How to Get a Lot Done Without Stress

Why can one person get a great deal done without feeling constant stress, while even a small number of tasks is hard for another? I look at why having a lot to do does not, in itself, make life harder: what feels like a heavy burden to one person may be a natural pace, an interest and a joy of life for someone else.

I also talk about why we compare ourselves with others, what really makes work feel hard, and how to take a broader view of our own rhythm of life.

How to get a lot done without driving yourself into stress

I was asked a question: how do you stay energized, keep up the pace and still not drive yourself into stress? Sometimes a person looks at someone else, sees how much they get done, how quickly they make decisions, how many events they live through, and can't understand why even a smaller load is so much harder for them. And sometimes there's a different feeling: I used to be able to do more, but now it's as if I've slowed down, lost my pace and stopped keeping up. But have you really slowed down? What creates the feeling that you're not keeping up at all? Why does a fast pace bring one person joy in life and lead another into tension? And does a person need to keep striving to do more?

Let's figure it out. Yesterday I was talking with my wife's mother — she's staying with us — and as we went through a few situations, she said: “Sasha, listen, this is so hard — you have to keep thinking and working things out to understand other people's situations.” Later, as I was driving, I said: “Well, that really is quite a lot of work.” And yet, for me, working out every situation is very easy. Then, as I drove, I thought: what an incredible joy of life it is to relate to a great number of events, to the analysis of life, with a sense of joy. Having this great number of events is a joy of life in itself.

You might assume that when a person has a lot going on, there must be stress, there must be a problem, tension, some kind of losses. But if we look fundamentally, for real, we'll see this: if people have fewer events in their lives, if their exploration, their endless study of life is reduced, it doesn't mean they live more calmly — in terms of their own state, their own sense of things — than people who live in the exploration of life.

On the one hand, working out every situation and every person, trying to understand causes and effects, digging deeper, not rushing to put a label on things, sensing the wholeness of a real event instead of judging superficially — that seems like a lot of work. It really is work. On the other hand, you can see it simply as the flow of life. And it's interesting. Life itself is interesting.

And it's remarkable: for me this is very interesting, while for some other person it's nonsense and generally incomprehensible.

It turns out that the same kind of work brings one person joy and brings another indignation, negativity and a very difficult perception of everything that's happening.

So why does this happen? Why does this very construct of perception arise at all? So in the question that was asked — the one you just voiced — you need to look fundamentally: why do I, the person asking myself this question, see the picture this way? Why, just because another person has a lot going on, do I perceive a large number of events as always very difficult?

What society imposes on us

Although, of course, society imposes this. It talks about it constantly; people talk about it everywhere. To be successful, you have to work a great deal. To have a lot of money, you have to work a great deal. It's very difficult. You have to find some balance between family, money and work. This endless story that everything is very difficult and you need balance — an endless search for balance.

And by the way, since I've already mentioned my wife's mother today: yesterday she says to me, “What matters more to you — work or family? What would you choose? You once said you would choose work.” I say, “I don't know in what circumstances or to whom I said that.” Her late husband simply passed it on to her. And I say, “Perhaps that's how you heard it. Perhaps he said something else, or perhaps it was a different time.” I don't know what exactly it was about. But I won't choose either work or children. I think we have a lot of videos on this topic on the channel.

What exactly do you consider hard work

The main problem in how people perceive difficulty — the difficulty of business, for example, of professional life, of having many children or of a child at all, the difficulty of being yourself — is that a person perceives it, once again, as hard work. Maybe that isn't quite the right way to put it in Russian, but they perceive it as hard work. And some other events they perceive as easy.

There are people who find it easy to lie down. We had a joke about it yesterday. My dog is a Russian borzoi, and she sleeps ninety-nine percent of the time. She lies there and is already tired even of following me around. When I walk around, she follows me the whole time and flops down wherever I am: whether I sit down at the computer or start talking on the phone, she flops down right away. And at some point she gets tired of walking and just flops down somewhere in the middle of the house. I say to my wife, “Oh, look, your friend.” And she says, “Listen, I can't sleep at all.” But this isn't about the dog.

