Over the past two decades the word STRESS has become a global reference point. Quite often, such reference points become so common that their original meaning gets lost and is replaced by some meaning, which is far from its original significance. Actually stress is the other name of life – d+Sns g;kr vkS cUns x+e vLy esa nksuks ,d gSa] ekSr ls igys vkneh x+e ls futkr ik, D;kS – fet+kZ x+kfyc. "The bondage of life and the bondage of sorrow are one and the same as the man can never free himself from sorrow until his death." Though this may sound negative at the first glance, you will soon discover that it is not negative but a factual statement. The only stress free place on this earth is the graveyard where no one wants to go. When you stand up, your body has to stress against gravity. When you think of good tasty food, you have to stress your mind in wait till you actually put a morsel of food inside your mouth. Even that is not enough. You have to chew, swallow and digest. All these acts need to stress you physically and mentally. Though stress is so normal to life, in the current context the word stress has actually lost its original meaning and now it means anything and everything that you do not like. The old concept of life as a basket full of sweet and sour fruits is fast loosing its ground as everything sweet is readily accepted but anything sour is branded as stress. Thus the phenomenon called stress has almost become another symptom like bad cold, headache or fever and like all other symptoms you look forward to treating it by pushing another pill down your throat, expecting a cure, without ever bothering to analyse the real cause behind such a symptom.

Stress according to physics, is the equal and opposite internal reaction produced by an object when subjected to an externally applied force. Increase in external force causes an equivalent increase in the internal reaction. However, every object has its limitations on producing such internal reaction. When the external force exceeds such limits the object starts showing the signs of deformation and thereby gradually reaching a stage of destruction. In terms of Physics such deformation is called strain. So, what you really need to tackle is the strain and not the stress.

The stress and strain as described above can be both physical and mental in case of living beings. A workout at the gymnasium, a game or two of tennis or a jog in the morning is the means of stressing yourself physically. Similarly, a game of chess, a session of puzzles, listening to sad songs or even watching a movie full of tragedy and pathos is also the means of stressing yourself mentally. In such cases, quite often you stress yourself willingly. However, the strain sets in when you over stress yourself beyond acceptable limits, irrespective whether you did it willingly or unwillingly.

So far as physical stress is concerned the problem is very simple and can be resolved easily. Consider that game of tennis again. You enjoy the game so much that you play a game or two more even after receiving the signals of tiredness from your body. When you go home your aching muscles send you the message which you understand readily and resolve to rest for the next day and avoid playing those extra games in future. Every time you over stress yourself physically you get an instant reprimand, which continues to get sterner and sterner if you fail to comply. This phenomenon is common to every person. Of course, depending upon your physical constitution, you may be able to sustain more physical stress than others, but sooner or later you hear the warning shots and you are left with no other alternative but to slow down.

However, mental stress is a different story altogether. There is no early warning system or reprimand against the mental over stressing and when the punishment is ultimately delivered it is almost too late and is irreversible. Such punishment manifests itself slowly, both at physical level in the form of hypertension, blood pressure, diabetes etc. and at mental level in the form of forgetfulness, irritation, anger and fear. Though the after-effects of mental strain, in the form of such punishment are difficult to handle, the mental stress in itself is very easy to tackle if you are aware of why and how you create it in the first place.

The acts of stress mentioned earlier relate to your physical upkeep, entertainment or mental stimuli but rather than stress they bring satisfaction because you do them willingly. In addition to the above you have to work and stress yourself both physically and mentally for other reasons too, like earning your daily bread, acquiring objects of comfort and fulfilling many desires. As long as you succeed in you efforts you are happy but when success eludes you, you are unhappy stressed. In short, you associate stress with non-fulfilment of your desires. If you consider this statement as too generalised let us break the cause of stress in a few compartments but at the end you will find that each one has at its roots in YOUR DESIRE.

The Family Scene: A family means a close group of more than one person. Howsoever close you may be every person in your family is a unique individual with his own desires, ambitions and sense of right and wrong. What you think to be right may not be necessarily acceptable to your own son or anybody else to that matter. However, when all the members of a family consider happiness as one common desire they start accommodating their individual desires with other members. Not withstanding occasional outbursts of emotions from the individuals, the family as a whole remains stress free. The crux lies in accepting the desires of other members as your own. You must have also seen many families that are ready to burst at the seams any moment due to the lack of such compromise of DESIRES.

