Willpower

The Secrets of Self-Discipline

Dr. Kerry L. Johnson

• Publisher: G&D Media
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781722522728
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Ventes

Former pro tennis player, Kerry Johnson, shows us how to will power. With all the good intentions in the world to accomplish our goals we cannot move forward without willpower, without self-discipline. Among the lessons you will learn are how to change disbelief in your abilities into beliefs that support your dreams; how you limit yourself and how to do to break free from the very things that hold you back. In addition to having been a pro athlete, Kerry Johnson received an MBA and a Ph.D.; he lives and breathes self-discipline. Through his experience, and his knowledge as a research psychologist, he will teach you how you can achieve self-discipline. As a father, he shows you how to teach it to your children as well.

Five

Coping with Stress

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

—Winston Churchill

In 1962, John F. Kennedy’s assassination shocked the United States. A twenty-seven-year-old Army captain led the funeral procession transporting his body as a mourning nation grieved the loss. One week later, that same captain died of a massive heart attack.

A seventy-five-year-old man bet $2 on a long shot at the racetrack. When his horse won, he became ecstatic at the prospect of winning $1600. He was so overwhelmed, in fact, that just as he arrived at the window to collect his winnings, he collapsed and died.

One of these victims was young; one was old. One died during a period of national grief, the other while feeling overwhelming joy. Yet they shared a common denominator: both experienced significant stress just prior to death.

Odd as it may seem, all change, negative or positive, causes stress. The more unexpected the change in habits or environment, the greater the likelihood that stress will affect us. Sometimes this stress is mental, sometimes it is physical, sometimes it is spiritual. Most significantly, many medical researchers believe that 70 percent of all medical problems are stress-related, yet only 2 percent of patients tell their physicians about the problems causing their stress.

Stress and Change

Stress not only accompanies every major life change, from growing up to moving to a new community to aging, but also accompanies the changes that occur as we embark on a self-discipline program and lose weight, increase our wealth, or alter bad habits. This stress often diminishes our commitment, causing us to lose motivation. Ironically, the more successful we are at implementing discipline in our lives, the more change we will experience.

A life-insurance agent friend of mine doubled his income in 1984. It shot up so fast, in fact, that he employed ten new administrative people to support him. He was able to spend more time with his family and experienced great pride in his achievement. Yet in November of that year, he contracted mononucleosis. He was bedridden for three months, and his business was soon near bankruptcy. Nearly a year later his wife left him, taking their three-year-old son with her. Stress was as much a factor in his setbacks as his illness. His life had changed too quickly for both himself and his spouse.

In the short term, many causes of stress seem obvious. A prospect you are close to selling won’t return your phone calls. A customer won’t return the necessary paperwork after you have spent many months working with him. Perhaps you have office employees who move so slowly they seem more like monolithic structures than alert human beings.

Our response to stress is fairly predictable, as are the four stages of behavior we go through during stressful situations: alarm, resistance, adaptation, and fatigue. Say a client of many years is approached by a competitor and becomes convinced that the product you’ve sold him is obsolete and a bad investment. When you discover the transgression, you experience shock and alarm. How could this happen? How could your customer be so stupid as to listen to other people?

The next stage you experience is resistance. You may contemplate bombing your competitor’s building, or at least slicing his tires. You may walk up and down the hallways of your office complaining to everyone you see. You may feel yourself tensing more and more as you talk about your situation. After writing letters to well-chosen recipients, you decide the best thing to do is to call the client and explain to him how he was wronged.

Then you begin to adapt. You reason that it might be more work to pursue your former client than it is worth. You may even contemplate ways of preventing the problem in the future.

The final stage is fatigue. Even though you learned of the replacement only a few hours ago, your whole body feels like a twenty-ton truck ran over it. Every muscle aches, and you’re mentally exhausted and emotionally spent.

The theme in this example is that the more time you spend resisting the stressful situation, the more fatigued you will be in the end. Likewise, the more strenuously you resist, the more fatigued you will be. If you’ve ever arm-wrestled, you know that each competitor tries to pin the other’s hand and arm onto the table, and that each experiences one common result: exhaustion after the match.

