Start Doing This If You Want to Manage Stress

AVAlexander Volchek

Hello, everyone. You're on Alexander Volchek's channel. In the previous video, we looked at three steps toward calm and discussed how to get rid of stress once and for all. The first and most important step is to understand what causes stress. As long as its source remains in the shadows, getting rid of stress is absolutely impossible. Stress is always present in each of us. How do you find its cause? How do you understand exactly what's throwing you off balance? In this video, we'll examine how to find the cause, the root of stress. Most importantly, at the end I'll give you a practice that really helps reduce stress many times over, tens of times over. A practice that really works. Believe me, it will change your perspective, radically change how you see a situation that causes stress and various negative emotions. To understand the cause of stress, the most important thing at the very beginning is simply to ask yourself that question. We're saying the most important question isn't how to resolve stress, but why it happens. When we ask why it happens, we shouldn't treat it as a theoretical question: “All right, I'm stressed. Now what?” Or, “How do I find the cause?” You need to start putting that question to yourself. Causes can be completely different in nature. Some stress arises from the physical body you have. For example, one of your legs is several centimeters shorter than the other, and you limp all the time.

Your physical body hurts constantly. Because it hurts constantly, you're in a state of fatigue. That fatigue can easily trigger stress. That's a deeper subject, fairly deep. But some causes of stress are very simple and straightforward. Once again, if four armed people suddenly burst in here and said, “Get down!” and shot someone else dead here on the set, for example, the people left alive would automatically go into stress. There's no need to search for the cause. It's obvious, very obvious—obvious in the sense that it's easy for the mind to understand. It's also a situation that doesn't tend to repeat. When a child develops a fever and a person gets stressed, they start asking themselves questions. “I'm stressed because my husband starts getting hysterical and shouting, and I can't pull myself together and make the right decision.” He gets stressed because he starts feeling his actual insecurity. He's unsure of himself every day, nothing in his life works out, and he thinks he's about to let the child down and make the wrong decision.

He gets stressed because, say, he's run out of money, has no insurance, and can't even call a doctor. He sits down and starts examining it. In every different situation, the cause can be fundamentally different. Some causes relate to things that happened in childhood, when the person was a child. Seeing a man stresses them out because they were treated very harshly as a child. Or they get stressed when someone starts drinking because their parents drank, for example. Or stress arises at work when the boss shouts, because certain things happened at home or at school when they were a child. And some causes are even deeper. Karmic causes—today's video isn't about this—that lie entirely outside the realm of simple awareness. Some stress happens because of the space around you. For example, if you enter a space with poor air quality, you'll start feeling bad. Feeling bad will put you into stress. You might think you're stressed because your wife was shouting, but in fact you started noticing her shouting because your physical body wasn't getting enough normal, fresh air. It entered a state in which it started registering that your wife was shouting.

That's why it becomes stressed. If you observe it—I have four children, and I can identify this very clearly. I can often drive with them for ten hours without feeling even one minute of irritation toward them. They're constantly shouting and talking. Anything at all can be happening. But sometimes I spend twenty minutes with them, and one of them starts irritating me. I start getting stressed and acting inappropriately—shouting, for example. Why? Why do the same children, seemingly in the same car, bring about different states? That's what you need to observe and look into for the fundamental cause. What's the cause? The real, fundamental cause? One of the most important things you can do—here's a bonus to help you truly find it—is allow for the possibility that you still haven't found the cause. Your first impulse is to find a cause and say, “That's it, the cause is clear. Let there be happiness.” Put every proposed cause under observation instead of treating it as the final answer. Tell yourself, “Most likely, this is the cause, but it could be another one.” When you're stressed, there's a strong chance you'll want to choose the cause you like rather than the real one.

That brings up another question about causes. When should you look for the cause of stress? While you're stressed, or when you're calm? Working deeply with stress means looking for the cause at every moment. Stress arises, and you're immediately aware of its cause. The deepest way of working with causes when stress arises is to see that it's about to arise: to know that in about five or ten minutes, you'll be stressed. We had a situation recently. Last weekend, my wife, my mom, and I went to a flea market. We live in California, in the United States. This market happens once a month. They sell antiques, old things, flowers. I like buying flowers there. I bought some, and then my wife and my mom said, “Now it's our turn. We're going to look at jewelry.” They went to look at jewelry, stopped at one stall, and spent thirty minutes choosing something. The market is huge, with lots of stalls. I don't know, a square kilometer. They stopped at one stall and were choosing things. I was talking on the phone for a while; then I was off the phone and just stood waiting for them.

