Unstressable by Mo Gawdat and Alice Law
“It’s not the events of our lives that stress us.
It is the way we deal with them that does.”
3 Main Messages:
We are not designed for an endless stream of negativity.
Our world has never been safer but our exposure to online bad news has skewed our perception. Most of life is okay!
What you pay attention to grows.
Stress itself will not kill you, but no-one can argue that living a stressful life is bad for your health. According to Cancer Research UK, “Stress does not directly cause cancer, but during stressful times it can be harder to keep up healthy habits that lower the risk of cancer.” And we know that being stressed has a negative affect on sleep, which is vital for well-being, as “major restorative functions in the body such as tissue repair, muscle growth, and protein synthesis occur almost exclusively during sleep”
So removing or reducing stress from our lives is not a guarantee of longevity but inarguably has an impact on long-term health and certainly improves the quality of our lives. No one seems to be looking for more stress! But is it possible to be completely stress-free?
Mo Gawdat and Alice Law have both experienced trauma in their lives and have been able to turn these stressful times into seemingly less negative experiences. Their book, Unstressable, claims to be a practical guide to stress-free living. They say, at the outset, that it is not the events of our lives, but our responses to them which cause stress and that stress is “becoming the silent killer of our health, happiness and well-being in the society we have created.”
The book begins by listing the ways in which stress affects the body. They argue that a little cortisol flowing through us can be a positive thing but, guess what? A lot is not! Our bodies are designed to be able to respond to a range of emotions, but the modern world, with its never-ending bad news cycle, has made stress-free living seemingly impossible.
The simple answer to this is firstly to increase our consciousness and our control of our day-to-day environment, which includes our online environment. Gawdat and Law write at length about phone control and how important it is to be regularly offline, in nature and present. They suggest morning routines, meditations and exercises which encourage us to “switch off the hose of negativity.” Certainly the figures they quote about generational stress would suggest a positive correlation between stress levels and time spent online.
But what about when life throws a curve ball? How can we reframe deeply negative situations and environmental factors outside our control?
Again, Mowdat and Law write about controlling both what is around you and your response to it. While it is true that some people are drains while others are radiators, we cannot always control who we spend time with - sometimes we have to work with, live next door to, or are related to the people who cause us the most stress and frustration. We can’t just block them from our lives. However, the authors encourage us to be observers, rather than absorbers of negativity - controlling our response through conscious effort and detaching ourselves from drama.
The second part of the book is full of suggested routines, meditations and methods for increasing self awareness and self control. While not all will land, there is something here for everyone and a consistent message that we can go only some way to control our external environment but that there is much we can do to shift our mental response.
Given the depth of pain and personal stress which Gawdat and Law have separately experienced and share together here, this resonates as an honest, generous and genuine offer to the rest of us: routines and responses which set us up to live longer, healthier and happier lives.
The irony is that the most stressed people probably don’t have time to read these messages. But I suggest that you do!