The Social Scene: The society is nothing but an extended family and if you apply the same rules and principles you are practically stress free. Here again for whatever you do for the society you have to stress yourself but as soon as you accept one common social goal it is your desire to take such stress willingly and then nothing matters. Abraham Lincoln used to state very often that behind every act of a man, there always is a selfish purpose. Most of the people usually disagreed with him. However, one late night, while returning home from a meeting, he heard wild shrieks from the roadside. He asked the coachman to stop and got down himself to see what was happening. He observed a pig that was stuck in a muddy ditch by the roadside. Obviously the pig was struggling to free himself and in the process raising all the hue and cry. President Lincoln went near the ditch and after a lot of efforts was able to pull the pig out. In the process he spoiled his shoes and trousers but seemed quite satisfied to see the pig free again. When he was settled back in the coach, his aide asked him if there was a selfish purpose behind this act too. President Lincoln promptly replied that had he gone home without rescuing the pig he would have kept tossing in the bed, thinking what must have happened to that pig. So, by this rescue act he had earned himself a good night’s sleep. Albeit, Lincoln was a good human being and that is why he desired to save the pig but as soon as this desire crept into his mind, the fulfilment of this desire became his own primary concern. Neither the coachman nor the aide had such desire and that is why they remained unconcerned.

The Work Scene: Whether you are an executive, a professional or a businessman you have to stress yourself physically and mentally but why complain? After all it is your own desire to earn that fat salary with perquisites or the take home profit, which provides you the daily bread, the car, the house and what not. When you stress yourself for the fulfilment of your own desires you must take the responsibility for it. Your boss is in the habit of scolding you and your subordinates are careless, but that is the entire ball game, which is played in every organisation. You must accept this rule because you are not playing this game for them but only to fulfil your own desires. If you are looking for someone to blame for all the stress, you are the right person for it because it is you who started this ball game in the first place.

The Desires: gt+kjksa [+okfg’ksa ,slh fd gj [+okfg’k is ne fudys] cgqr fudys esjs vjeku ysfdu fQj Hkh de fudys & fet+kZ x+kfyc- "We long for the fulfilment of thousands of desires and yet the desires never end." If stress is associated with non-fulfilment of your unending desires, a stress-free condition would mean satisfaction of all human desires, which condition, everyone including you would be ashamed to consider even as a hypothesis. However, you carry many desires that bring stress irrespective whether they are fulfilled or not. Sounds funny though, it is not. Remember when you bought that beautiful dream car, drove home proudly and parked it in front of your house. A dream fulfilled and yet you kept tossing in the bed all night worrying about its safety. On the other hand look at all those self-contradicting desires you cherish. Ever tried to keep a wife and a mistress pleased with you? Don’t ever expect it but you still carry many desires equally self-contradictory. On one side you want to enjoy gulping down every delicacy laid on the buffet with mugs of beer and at the same time you want to be as slim as you were in your twenties. You want to work late in the office every night for that coveted promotion and at the same time you wish to enjoy with your children and help them in their homework. If you just start writing them down you will soon be short of paper.

As if this is not enough, you want to play multiple roles in your life and want to prove yourself perfect in every role. You, already burdened by your own desires, want to simultaneously prove yourself as a perfect son, a perfect husband, father, brother, friend and what not. Whatever you may say I am yet to see a person who is a perfect husband to his wife and a perfect son to his mother when all staying together. Somewhere or the other you fail and then complain about stress. After all it was your desire to be perfect in every role. Even the role model of many Indians, Maryada Purushottam Ram, failed to prove himself as a good husband while proving himself as the ideal king.

