Calm, Cool and Collected: A Manual of Stress Management Based on Principle Therapy

Calm, Cool

and Collected

Calm, Cool

and Collected

A Manual of Stress Management

Based on Principle Therapy

John F. Hunchak, M.D.

Country Publishing Company

Copyright © 1985 John F. Hunchak

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Country Publishing Company R.R. #1

Pickering, Ontario

LlV 2P8

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Hunchak, John F. (John Franklin), 1945-

Calm, cool and collected

1. Stress (Psychology). 2. Mental health. 3. Relaxation. I. Title.

To my children

Introduction to the Patient

Please Read This

Dear Patient:

This book is about learning to cope with stress. Of course, relaxation and various other therapies have already been designed to help people learn to cope with stress. Unfortunately, relaxation tapes, bio-feedback, yoga, and meditation tend to produce tense people who know how to do a relaxation exercise, but these therapies fall short of helping people to become relaxed personalities. They just don’t suit our times. We live in a convenience-oriented, fast-lane society in which we are expected to be always on the go, either working hard or playing hard. In real life, when you feel tense, you can’t say, Excuse me, I have to go and lie down now and listen to my relaxation tape for twenty minutes. It’s easier just to pop a pill and forget it.

Over the years, I have found that many of my patients don’t feel they can take even two or three minutes off to relax. This book contains relaxation techniques which can be done on the go, while travelling in the fast lane.

Other forms of psychotherapy have been largely impractical or not useful for the public. Some forms, like psychoanalysis, have been too time-consuming and expensive. Some forms have been too complicated and difficult to understand. Some therapies solve a specific symptom or problem all right, but in the end, the patient is no wiser, because only the therapist understood the principles that were used. Such a patient will be no better equipped to deal with new problems when they arise.

This book is written from the standpoint of principle therapy. A principle is a generality of wisdom or knowledge. This form of therapy is designed to provide you with practical strategies and wisdom to help you deal with life and reduce stress. One good principle is worth a thousand good facts. The principles in this therapy will be useful to solve or resolve the problems you now have.

What cannot be cured can be endured

Having learned these principles, you will find them portable, and you will be better equipped to deal with other problems in your life as they arise.

The cardinal principle in this book concerns balance.

Hunchak’s Principle:

The point of maximum stability and function

is the point of maximum balance

This principle suggests the main goal of therapy in this book: to establish balance.

Establishing balance requires a very significant effort and commitment on your part. Change towards balance is difficult, but it can certainly be achieved, and is worth it in the end. You have only one life to live, and you will get more out of yours if you are balanced.

You can think of stress as the sum of all your stresses . Your stresses from your personality, work, marriage, children, relationships, finances, and so on all add up to your grand total of stress. You will never be able to relieve all stress, nor would you want to, because a certain amount is useful. What you want is to reduce your total stress to a comfortable level by reducing each source of stress as much as possible. Relaxation is your key to the potentially good parts of your personality: good feelings, constructive thinking, and useful behaviour. This book is about relaxation in that broad sense.

Read this book in sequence from the beginning to the end, because the order of the material is important. It is specifically written for people under stress. I have deliberately excluded philosophical issues of religion and morality. If you have little stress, you may find it difficult to relate to specific sections of the book. For example, if you have work-related stress, you will likely relate to the material in that section; if you have no such stress, you may find that particular section remote. Some of the statements have been provocatively phrased; this is deliberate, and such information needs to be taken in the context of the principle of balance which is developed throughout the text. Be specific in applying the material and follow the instructions. Write things down when suggested, and discuss them with your doctor. You will get the most out of the book that way.

To solve whatever problems you have, you will first need to define them clearly. Becoming aware of any problem is half the battle won. Your doctor can sometimes help you with this. Once you/become aware of your problems, you can then move towards a solution or resolution.

Lastly, you should know that you are not unique or alone: no matter what problems you have, there are lots of others just like you. If you don’t believe me, ask your doctor!

I sincerely hope this book helps you to achieve comfort and peace of mind. When I cover the material in this book with my patients, they often ask, Why didn’t someone tell me this sooner? I wrote this book to bring this information to you ­and the sooner the better.

Sincerely,

John F. Hunchak, M.D.

Introduction to the Doctor

Dear Doctor:

We are all aware that anxiety is a significant problem in many patients regardless of their diagnosis. One might say that anxiety exists in virtually every patient, even those who are primarily afflicted with physical problems, such as trauma victims, heart attack patients, etc.