Anyway, I stood there waiting for them. We went to another stall. About thirty minutes passed, and at some point I went up to my wife and said, “Polina, we need to leave, because I'm about to reach the point where I'll snap.” She said, “Yes, let's go.” Five minutes later, I came over and said, “Polina, we need to leave. I'm about to reach the point where I can't stand any more of this rummaging through jewelry.” “Yes, we're going now, we're going now.” My mom was there too. They finally came over when they'd almost made the cup overflow. I'd already come up at one point and said, “That's it! How much longer?” They got ready and said, “Why are you angry?” I said, “I'm not angry yet. I'm still on the edge.” Of course they started prodding me further: “You can't react calmly or handle this calmly.” I said, “I warned you in advance. There's a point where you cross the line, and that's it. It gets hard for me to resist, hard to stay there. We either need to leave, or I need to…” Then my wife should come over and say, “Sasha, honestly, I'd like to stay another thirty minutes.”

“You could go drop off the flowers, take care of something, go look at something, and we'll come soon. We definitely will.” She probably would have resolved that state, that situation, too. That's recognizing it in advance. So once again, it isn't just the intention to find the cause that matters, but also when you examine it and look into it. Learning to recognize in advance that you're about to get stressed is incredibly important. What else matters with causes? Of course, your desire to resolve the stress itself. That desire lies at the heart of the most important work with stress, which I'm not discussing today. I've talked about it before in one of the videos on this channel. Often, you want to resolve stress only for your own sake. Most of the time, people want to resolve it for themselves. They don't want to feel bad; they want to feel good. They want to resolve stress exclusively for themselves. Even when another person is dying, someone wants to resolve the stress for their own sake. They're the one who won't have that person nearby anymore; that's why they're stressed. When someone is dying, you realize you're facing all sorts of problems, and that's what stresses you. Your child is ill, and you're stressed because you have problems.

Nine out of ten mothers I see are stressed about their children not because of what they understand will happen to the child, but because of themselves. Just themselves. In relationships, husbands are stressed about themselves, not their wives. When earning money, people are stressed about themselves, exclusively themselves, without understanding what will happen in the company or what will happen to their colleagues. Stress only about themselves. About the country and the political situation, they stress only about themselves. Stress about themselves, directed exclusively at themselves. Someone says, “I'm stressed about others,” but if they turn inward, they're really working exclusively for themselves. So try to allow for this possibility when stress arises and you want to resolve it…

When stress arises and you want to resolve it, and you know you need to look deeply into the cause, you start looking for that cause. You start working on yourself so you can see the cause in advance. Allow for the possibility that you want to resolve this stress not for yourself, but so that other people and the world around you don't have a shitty time because of your stress, so that people around you don't suffer because of you. Most of the time, your own stress destroys the people around you. In the situation I described with the children in the car, sometimes I respond calmly when they're shouting, and sometimes I don't. With four children, there's always a limit. They can always push you over the edge. Always, absolutely always, my fundamental reason for working to understand stress is to avoid causing them long-term trauma, to learn to be a real human being and respond genuinely well to the people around me, equally to any children around me. To learn to respond that way. There are many situations like that. This doesn't mean you shouldn't do certain things for yourself. If someone attacks you with a knife in the street, are you supposed to say, “I won't get stressed, so I don't spoil my attacker's mood or put them under stress. I won't draw my pistol”?

No. It means there's an appropriate response to everything. But as a basic focus of your intention in life and in working on this, it's a golden key. You can sit with your back straight, meditate, sit in the lotus position, or go on retreats as much as you like, to avoid stress and stay ready for action. But if you treat other people badly, you'll deteriorate in life, not develop. You'll sink to the bottom and move into dark spaces instead of expanding, even though you'll be completely deluded that you're a holy Buddha, a person of light, Jesus Christ, an incarnation of Zarathustra, or whoever else. This is fundamental to the whole movement into causes. A complex cause of my stress might seem to lie in my childhood, my mom or dad, relatives, the bad political situation, the president being an asshole, a bad exchange rate or economy, a shitty boss, or the wrong partner. But the fundamental root lies in your own experience of life and what you want in life: do you want to help other people in a comprehensive way, or are you only looking for your own benefit?

Again, allow this question to stay alongside you. It's an incredibly powerful practice. This practice is guaranteed to reduce the stress in anyone's life. Anyone—guaranteed. Guaranteed. I rarely speak of guarantees or commitments, but this is guaranteed, because it's a real law of the universe, an absolutely real law of the universe for a human being.

You've been on Alexander Volchek's channel, where we talk about scaling up as a person and spiritual development. In the very next video, we'll look at how to handle stress in the most difficult situations: at work, in relationships, and even before public speaking. If these situations make you tense, you definitely need to know this. Subscribe so you don't miss it. Every Wednesday, there's a genuinely useful episode on personal growth.