Take it easy and be prepared to fail once in a while: There is nothing wrong in cherishing desires because that is what the life is. This entire universe is the mental creation of God, the Ishasankalpa ¼bZ’kladYi½] meaning the God’s first desire that "I am one and I want to be manifold" ¼,dksga cgqL;ke~ iztk;s;½- If this universe is the outcome of a desire how can its essential ingredients like us be free from desire? Behind every desire, its fulfilment or non-fulfilment there is a Divine Plan that carries a greater picture, which you fail to visualise because of ignorance. Every time you succeed, you take the credit to yourself and every time you fail, you put the blame squarely on God’s shoulders with a wisecrack saying "Man proposes and God disposes". I believe in just the opposite. In reality God proposes and Man disposes. Whereas, God’s proposition is the Divine Plan, man’s disposition is his destiny. Therefore, if you keep your mind open to the Divine Plan and try to learn out of every failure you will soon be able to see a bigger canvas of life including the bigger picture. Never be proud of not falling but be proud of rising every time you fall. This may necessitate surrendering your ego to Him but after all what are you in comparison to the collective intelligence called God? God answers your prayers in three ways. He says ‘Yes’ and gives what you wanted. He says ‘No’, and gives something else far better than you wanted and when He says ‘Wait’, and if you do comply, gives the best that you deserve, at the time opportune.

Select your priorities: Our scriptures explain life experience as Agnyanprabhavam Sarvam Gnyanen Pravileeyate ¼vKkuizHkoa loZa Kkusu izfoyh;rs½] meaning all experiences of life are the creation of ignorance, which disappear only with true knowledge. To explain this the Shastras cite the famous Rope and Snake Analogy ¼jTtqliZ n`"VkUr½- Imagine if you wake up in a dimly lit room at night and while walking, step over a rope lying on the floor. The shape and thickness suggest that it can be a snake. The dim light also indicates a profile similar to that of a snake. The instinct of survival instantly creates a fear in your mind as the snake poses a grave danger to your survival. Within a fraction of a second, you jump back onto the bed and start shouting for help. Someone enters the room and switches the light on. In presence of light it becomes known that you had stepped on a piece of rope and in the darkness mistook the rope for a snake. With this knowledge, devoid of all fear, you start looking at the rope as a rope. However, in the absence of true knowledge, though the snake did not exist in the room physically, it existed in your mind and provoked you into performing all the acts as if the snake really existed.

The entire creation appears to us in threefold existence. One is the Physical existence ¼HkkSfrd vFkok O;kogkfjd lRrk½, the second is the Illusive existence ¼izkfrHkkfld lRrk½ and the third is the Spiritual existence ¼vk/;kfRed lRrk½. Of the above three, The Physical and the Spiritual existence always have a fixed and pre-set meaning and value, whereas the Illusive existence is always changeable. In the above example the rope physically exists as a rope and the snake existed only in the illusion. In presence of light (true knowledge) the illusion of the snake vanished and the physical existence of the rope was reinstated. However, as long as the illusion existed in your mind, for all practical purposes there was a snake in your room instead of the rope. You enact similar drama throughout your life. You convert your basic needs into innumerable desires and start chasing them with greed and passion. In the process you forget what you really want and then associate fulfilment with happiness and disappointment with stress, which is merely a mental phenomenon.

You invite all this misery due to your misplaced priorities. And these misplaced priorities play the role of a snake, which erroneously appears on something else in absence of true knowledge. All of us, living beings, long for happiness which has been eluding us since we landed on this planet. You fix your own priorities considering their fulfilment will make you happy. However, concepts of happiness and achievement keep changing through the entire journey of life because of their illusive nature but certain basic requirements don’t. Achievement of major objectives of life does need time and if your concept of happiness changes with time, at the end of it you are unhappy and stressed. There is a saying "When I had strong teeth I could not afford to buy nuts but now that I can afford to buy nuts I have no teeth to crack them". A young budding executive sets a goal at the onset of his career to become a multimillionaire, as he trusts it will bring him all the happiness. Personal physical health, happy family life, social acceptance and a comfortable life of retirement and such similar things are nowhere in his list of priorities because he thinks that everything is included in those millions. He has good chances of becoming a multimillionaire, maybe spending most of his millions in a hospital at the age of fifty. In the course of your chase for misplaced priorities, every event that takes you closer to the realisation of your priority is accepted as a happy event and every event creating an impediment is construed as stress. Obviously every different person having a different priority set for his life differs in his concept of stress and happiness. If different people see the same physical object all of them will equivocally confirm to having seen the same object. However, conceptual illusive values differ from person to person because they lack physical justification, as they can never be quantified. In short, stress and happiness are mental functions, which you create according to your attitude. In reality, stress is not caused by people or situations, it is your response to them. You must learn to choose your response by controlling your mind. This will help you regain control of your life.