The objective of this book is to bring relaxation, in the broadest sense of the word, to the patient, helping him or her to become a relaxed personality with peace of mind and physical comfort. In doing so, we hope to reduce the patient’s need for drugs. This book is designed to help the patient identify problems, to initiate therapy to solve or resolve those problems, and to allow you to participate and guide him or her through that process, using the fundamental principles of self-hypnosis: concentration and repetitious suggestions. The objective is a continuing therapeutic process that is compatible with a busy office practice.

There are more complicated forms of psychotherapy which have their place in clinical practice, but I have come to prefer this style as a first-line approach, on the principle that the simplest way is often the best. I have resisted the urge be comprehensive, and instead have included only that material which seems applicable and useful to most patients under stress. Some of the material or models of thinking may not be strictly factual, but if it helps the patient to achieve comfort, I have allowed the end to justify the means.

Over the years, I have found the basic relaxation exercise at the beginning of the book to be a useful clinical test. A single run through the relaxation procedure (especially if done by the physician), allows you to estimate to what extent anxiety is playing a part in your patient’s life. If after the test the patient feels unusually relaxed, then clearly he or she experiences chronic anxiety. If the patient does not feel any different afterwards, then he or she is either usually in a state of relative relaxation, or is still tense and resisting your efforts. Sometimes getting patients to practise the exercise on their own bypasses this resistance, and allows you to estimate whether they can move towards a more relaxed state or not.

I have included in the beginning of the book some information to help patients approach their physician regarding some problems that are very difficult to overcome with psychotherapy alone. The problems I have included are primary affective disorder (unipolar depression), panic disorder, alcoholism, and substance abuse. Once these have been managed and brought under control, the psychotherapy of this book may help further progress with such a patient.

We have all had the experience of treating a patient and finding in retrospect that we were only aware of the tip of the iceberg. I have also had the experience of treating patients for a specific problem, only to have them return later to discuss other problems that they had all along, but for some reason, didn’t mention to me the first time around. Since stress can come from a number of sources, I have outlined the common sources that seem to bother most patients. It is useful to have the patient review all the topics, and to bring forth any issues that need attention or elaboration with you.

The easiest advice to give is to advise the patient under stress to do the opposite of whatever he or she is doing. For a while, in my early years at therapy, I realized that I was giving contradictory advice to different patients, and this made me pause to evaluate the validity of my advice. For example, some patients I advised to get a job. Others, I would advise to quit work. Although the advice seemed contradictory, it did seem appropriate for each patient. I concluded that each of these patients had the opposite type of problem, and therefore the changes required for each were opposite as well. This led me to formulate the principle of balance. I have since found it universally applicable to our human condition.

I think for years physicians as a group have felt uncomfortable advising relaxation techniques for their patients, because few doctors use relaxation techniques themselves. I have evolved these techniques to make relaxation more universally applicable. I hope they will be useful to you in your management of your patients.

Sincerely,

John F. Hunchak, M.D.

Contents

1 • Sizing Yourself Up

Stress: The Nature of the Beast

Your Symptom List

Disease Components

Excluding Some Big Hurdles

What’s Normal

Problem, Problem, Who’s Got the Problem?