I know people who rest very easily. And there are people who can't lie on the couch for thirty minutes — for them, that's hard work.

How we make our own lives harder

So it's fundamentally important for every person to understand from the very start: what you perceive as hard work, or as difficulty in general — and everything in life is work — another person may perceive as rest or as work that brings joy. Or they won't even use the word “work” and will consider it complete, genuine rest.

And, by the way, this also causes social conflicts in the world. For example, my wife mainly takes care of the family, the children, the home. And if I say that being with the children is a joy, then, on the one hand, she says: of course it's a joy. But on the other hand, she has to keep this social embellishment that life must involve hard work. You absolutely have to keep the idea that something in your life is difficult.

If you pay attention, people talk about this all the time, they make use of it, and it's very hard to get it out of yourself. If you're resting, going through some period when you're not doing anything, society will start pressuring you and telling you that you need to work: “Stop wasting time. It's time to get busy with something, time to start some projects.” That is, it's time to do something, without fail — but what? Whatever society considers socially necessary.

And yet, in fact, not working, not going to a job every day, not running a business every day, living not by a schedule but in freedom — that is very hard for this same society. What does it mean for a person who has gotten up on schedule every morning for forty years and gone to work to hear that they must live outside a timetable, lose their timetable, be off schedule? It's incredibly hard. Removing a schedule altogether is incredibly hard.

And there are people who struggle their whole lives — endlessly, every day, every year — for example, to start getting up early or going to bed on time, on schedule. And there are people for whom this is the absolute norm, and they would suffer if they didn't do it. For example, for me, getting up late or going to bed late isn't easy. For me it's a barrier — and not because I'm busy. Wherever I am, it's a barrier for me. I immediately start feeling energies from every direction, as if I've missed something, done something wrong or arranged something badly.

So it's a whole barrier, a problem — rather than something you simply let go of so that it flows on its own. And changing it isn't easy. If a person has lived in such a state for decades, then to remove it they have to really force themselves.

Spiritual impulses that create stress

On the other hand, we notice how difficult certain tasks feel and think that with the help of some practices or techniques we'll get to the point where it becomes easy for us.

But it's very important to understand that there are spiritual impulses that shape your state, your mood and your energy.

These impulses exist. For people who are not studying the spiritual world, touching this area is extremely hard: their inner system automatically wants to compare itself with another person by ordinary social or psychophysical phenomena, by matter — without allowing that a certain energy may simply be flowing in the other person.

For example, in one person an energy of endless stress may be flowing through their whole spiritual system, while in another this type of energy will be weaker or extinguished. And this second person isn't simply at an advantage: they will feel states that are essentially inaccessible to the first person and will never become accessible.

If we look at the structure of the spiritual world, look at the spirit, study spiritual science and look at these energies, we'll see: there are energies that cannot be copied. There are energies that cannot be recreated in another person. There are energies that cannot be repeated in this person. It simply cannot be done by any means.

Why you cannot compare yourself with another person

So in the question this person asked, the next step is this: how do you perceive another person at all when you ask such a question? Why, when you look at another person, do you think they feel joyful or that things are very hard for them?

I have three channels, and thousands of people watch me. If you read the comments, at the same time there are people who say I'm insane and an egoist, and there are people who say they have beheld a spiritual teacher, a person of incredibly expanded understanding. So from the point of view of outside perception — of me simply as an example, of me as a person — there is an incredible range of different opinions. At the same time, and essentially about the same videos.

And these are people I don't know. Of course, people I know personally watch too — that may be a different matter: we'd say that such a person simply knows me a little better or understands my circumstances a little more broadly. Why do people form such opinions?

The main principle of life without stress

And here we arrive at the following construct.

Don't just say, “Why is Olya in such a mood today?” — but try to look at what she had during the day, what energies she carries with her, what events are happening to her right now, how the outer space where she is affects her, what is truly at work in her and what is simply some micro-circumstances. Perhaps a neighbor scolded her as she came into the building. Or she came into the building and found a thousand dollars. Some micro-circumstances that aren't connected with her main energies — simply external factors that affected, at that moment, why her face is paler or redder.

