For you have made the conscious decision to better yourself by learning and implementing this book’s suggestions. Thank you for doing so. May the teachings of this book bring you more success and much less stress.

Introduction

Worry in a person’s heart weighs one down…- Proverbs 12:25

[Unproductive] stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness. – Richard Carlson

BAD EFFECTS OF STRESS

Heart Attack

Stroke

Depression

Low Self-Esteem

S tress is the background music of our lives and is constantly harming us in many ways. In fact, stress is so widespread it is a safe bet you suffer from it even if you don’t feel that you do. Stress may be acute and may injure you directly by causing a heart attack or stroke. More often than not, it harms you indirectly by compromising your quality of life and the lives of those you care about. This is because when you are stressed, you do not take as much care of yourself as you should. You do not eat as well, you do not exercise, and you are cranky and hypersensitive. This, in turn, can lead to heart disease, high blood pressure, immune system disorders, diabetes, and a host of other conditions. More ominously, stress by itself, even when it does not influence you to eat poorly or skip the gym, can lead to these ailments. As many as 70-80% of all doctor visits are for stress-induced ailments. However, these statistics need not create a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are many things you can do, including following this book’s teachings, that can markedly reduce, if not eliminate, your stress. Doing so will not only assist you in preventing or lessening your chances of becoming ill but will help prevent many of the psychological and emotional problems and havoc stress can cause.

This is important, for stress can usurp your attention, deplete your energy, and sap your ambition. It can further result in low self-esteem and a negation of your personal values. This is because when you are stressed you cannot focus on your dreams and goals. You tend to take the path of least resistance. You come to settle for all that is not ideal and worth fighting for in life, including your job, friends, integrity, relationships, and financial, physical, and emotional well-being, just because it is more convenient and easier to do so. In time this may make you angry, bitter, and depressed, and result in harmful and painful addictions and ruined relationships. Even worse, stress can give you an increasingly negative outlook, until you say, what’s the use? and no longer try to improve. At its worst, stress can cause total nervous and emotional breakdowns and destroy a life completely, or deprive you of the best one you can have. Such a reality is tragic because you do not need to do anything, make a certain amount of money, or win an award before you are entitled to enjoy a happy, fulfilling, and productive life. Always remember this: You have already earned the right to enjoy life. It is your birthright.

You cannot live without stress

The bad news is that you cannot live without stress. This is because although you want what is best for you, you live in a world with other people who want what is best for them. So when what you want does not jibe with what others want, you experience conflict, which in turn causes stress. Now, this reality is not as pronounced in cultures like the Japanese and Ladakhi, which place a premium on cooperation. But in much of the world, competition has replaced cooperation as the main way in which we function. Although competition is not bad per se, much of it is based on a belief in lack, or the idea that there is not enough to go around and if we don’t get the best of anything then someone else will. The fear we may not be able to carve out not just a place in the sun, but the best place in the sun, tarnishes our ability to relate to others from a position of interconnectedness which teaches there is enough to go around and that by helping each other we help ourselves. Furthermore, although each and every one of us should strive to acquire the best in life, inordinate competitiveness causes us to believe we are entitled to the best. This sense of entitlement degrades us, for we come to think that if we cannot have the best of everything, no one should. Such an outlook neither inspires cooperation nor makes the world better, and is one of the main reasons so much is not working in our world today.

Inescapable stress

There are many types of stress. One is what life coach Paul McKenna calls inescapable stress, or stress that comes from situations you feel you cannot immediately escape from. These include bad