Fighting Impatience, Stress, and Fear

[Bubulous]

Patience:
The Tao Te Ching is 2000 year old Chinese literature written by Lao Tzu.  I have read two different translations of it.  It has philosophies in it that are very deep and some of them are hard to grasp.  Still it is a great read.  It has only 81 chapters and all of them are only 1 page long, however if you read it in 30 minutes then you didn't really read it.  The translated versions of it have the authors thoughts on how to translate the chapters but I would recommend coming up with your own as it relates to your own experience.  It is the main book I live my life by.  I do also like the Bible and many of it's stories the same as I like the AA book for it's stories and inspiration.  One of my favorite statements in the book Tao Te Ching I read was "Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?"  There are many different ways to interpret this but I will give you mine as it pertains to what I am about to talk about.  First it pertains to me because of my mood swings of bipolar.  I often have to tell myself when I am depressed not to brood on it but let it pass naturally.  That is waiting for the mud to settle in my foggy mind so that I can see the world clear and beautiful again.  Another way of looking at is imagine you are trying to find something in a shallow creek.  Maybe it was your watch that you dropped as you were walking through the creek stirring up mud.  You freak out because you cannot see through the mud to find your watch so you start combing the creek bottom in the hope that you would feel it.  Eventually you may find it.  If you had waited for the mud to settle it may have took just as long to find it but in this world of instant gratification it is much more of a habit to freak out and panic then to stop and think.  Which way of looking for the watch do you think would be the most beneficial, cognitively?

Another story that I like to think about took place at a McDonald's a few months back.  I ran into one of my old military friends standing in line.  He was the next in line and I was directly behind him.  I said hi with a smile and we began to talk.  We talked for maybe a minute and a half before he stopped me mid sentence and yelled out "Doesn't anybody work here?"  I thought it was funny because he was taking the quickest route to get a meal by going to a fast food restaurant but somehow it still wasn't Quick enough.  In my head it was funny but to the people working there which heard him scream, it was likely insulting.  That was one of the most ridiculous things I had ever seen.  
I practice patience everyday.  One of the main things people are guilty of doing that shows there impatience can be easily seen in the way they communicate.  I am sure everyone has noticed when talking to a certain person that they are not listening at all.  If you don't you will after you read this.  If you pay close attention to the feedback you get from those you talk to you will learn a lot.  If they say something totally unrelated to what you were talking about, they were likely just waiting for their turn to talk.  They dismiss what you said because they were waiting for you to stop so that they could tell you what they were thinking the whole time you were talking which they consider more important than anything you said.  This shows a lack of patience.  
If I am going to walk somewhere and I have time I will take the longest route that I can.  This is one way I practice patience.  I don't listen to the voice in my head that is telling me to take the short route.  I will talk about the voice in your head later when I talk about fear.  Society is getting worse about patience because at this point in time it is easy to get what you want quick.
I learned about instant for the first time at an orientation for a job I had just gotten.  The main leading it said that the job was difficult for most young people because they were programmed to get what they want instantly.  He said that when working a job, you have to work all week to get the reward of a paycheck.  You have to work for months or years to get the reward of a promotion.  He related this to video games.  He said that when a person is playing a game they are rewarded every minute.  You push a button and you kill a bad guy.  You kill a bunch of bad guys and you go to the next level.  You go through all the levels and you beat the game and trade it for another one then start all over again.  
Nowadays if you want to talk to someone you take out your cellphone and call them. If they have a cellphone they will answer.  Within seconds after taking the cellphone out of your pocket, you are connected to a friend or family member.  You can also look through your contacts and call someone without having to memorize the number.  For those of you who remember "back in the day" you had to try to catch someone at home before you could talk to them and calling anywhere outside of your county or city costed extra money.  Phone conversations were more enjoyable and lasted longer because you didn't know when both of you would have the time to sit in the house and talk.  With the invention of wireless house phones you could at least walk around the house and clean but you couldn't venture far away from the receiver because it would cut off.  I could go on and on with examples like this but I will just list a few for you to think about:
Record player/tape player/cd player/walkman vs Ipod
Playing sports on a game vs playing sports
VHS vs DVR
Multiple stores for merchandise and food vs Walmart
Writing vs typing

I think you get the idea.  Practicing patience will help to keep away stress.

[Bubulous]

Summary:
Impatient behavior causes you to try to control your life and moves you further away from your higher power and your faith in it.  If you try to control your life you will live a life of fear.  If you live a life of fear you are most likely doomed to die from stress.  This poem should sum it up better than making this a long summary.