In the late 1970s in Linz, Austria, I competed in a tennis tournament against an Austrian hometown champion. “Boris” was favored to win the tournament. In fact, the tournament directors tried to ensure his win by entering him in the semifinals without competing in the preliminary rounds like the rest of us. It was common in those days for a celebrity to receive money under the table to entice him to show up. This stipend was often more than the winner’s purse.

Boris won the first set. I was ahead five to three in the second set when Boris tossed the ball up to serve. But instead of serving the ball to me, he served his racquet. He threw his tennis racquet across the net, and it went whizzing over my head.

My alarm stage set in. I felt shocked that this would actually happen. I then resisted. I ran over to the chair umpire and demanded that Boris be ejected from the match, but the tournament directors weren’t about to expel an investment property as valuable as their champion. I then adapted by realizing my efforts at retribution were useless. I walked back onto the tennis court and stood ready to play, but I felt exhausted, as though I had already played a five-set match. I had spent so much energy resisting the situation that I had fatigued myself. I was unable to play effectively throughout the rest of the match, and Boris went on to win the second set seven to five and take the match.

Types of Stress

There are two distinctive types of stress. Cannon stress is named for the esteemed physiologist Walter Cannon, and Selye stress is named after the great Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye. Both types work on the presumption of a weak link. Every one of us has a weak link physically or mentally. This weakness is the first part to break, and because of this no two people will react to stress alike. Some may have heart attacks while others, like me, lie awake with insomnia night after night.

CANNON STRESS

Cannon stress, also known as the fight-or-flight response, is based on a physiological reaction. It is useful during periods of emotional or physical threat. If you are a caveman and are attacked by a saber-toothed tiger, for example, Cannon stress will help you climb a tree faster than a cat.

During periods of physical threat, Cannon stress saves lives, but except for these unusual examples it also serves to take lives. Physical symptoms of Cannon stress are as follows:

1. Muscle pain or illness. Have you ever come home at the end of a bad day at the office feeling as if you’ve been run over by a Sherman tank? You may have been suffering from Cannon stress. Even if you didn’t lift more than a pencil, the constant tensing and relaxing of muscles can leave you feeling as if you have run a marathon.

2. Tension headaches. Unlike migraines, this type of headache is caused by the tensing of skull muscles. Often aspirin can help relieve this pain, although relaxation techniques are more effective in the long run.

3. Irritable stomach. Because the stomach muscles are also in tension, digestion continues in the form of acid release. The acid causes ulcerations in the stomach lining.

4. High blood pressure. The automatic tightening of muscles even affects the capillaries. Blood pressure is increased, because the blood is redirected away from the extremities toward the torso, putting pressure on the heart.

Some of the psychological symptoms of Cannon stress include:

1. Intractable fatigue. This is a condition in which one is actually too tired to sleep. After I have traveled through time zones, I sometimes find my exhaustion is so great that I am actually unable to fall asleep.

2. Insomnia. Because the muscles in the body are kept in such a state of tension, the body can’t relax enough to fall asleep. Insomniacs often report being caught in a Catch-22 cycle. They become so afraid of not sleeping at night that their anxiety levels soar, causing even more severe insomnia. You may experience this during periods of pressure at work or at home.

3. High irritability levels. Have you ever had a conversation with someone fresh from a problem or argument? You ask a simple question and get a nasty response like, “How would I know?” This is an example of irritability caused by stress. Bobby Knight, ex-basketball coach for the Indiana Hoosiers, once threw a chair onto the court during a game because of his high irritability level. His temper got him into more trouble later, when he was accused of choking a player for being disrespectful to the coach. He was fired for violating a zero-tolerance policy the athletic director had initiated to curb violent outbursts.

4. Lack of concentration. If you have ever flown, you have undoubtedly sat for long periods of time in an airport. Did you try to read or concentrate? During this high-stress time of waiting, it becomes difficult to concentrate or follow through on a thought. You are instead paying attention to flight announcements and watching your belongings.

