Chapter 8: Stress: It’s definitely my problem to solve

One of the first things you have to do in order to move ahead of the crowd of people who are beaten
down by stress is to take ownership of your problems. Many of the stress-related problems you
experience, have been created by you and can be only be solved by you. This is especially true of
psychological stress which often involves faulty or overly negative thinking on your part.

Even the problems you didn’t create like getting laid-off, or dumped by your significant other, or a nasty
cold you caught from a family member, are STILL YOUR PROBLEMS. When we blame other people or
outside circumstances for our problems, we hand over the keys to solving that problem to somebody
else.

Taking responsibility for solving your problems doesn’t mean that YOU are to blame; it simply means
that no matter who is to blame, you are still the one who has to solve the problem. So if you have a
difficult relationship with a boss or a spouse, you can either end that relationship (if it’s bad enough), or
develop coping strategies, like exercising or meditating daily so the stress doesn’t overwhelm you. There
are lots of other coping strategies and ways of handling this kind of stress but you actually have to sit
down, take ownership of the problem first, and then give yourself a little transition time to move into a
solution-oriented way of thinking.

SHIFTING YOUR FOCUS FORWARD

Moving into a solution-oriented way of thinking requires an important process that I call shifting your
focus forward – from the problem to the solution. Here’s how it works:

When we are first confronted with a problem, the problem is all we can see. As the result of this
tendency toward tunnel vision, we become problem-oriented. This may be the element of surprise
coming into play (as stress often hits us from out of the blue), and because it takes us a while to adjust
to our new reality (where we suddenly feel worse off than we were just seconds before when we didn’t
have this problem.) So it could take a few minutes, or a few hours, or even a few days to adjust to our

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new reality, depending on the size of the problem. While we are in this transitional phase, we often say
to ourselves: Woe is me. I have a big problem I didn’t have before.

Maybe a tree falls on your house, maybe you find out your teenager got expelled from school, maybe
you didn’t get the promotion you were counting on, or maybe you find out that your car needs a new
transmission. In this transition phase after we FIRST hear the bad news, we tend to focus entirely on the
problem which only increases our stress: This problem is terrible; It stinks; Why does this stuff always
happen to me?

MAKING THE SWITCH

Another reason why it’s hard to move into being solution-oriented is that when we are stressed, our
problem-solving ability essentially just disappears. Under pressure, especially under the intense stress
you feel when you first encounter a really big problem, your “emotional brain” (the lower part of the
brain called the limbic system) takes over your “thinking brain” (the upper cerebral cortex) and it’s
difficult to think clearly. Dan Goleman, author of the book Emotional Intelligence, calls this an
“emotional highjack.”

Imagine the moment of receiving new, disheartening information that makes you feel so angry you want
to punch the wall, or yell at someone, or just scream in the stairwell. Don’t expect yourself to think
clearly or to do ANY form of creative problem solving in this agitated state. In order to move through it,
simply focus on your breathing and getting your stress number down to a five or a four and then
continuing to calm yourself down by simply repeating: “This is just a problem that needs to be solved.”

Depending on how good you are at calming yourself, you may need to allow a few minutes or a few
hours or even a few days before beginning the following problem solving exercise. However long it
takes, remind yourself, that you are moving through a transition from being no longer problem-oriented
to becoming solution-oriented. And surprisingly this new solution orientation is sometimes all you need
to make your stress almost completely disappear. This happens because you start to feel a growing
sense of control over your problem.

EXCERCISES FOR BECOMING SOLUTION-ORIENTED

Included here are five exercises to help you brainstorm a solution to your stressful problems. If you’re
serious about managing your stress, going through these next few pages will really help.

These exercises follow the five-step program we outlined in the previous chapter and will allow you to
solve many of the stressful problems you’ve already identified with your stress log. Write down anything
that comes to mind. Silly solutions are fine because they sometimes help get your creative juices flowing
and move toward a more serious solution that will actually work. For this exercise: write down as many
different solutions to the same problem as you can.

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 1. Make a list of all (or at least ten) problems you have been
experiencing lately.

2. Rank these problems from the most troublesome to the least

troublesome based on the frequency that the problem occurs and
severity of the problem. Find the most troubling problem, put a 1 next to
it and continue through your list prioritizing each problem.

3. Take your top five problems. Come up with at least three possible
solutions to each problem. (Just keep asking yourself: How do I solve this
problem? (Don’t worry about the quality of the solutions. For now,
quantity is more important than quality. If you are stumped, feel free to
brainstorm with anyone you think that can offer you help.)

4. Pick the problem that seems like the most pressing (or the one that
you’ve come up with the most solutions for) and put a plan in place for
dealing with it. If the solution is going to be carried out over time, put a
schedule in place, too.

5. Carefully define how the successful outcome of this problem would

look to you. Some stressful problems will go away without a fight, but
others will recur. You’ll have to come up with a definition of success that
allows for the occasional recurrence, but perhaps without bothering you
quite so much. (For example, if you wanted to spend less time arguing
with your spouse or companion.)

LET IT BE

Sometimes you simply need to STOP thinking about your problem in order to solve it.

This approach works best with problems that come up at the end of day (and can be left until the next
morning to resolve.) When this occurs at work, don’t bring this problem home with you. Relax when you
get home, enjoy your evening and focus on getting a good night’s sleep. While you are sleeping, your
brain consolidates all the input and information from the previous day and often times, when you wake
up in the morning, a solution will appear that you hadn’t thought of before.

You will always do better at problem-solving, when you’ve gotten some distance from your problems
and they are not staring you right in the face. If you are a morning person, try doing this problem-solving
work in the morning when you’re fresh, and when you haven’t been dealing with problems all day. If
you’re a night person, tackle this problem-solving work after you’ve exercised or done some other
activity that takes you away from the problem and helps clear your mind.

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Here’s one last quote from Dr. Orman who inspired this problem-solving approach to managing stress:
“Everybody in life has problems, and that's what we really mean when we say we have stress. Some
people, however, know how to deal with their problems better than others, and those are the people
who don't show up in my office for help with stress.”