How to Get a Lot Done Without Stress | Why What Is Easy for One Person Is Hard for Another

AVAlexander Volchek

Someone asked me how to stay energized, keep up the pace, and avoid pushing yourself into stress. Sometimes you look at another person and see how much they get done, how quickly they make decisions, how many events they live through, and cannot understand why even a smaller workload is so much harder for you. Or you feel that you used to be able to do more, but now you have slowed down, lost your rhythm, and stopped keeping up. Have you really slowed down? What creates the feeling that you are falling behind? Why does a fast pace bring one person joy in life and make another tense? Do we need to keep striving to do more?

Let us look at it. Yesterday I was talking with my wife's mother, who is visiting us. As we discussed a few situations, she said, "Sasha, this is so hard. You have to keep thinking things through to understand other people's situations." Later, while driving, I said, "Well, that certainly is a lot of work." Yet for me, understanding each situation is very easy. As I drove, I thought: what an incredible joy it is to experience so many events and explore life with a sense of joy—not just an attitude, but joy itself. Having all these events in your life is a joy.

You might assume that when a person has a lot going on, there must be stress, problems, tension, and losses. But if we take a real, fundamental look, we see that people with fewer events, less exploration, or less ongoing study of life do not necessarily live more peacefully, in terms of their own state and feelings, than people who keep exploring life. On the one hand, there is examining every situation and every person, trying to understand causes and effects, digging deeper rather than immediately applying a label, sensing the whole of an actual event rather than judging it superficially.

That seems like a lot of work, and it is work. On the other hand, we can see it as the flow of life. It is interesting. Life itself is interesting. It is remarkable: I find it fascinating, while someone else may see it as nonsense they cannot understand. The same kind of effort brings one person joy and another indignation, negativity, and a very difficult experience of what is happening. Why does that happen? Why does that way of perceiving things arise at all?

In the question you just voiced, the person asking needs to look fundamentally at why they see the picture that way. Why do I assume that having a great many events in my life is always difficult, just because I see another person with a lot going on? Of course, society imposes that view. It says it all the time, 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 is very difficult. You need to find some balance between family, money, and work. There is this endless story about how difficult everything is and how we need balance, this endless search for balance. Since I have already mentioned my wife's mother, yesterday she asked me, "What matters more to you, work or family?

Which would you choose? You once said you would choose work." I said, "I don't know in what circumstances I said that, or to whom." Her late husband had passed it on to her. I said, "Perhaps that's how you heard it. Perhaps he was saying something else, or perhaps it was a different time." I do not know what exactly it was about. But I will not make a choice between work and children. I think we have many videos about this on the channel. If we put a choice before ourselves, I choose true life. In true life, everything is interwoven. There is no choice between work and children. The central problem in how we view the difficulty of business, professional life, having many children or even one child, or simply being ourselves, is that we perceive it as hard work.

That may not be quite the right expression in Russian, but we perceive it as hard work. Other things seem easy. Some people find it easy just to lie down. We joked about it yesterday. My dog is a Russian borzoi, and she sleeps ninety-nine percent of the time. She lies there, already tired even of following me around. When I move around, she follows me and flops down wherever I go, whether I sit at the computer or start talking on the phone. At some point, she even gets tired of following me and just flops down somewhere in the middle of the house. I said to my wife, "Look, your friend." She said, "Listen, I can't sleep at all." So for some people… This is not really about the dog.

I know people who find it very easy to rest, and others who cannot lie on the couch for thirty minutes. For them, that is hard work. From the start, it is important to understand that what you perceive as hard work or difficulty—because everything in life involves effort—may be rest or joyful work for someone else. They may not even use the word work; they may consider it complete, genuine rest. This also creates social conflicts. My wife, for example, mainly takes care of the family, children, and home. If I say that being with the children is a joy, she agrees on the one hand. On the other, she needs to preserve the social embellishment that life must involve hard work.

You have to keep something difficult in your life. Notice how constantly people talk about it and make use of it, and how hard it is to let go of internally. If you are resting, going through a period when you are not doing anything, society starts pressuring you to work: "Stop wasting time. It's time to do something, to start some projects." You must do something, but what? What society says you should do. Yet not working, not going to a job or running a business every day, living freely instead of by a schedule, is very difficult for that same society. Imagine telling someone who has gotten up on a schedule and gone to work every morning for forty years that they must live without a schedule, let go of it, and step outside it.

That is incredibly hard. Letting go of a schedule is incredibly hard. Some people struggle their entire lives, every day, every year, to start getting up early or going to bed on time. For others, that is completely normal, and not doing it would cause them distress. For me, getting up late or going to bed late is difficult. It is a barrier, regardless of whether I am busy. Wherever I am, it remains a barrier. I immediately start feeling energies from every direction, as though I have missed something, done something wrong, or arranged things badly.

It is a real barrier, a problem, rather than something you can simply let go of and allow to take its course. Changing it is not easy. If you have lived that way for decades, you have to really push yourself to change it. On the other hand, however much we observe how difficult particular tasks feel, and however much we think certain practices or techniques will make them easy, it is important to understand that spiritual impulses shape your state, mood, and energy.

Those impulses exist. For people who are not studying the spiritual world, approaching this area is extremely difficult. Their internal system automatically wants to compare them with others through ordinary social or psychophysical phenomena or aspects of material existence. It does not allow for the possibility that a particular energy is simply flowing in someone else. For example, one person's entire spiritual system may carry an energy of endless stress, while in another this type of energy is weaker or has been extinguished. The second person does not merely have an advantage. They experience states that are essentially inaccessible to the first person and will never become accessible to them.