If we made it forty degrees in this room right now, it would be hard for me to talk and hard to sit. Everyone would say, “Alexander is stressed.” Obviously I would be. My physical body would be under stress because it would be hot here. But not because it lives in me — only because I've been put into such circumstances.

It's very important to keep studying another person. And here the question arises: what does studying another person mean? As my wife's mother said then: “It's so hard to keep analyzing things like this. How do you find the time? How can you do it?”

But she, too, makes certain judgments about people. It seems to her that if I unfold the picture a little more broadly, that's difficult. But actually I formed my judgment just as she did. I simply told and described it a little more broadly. That doesn't mean I spent any additional energy on it.

It's as if one person went to the store and needed to buy tomatoes, while another went to the store and bought tomatoes, cucumbers and apples. They hardly spent a different amount of energy buying just cucumbers or cucumbers, tomatoes and apples. It's more or less the same. They didn't also buy forty liters of water. Picking up something extra at the store doesn't seem to be any problem.

And it also depends on what kind of person came. If a person came on foot, even cucumbers may be hard to carry, because they have to walk ten kilometers home. But I came by car: I can take even more, pay to have the groceries carried to the car, and then pay to have them brought into the house. And it turns out that it was easier for me to buy forty kinds of groceries and even forty liters of water than for the other person to buy cucumbers.

My late grandmother, if she saw how much food we buy, would connect it with how she used to buy food: taking a trolleybus somewhere to a store or a market, or walking a long way to some small local store. I remember how, as a child in Minsk, we used to go to Komarovsky Market. You had to ride two or three stops — I don't remember how many — get to the market, buy the food and then lug those bags in your hands.

Now, even when I go to the market, I drive there and take a cart out of the car — we're in California, after all, it's the California vibe. You walk around the market, put the groceries in the cart, drive home and unload them straight into the house, instead of carrying them up to the fourth floor without an elevator, as I did as a child. Of course, there's a big difference. And I'm not even talking about the fact that ninety-nine percent of the groceries and the water — hundreds of liters — are delivered to the house. They deliver it right to your door, bring it and leave it at your door. A big difference.

How expanded perception changes the sense of difficulty

This comparison is important. It may seem strange, taken from the physical world, but this is what understanding reality is. When we talk about the consciousness of a person who is in an expanded perception of the world, or who is able to perceive the world in some other way, it isn't difficult for them.

It's like how life is hard for a blind person, while a person who sees a great deal has no difficulty processing it.

Notice how interesting it is: a person sees less, perceives less information, has less information to process — and yet in the social world they get difficulty.

You agree, don't you? It's hard for a blind person, for example, to get to the kitchen and pick up a cup. It would be quite hard for them to walk through my house here right now. For me it's very easy to do, although if someone asked me what I did, in terms of description it would sound like this: “Listen, I'm perceiving a 3D space, three hundred and sixty degrees around me: the walls and the floor. I perceive what the floor surface is, and my brain automatically registers that I won't slip on this floor. What I'll do and where, how I'll pour. I take this cup and pour.”

Sounds incredibly complicated. I put a filter into the coffee maker, poured in coffee, opened the cupboard, took out a bag, measured it for the right number of cups. Can you imagine how that sounds? But in reality it's elementary — like going out to buy a coffee at a coffee shop. It's an elementary event. But if you start describing it, telling it in great detail, it's very complicated.

When we work through some situation with another person — for example, why partners quarreled, why a husband and wife are separating, why people started a business together, why a child doesn't want to listen to their mom or dad, why a person can't fall asleep at night, why certain pictures are stuck inside a person — you start telling the person about it and describing various patterns, details, approaches, circumstances.

And sometimes a person isn't used to perceiving the picture that broadly and is used to perceiving it very simply: they see Olya, look at her — the main thing is that there's no knife sticking out of her shoulder. So everything's fine. As my grandmother used to say, “The main thing is that there's no war.” How many people in the world thought the main thing was that there was no war — and it turned out that war breaks out very easily, anywhere.

There are certain fixed ideas, and a person gets fixed on them.

🎥 Video for this article