Seeing Yourself as Others Do

Goals of Life

So You Think You’re Different

2 • Relaxation: Your Key to Comfort

Problems with the Relaxation Exercise

Relaxation in the Fast Lane

The World’s Most Relaxing Thought

Making It to Home Plate

Assertiveness

Fencing Your Private Property

Saying No

Testing

Balancing Your Relationships

3 • Resting in the Balance

Balances

Paradoxes

Bringing Yourself into Balance

Climbing Uphill

Trying

4 • Balancing Your Intake System

Taking in Information

Double Vision

Near and Far Vision

Equality of Stimuli

Relativity

Switching Places

5 • Developing a Balanced Style

Priorities

The Essence of Work

Independence

Structure

Activities

Burnout

Media Stress

Christmas Stress

Time Frames

Appearances

Money

Inheritance

Honesty

Safety

Standards

Liking and Wanting

New Styles

Natural as It Was

6 • Personality Balance

Personality Structure

Personality Growth and Development

Choosing the Right Approach

Problem Solving

7 • Tuning Your Feelers

Feeling Good

Resonance

Multiplication Tables

8 • Tuning Your Thinkers

Mind over Matter

Merry-Go-Rounds, Gloomy-Go-Rounds

Vague Notions

Understanding Life

Scientific Thinking and Superstition

The Unconscious Mind Phobia

Trains of Thought

Weeding and Cleaning

Planting Thoughts

Learning from Mistakes

Turning Negatives Around

Humour

Thought Structure

Thought Phobia

Trade-offs and Dilemmas

9 • Tuning Your Doers

How and What to Do

Reaping and Sowing

10 • Balancing Relationships

Marriage

Children and Discipline

Spousal Personality

Me, Myself and I

Fencing Others In

Communication

Conversation

Ignoring Things

Conflict and Confrontation

Playing the Game

Complainers and Whiners

The Competition Bug

Selling Yourself

Liking Each Other

Trust

Promises

Giving Honour

The Good Samaritan

Good Manners

11 • Keeping Life in Balance

Love

Mating

Ungluing

Reproducing

Special Problems with Children

Religion

Coping with Loss

Death

Friends and Relatives

Accepting and Coping

Adjustment

Epilogue

•1•

Sizing Yourself Up

Stress: The Nature of the Beast

It is well accepted that stress is harmful to people. Because it causes discomfort and disease, it is certainly worth doing what you can to keep your level of stress at an acceptable level. On the other hand, don’t go overboard worrying about the effect of stress on you — that’s too stressful. Some articles on stress have frightened my patients unnecessarily and only added stress to their lives.

There are a number of common sources of stress that most of us have to face some time or another. These include spouse, children, work, relatives, in-laws, friends, and money. Those are the big ones.

The body’s stress reaction is nature’s way of preparing you for intense physical action, the so-called fight or flight response. In other words, it prepares you for either running away or violence. Either way, the preparation is the same: increased heart rate, increased circulation to muscles, pupillary dilation, and so on. This response was probably more useful to our ancestors; in our culture how often is it appropriate to run away or to become violent? Hardly ever — if ever. When we do become upset then, our body prepares us for action that will not be taken. It’s like putting your car into neutral, and pressing the accelerator to the floor. That is hard on the system, and can be damaging. We can either try to put that energy to constructive use (for example, exercise) or we can work at training ourselves not to produce the stress response unless we will actually use it for fight or flight.

The opposite of stress — calm — comes from control: control of self (your personality) and control of the influence of others. The control of self involves the useful management of all parts of your personality — what you feel, what you think, and what you do. The control of the influence of others includes assertiveness as well as the refinement of your reactions to people.

There is, of course, essentially no control that you as an individual can exert over society and culture. There’s often not much sense bucking such a mammoth machine. Fortunately, our society has a great deal of room for individualism and individual rights and freedoms. That makes the system liveable.

Your Symptom List

We will need some way to measure whether you get better by using this book. Make a list of your symptoms and problems, their severity, and the frequency with which they occur. Don’t forget to include symptoms such as nervousness, headache, stomachache, diarrhea, palpitations, shakes, sweats, difficulty sleeping, depressed mood, panic attacks, phobias, irritability, yelling, bad temper, and any other problems you may have. Here is an example of a list of symptoms one of my patients had the first time we met: headache twice a week, stomachache daily, insomnia every night, nervousness almost always, prescription drug dependency, boredom, trouble coping with children, perfectionism, and chronic worry.

Your symptom list can also act as your alarm to let you know when things are not going well for you. As such, your symptoms can become your friends, to let you know when you should be putting more effort into being relaxed. Here’s a blank list for you to fill out. Don’t forget actually to write your symptoms down, because sometimes as people get better, they don’t realize their improvement, and forget how things were in the beginning.

By the way, don’t talk to your spouse, family, or friends about your symptoms and problems over and over again. They won’t know how to help you, which will frustrate everyone. Get professional help.

Disease Components

There are three factors which contribute to the production of symptoms: your chemistry, your personality, and your environment.

The first component is the chemical, electrical, and physical aspects of the symptom. Everything we feel and think is probably chemically or electrically produced. The big question in many people’s minds when they have symptoms is, Is it physical or in my head? This actually is not an important question to answer, because the answer is always that it is both.

Most people think it’s more respectable to have a physical illness than an emotional illness. To most people, emotional means all in your head or imaginary. Actually, everything is physical. Even your thoughts and imagination are likely made by physical events like chemical reactions and electricity in your brain. Everything about you is real and physical, no matter what you have. When science and medicine have advanced enough, everything may be treated by physical means; but that won’t be for a long time yet. So in the meantime, don’t fret about whether your problem is physical or in your head. It’s physical and it is a respectable problem to have, so just get on with doing your best to deal with it. Your mind and body work together and they affect each other at all times.

A better question is, How much control can I exert over my symptoms? In one way or another, it’s probably possible for a person to exert some control over any symptom. On the other hand, I think it’s fair to say that there are some chemical,