If we examine the structure of the spiritual world, look at spirit, study spiritual science, and consider these energies, we see that some energies cannot be copied. Some cannot be recreated in another person or reproduced in that person. It simply cannot be done by any means. So the next question for the person who asked is: how do you actually perceive someone else when you ask a question like this? Why do you look at another person and think they feel joyful or are having a very hard time? I have three channels, and thousands of people watch me.

If you read the comments, some people say I am insane and selfish, while others say, "I have seen a spiritual teacher, someone with an incredibly broad understanding." Using me simply as an example, there is an enormous range of outside opinions about the same person, based on essentially the same videos at the same time. These are people I do not know. Of course, people I know personally also watch, which may be different: they know me a little better or understand my circumstances more broadly. Why do people form these opinions?

That brings us to the following. First, to live at all, we need to keep studying everything. We need to keep working, analyzing, avoiding premature conclusions, and trying to see a broader picture. Instead of simply asking, "Why is Olya in this mood today?", look at what happened during her day, what energies she carries, what events are unfolding, how the space around her affects her, what is really operating within her, and what is merely a minor circumstance. Perhaps a neighbor scolded her as she entered the building, or she found a thousand dollars there. Minor circumstances that are not connected to her fundamental energies.

External factors that happen to make her face paler or redder at that moment. If we raised the temperature in this room to forty degrees Celsius, I would find it hard to talk or sit here. Everyone would say, "Alexander is stressed." Of course I would be. My physical body would be under stress because it was hot. It would not be something that lives inside me; I would simply have been put in those conditions. It is important to keep studying another person. But what does that mean? As my wife's mother said then—my words are a little foggy right now—"It is so hard to keep analyzing things like this.

How do you find the time? How can you do it?" But she also makes judgments about people. She thinks that my seeing a slightly broader picture is difficult. Yet I arrived at a judgment just as she did; I merely explained and described it a little more broadly. That does not mean I spent additional energy on it. I do not know if that makes sense. It is like one person going to the store to buy tomatoes and another buying tomatoes, cucumbers, and apples. They are unlikely to have used different amounts of energy buying just cucumbers or cucumbers, tomatoes, and apples. It is more or less the same. They did not buy an additional forty liters of water. Picking up something extra at the store is not much of a problem.

It also depends on the person who came to the store. If they walked, even carrying cucumbers may be hard because they have to walk ten kilometers home. If I came by car, I can buy much more, pay someone to carry the groceries to the car, and then pay someone to carry them into the house. That means buying forty kinds of food and even forty liters of water is easier for me than buying cucumbers is for the other person. If my late grandmother saw how much food we buy and compared it with how she shopped—taking a trolleybus somewhere, to a store or a market, or walking a long way to a small local store—there would be a real contrast. I remember going to Komarovsky Market in Minsk as a child.

We had to ride two or three stops—I do not remember exactly—to get to the market, buy the food, and then lug those bags in our hands. Now, even when I go to the market, I drive there and take a cart out of the car. We are in California, after all: that is the California vibe. I hope we can show some photos here. You take out the cart, walk around the market putting groceries in it, drive home, and unload them straight into the house. You do not carry them up to the fourth floor without an elevator, as I did as a child. Back then, after getting home, you still had to carry everything up to the fourth floor. Of course, there is a big difference. And that is without even mentioning that ninety-nine percent of the groceries are delivered to the house, along with water by the hundreds of liters.

I have not even included that. They deliver it right to your door, bring it up, and leave it there. It makes a big difference. This comparison matters. It may seem odd, an example from the physical world, but it is a way of understanding reality. When we talk about the consciousness of someone with an expanded perception of the world, or the ability to perceive it differently, it is not difficult for them. A blind person may find life difficult, while someone who sees a great deal has no difficulty processing it. Notice the interesting point: someone sees less, perceives less information, and has less information to process, yet encounters greater difficulty in the social world. You would agree that, for example, it is hard for a blind person to get to the kitchen and pick up a cup.

It would be quite difficult to walk through my house here. For me, it is very easy, although if someone asked me to describe what I did, I would say, "I perceive a three-dimensional space, three hundred and sixty degrees around me: the walls, the floor. I see the surface, and my brain automatically recognizes that I won't slip on it. I work out what I will do where, how I will pour something. I take the cup and pour." It sounds incredibly complicated. I put a filter in the coffee maker, add coffee, open a cabinet, take out a bag, measure the amount for the number of cups. Can you imagine? It sounds incredibly complicated, but in practice it is elementary, like going to a coffee shop to buy coffee. That is a simple event. Describe it in great detail, though, and it sounds very complicated.

When we examine a situation with someone—why partners argued, why a husband and wife are separating, why people started a business together, why a child will not listen to their mother or father, why someone cannot fall asleep at night, or why certain images remain inside them—we start explaining patterns, details, approaches, and circumstances. If they are not used to perceiving the picture that broadly, they may be used to something very simple: they see Olya, look at her, and think, "As long as there isn't a knife sticking out of her shoulder, everything is fine." As my grandmother used to say, "The main thing is that we're not at war." So many people thought the main thing was that there was no war. As it turned out, war can start very easily anywhere.

There are certain fixed ideas, and people become locked into them.