5. Acute anxiety. The psychological discomfort caused by stress stirs up apprehension and anxiety, occasionally to the point of fear.

SELYE STRESS

Selye stress works in a different way. This type of stress causes small muscle problems in the arterial walls as well as artery and vein constrictions much as a clenched first causes blood flow to be restricted in the hand. Also reacting to perceived change, it causes problems with other systems in the body. Some common Selye stress symptoms include:

1. Migraine headaches. These headaches cause more pain than simple headaches; it often feels as though pain is wrapped around the head or centered unilaterally in one area. Such headaches can result in flulike symptoms. Once they begin, it becomes difficult to break the cycle of pain.

2. Rash or skin eruptions. You have undoubtedly seen people red-faced when upset. Others actually break out into a facial rash. I worked with one person whose face turned red when stressed. I usually knew how much stress she was under just by looking at her blotchy skin.

3. High vulnerability to illness. Selye stress lowers the body’s natural resistance to illness. If you have had the flu or a cold more than once this past year, you may be suffering from stress.

4. Heart disease. This is often due to coronary artery obstructions, damaging the heart itself. The arteries need to be elastic to allow blood to ebb and flow. Selye stress causes these arteries to harden, making them susceptible to stricture and blockages. Arteriosclerosis is a hardening of the arteries made worse by stress. A majority of heart attacks occur between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m. on Monday mornings. Apparently job stress is a great contributor to heart attacks.

5. Cancer. I never understood the magnitude of how stress can affect cancer until I watched what happened to my mother. In 1979, even though she had never smoked a single cigarette in her life, she had a lung removed because of cancer. In February 1987, she collapsed in her home, paralyzed with a malignant brain tumor. Fortunately, her neurosurgeon was able to remove all of the cancerous tissue. After the operation he said that the cancer, latent for twelve years, had been activated by stress.

One theory is that cancer develops because the body’s resistance level is fatigued by stress, making us more susceptible to cancer attacks. Another theory is that the normal resistance to cancer we all have is diminished by constant stress.

6. Grey hair. Even if you’ve been using Grecian Formula for years, you may be surprised to learn that the pigment of hair, called melanin, is destroyed during stress, leaving hair a premature grey.

7. Male pattern baldness. Baldness is obviously hereditary, but it also can be accelerated during periods of high stress. The smooth scalp muscles may actually constrict the hair follicles, causing the hair shaft to fall out more quickly.

The psychological symptoms of Selye stress include:

1. Depression. Defined psychologically as loss to oneself, depression can trigger periods of hopelessness and helplessness. Serious depression can lead to suicidal thoughts. Over 70 percent of the adult population in America reports serious depression at least once a year. The highest number of suicides in our society occur between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five years, ages of radical physical and emotional change. Losing a loved one can cause depression. It also is the result of losing a job, opportunity or even a tennis match. When I was on the pro tennis tour, players would often say that they depression they felt from a match loss was more intense than the joy of winning a tennis match.

2. Psychosis. Many psychologists believe that all of us possess latent psychotic tendencies. Psychosis is medically defined as a symptom or feature of mental illness typically characterized by radical changes in personality, impaired functioning, and a distorted or nonexistent sense of objective reality. The line between normality and abnormality is a thin one. Stress-related pressures can push us across that line, causing ordinarily normal people to exhibit very unpredictable and unstable behavior.

Stress and Behavior: Type A and Type B

Your personality type also contributes greatly to your stress level. Consider these questions: Does your behavior help you or hinder you in achieving your goals? Do you roll with the punches or make things worse for yourself? Take the short test below to determine your personality type. If you answer yes to ten or more of these questions, consider yourself a Type A personality. If you answer yes to fewer than ten questions, breathe a sigh of relief and consider yourself a Type B personality.

TEST FOR STRESS

1. Do you finish others’ sentences before they do?

2. Do you move, walk, or eat quickly?

3. Do you prefer a summary instead of skimming or scanning a complete article?

4. Do you become upset in slow lines of traffic?

5. Do you generally feel impatient?

6. Do you find yourself uninterested in or unaware of details?

7. Do you try to do two or more things at once?

8. D...