If you feel poor then you want wealth
If you feel sick then you want health
If you feel cold then you want a cover
If you feel lonely then you want a lover
If you hate the day then you want the night
If you fear the dark then you want the light
If you feel like a dunce then perhaps you want school
If you feel like a dork then you want to be cool
If you're in pain then you want it to heal
If you feel insane you may need a pill
If you want to be saved then you need to pray
If you want what I have I'll tell you the way
Don't brood on the past live in the present
Don't try to be king be happy as a peasant
Don't fear the future it could be better tomorrow
Don't force love it will just bring you sorrow
Don't hold grudges learn to forgive
Be ready to die so you can live
Love everyone there is no need to hate
If they are in a hurry be patient and wait
Do something selfless and expect no credit
Find peace in yourself and learn how to spread it
One cycle begins when you take your first breath
That cycle will end on the day of your death
Perhaps an endless cycle is that of the soul
It uses life cycles to allow it to grow
Notice the cycles and let them flow
Try to find faith and give up control

[Bubulous]

Fear:
I talked earlier about the voice in your head earlier.
One of my favorite things to say about fear is that it is actually love going in the wrong direction.
Imagine that you are a man shopping in a mall.  You turn the corner and see a man screaming at his girlfriend.  The man is much bigger than you and would definitely mess you up.  You turn around and walk away.  You wanted to do something because you wanted to protect the girl (love) but didn't because you thought you were gonna get beat (fear).  If you don't love yourself and the values that you have, you will always be afraid to stand up for them.
I don't quote the Bible much but in this case the story of David and Goliath fits pretty good:
David was not even an adult yet.  He hard heard of the bully Goliath and volunteered to fight him.  He was dismissed because of his age until there were no more volunteers to fight Goliath.  David truly loved himself because he knew that he was carrying out his God's work and it gave him the courage to stand up and fight.  Could he have slung that stone and hit perfectly if he was doing it because he was afraid of getting beat up if he missed?  Could he have done it if he was doing it for praise or a reward?  The answer to these is no.  He did it because he listened to the voice in his head which in this situation and my situation is God, it can be different for those who have a different higher power but you get the idea.  He knew that it was his purpose to fight the Giant and because his faith was so strong there was no way he could have missed.  Faith is love and fear is love going in the wrong direction.
What did that child have that you cannot?
You don't have to wait until you are strong or wise to start standing up for your morals and values.  Don't do it for yourself or the person you may be defending.  Do it for your higher power if you have one or just do it to combat evil.  I do it with a pen and paper but I am not afraid to take the fight to evil in wherever it presents itself.  If you do it for love you cannot lose no matter the outcome.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

[Bubulous]

Stress:
I have heard and I believe that stress is the number one killer today.  Stress cause depression, feeds addiction, causes heart and blood pressure problems, causes migraines, and fights your spiritual connection with your higher power (which in turn pushes you further away from faith and cause the behavior of trying to control your life, which adds more stress), just to name a few.  Think about this situation...
A man falls asleep and forget to turn the alarm clock on.  He wakes up the next morning, look at the clock, and realize you have 30 minutes to get ready do you can make it to work on time(stress 2 of 10).  He quickly grabs some clothes and rush to the shower.  After the shower he starts to get dressed and realize that in his panic he forgot to grab a shirt which means he has to go back to the room and find one(stress 3 of 10).  He gets ready and rush out the door to jump in his car.  When he gets to the car he realizes that he forgot his keys so he has to run back inside(stress 5 of 10).  he sits out on the road driving excessively to make it to work on time.  He has tunnel vision and notices nothing around him.  Suddenly a car pulls out in front of him, he cuts the wheel, and crash into a tree.  To make this a happy story, he doesn't die.  But you can see how stress could have killed him.
The lymbic system in the brain can have a dramatic impact on stress.  Let's say that you just came back from a deployment from a war zone.  Over there you had experienced daily bombings that shook the ground and got your heart racing.  Now you are back home.   Using the baseline of a person who has never been to war, let's call him Mark, I will compare their physical and mental reactions certain things.  The soldier and Mark are laying in bed and hear a clap of thunder.  Mark reacts but because he has never experienced combat he has no memories that are intensified by the lymbic system making his stress 2 of 10.  The soldier hears it and what starts out as 2 of 10 becomes a 9 of 10 quickly because he hears a mortar not thunder.  The lymbic his memories triggered the lymbic system to make his symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) arise.  His mental reaction is fear and his physical reaction is an elevated heart rate and sweating.  A lot of people define PTSD as a normal reaction to an abnormal situation.  It was normal for the soldier to act this way because of the abnormal situation he was in.
Obviously I can relate to that story because I am a combat vet who has PTSD.  A story that most people can relate to is getting cut off in traffic.  The baseline for this is someone who has never been cutoff (Steve again).  Steve gets cut off and he gets a little bit aggravated but lets it go, stress 1 of 10.  When it happens to someone that has been cutoff several times may start off at 1 of 10 but by the time it passes through the lymnic system it becomes a 7 of 10.  His mental reaction is anger and his physical reaction is elevated heart rate and behaviors such as flipping of the cutter and flipping him off.
Unresolved issues do not go away, they worsen.  The fear that the soldier had will not likely go away but through therapy he can lessen the intensity of his physical reaction.  That takes me into fear.