Coping Skills for Dealing with the Overwhelming Responsibilities of Life
“An elegant, powerful, and simple tool for finding serenity. Just what the world needs right now.” ―Richard Carlson, author of Don't Sweat the Small Stuff
We are always on the go. Balancing work, family, friends, and everything in between is a routine of running and never stopping─a cycle that can be tiring. We forget the beauty of the smaller moments and sometimes we forget to stop and use our coping skills.
Stopping is a gift to yourself. Knowing when to breathe and regain a clearer vision of yourself and your surroundings helps give you a fresh perspective and an inner balance meant to help you feel in control of the bigger things.
Who are you? What are your true priorities? Your responsibilities may have taken over and are preventing you from living to your fullest potential. Dr. Kundtz gives you insight into key questions you should be asking.
Stop whatever you’re doing and enjoy the sunrise. Big things can grab your attention but don’t forget to turn around and find the serenity in stillness─the peace in a deep breath, and the happiness in remembering who you are.
With this valuable guide learn to:
- Connect with the spiritual aspects of your life
- Practice mindfulness and reduce stress
- Acknowledge when it becomes too much and take a step back
- Use proper coping skills to create healthier habits
If you enjoyed books like The Way of Integrity, Giving Grief Meaning, I Am Invincible, Time Management for Mortals, or The Road Less Traveled, then you’ll love The Art of Stopping.
A Fast Train on the Fast Track
Stopping is not slowing down. There are many books on slowing down the frantic pace of life. This is not one of them, even though an important aspect of Stopping—even one of the reasons for Stopping—is, in fact, to slow down. The process of Stopping is very different from the process of slowing down. Trying to slow down does not slow you down. We have been trying to do that for many years now; it generally doesn't work. It's like trying to cut down on smoking: in a short time you end up where you started, except more frustrated.
Slowing down doesn't work because everything around us is going so fast. We get revved-up even if we don't want to be. In his book Timeshifting, Stephan Rechtschaffen, MD, writes about entrainment, which he describes as an unconscious “process that governs how various rhythms fall into sync with one another.” For example, if you were to place two out-of-sync pendulum clocks next to one another, in a short time they would be exactly in sync. “The same principle works,” says Rechtschaffen, “with atomic particles, the tides and human beings.” With human beings? That's quite a remarkable idea. We pick up each other's rhythms and the accumulated rhythms of the world around us. If most of the rhythms around us are fast, so are ours, automatically. That's entrainment. The word can also mean “getting on a train.”
We have all boarded the train, the fast train on the fast track, and the process of entrainment is not under our conscious control. That's why trying to slow down doesn't slow us down. It's not because we're weak willed or quitters; it's because we're on a fast train where we're the passengers and not the engineers.
We are all riding on a very fast train that is traveling down a predetermined track, gathering speed as it goes, and we have been on it for a long time. We can't get to the engineer because the engineer is protected by loyal guards. Or perhaps there really is no engineer; the train is run by a computer. Many of us want to slow down; some want to get off the train. Others are so used to the speed that they don't notice it. A few love the speed and want to increase it. The few who love the speed are the only ones who get their way. Most of us stare blankly out the window, barely seeing the world flying by and feeling helpless.
Fortunately, there is something we can do about it. Stopping can get us off the train, can separate us from the speededup rhythms of those around us, and can bring us into rhythms of our own choosing, which, it's important to note, may well include some time on the fast train. Stopping can roll us into the roundhouse for refreshment and cooling off so we can make sure that, when we take off again, we're on the right track, going in the right direction, and have a very intimate working relationship with the engineer.
Entrainment helps to explain the amazingly short attention span of most of us these days. We get our information in sound bites: many brief, skeletal bones of facts. We just don't have time to read in depth or to linger over the newspaper. It seems also to have something to say about our fad-driven society. As soon as one idea, trend, fashion, or person becomes popular, it is quickly dropped for whatever next demands our attention. Whether it is valuable or vulgar seems to make no difference; it's just the next view out the window of the fast train. Faddriven culture engenders frenetic citizens who find themselves, unwittingly, screaming through the night on the fast train and trying to figure out, “How did I get here?”
Stopping can bring us both an answer and a solution.
