Do you find yourself consistently miserable and stressed? I used to but now even my infamous ‘grumpy-old-man’ moods are underpinned by a strong undercurrent of contentment and joy. Why? Because along the way I have learned some awesome ideas that helped me to discover deep and lasting happiness. Here’s 7 of them…

1. Stop Looking for Happiness

When I was growing up my mother was often depressed. At the time I had never experienced this (it came later) and I didn’t understand it. By the time I was about twenty I figured out one reason why she was so regularly unhappy: because she was focusing on wanting to be happy too much.

I gave her a cheesy embroidery piece in a frame (warning: cheesy, but actually works) which said:

“Happiness is like a butterfly: If you chase it, it flies away, but when you turn your attention to other things, it comes and quietly lands on your shoulder.”

I have no idea if she ever really got anything out of that, but soon after she started to study accounting, and went on to become a practicing accountant. She had always enjoyed numbers and so she was quite happy with this career path, which was her first ever full-time job outside of the home.

She also began to develop an interest in gardening which soon blossomed into a full-on passion to which she willingly surrenders the bulk of her leisure time.

So although accountancy and gardening may not be your idea of fun (nor mine), for my mother, the two combined still hands-down beat all the church groups, personal development courses and self-help books that she used to burn through. By focussing on her passions, she went from being regularly depressed to what she is now: a peaceful-soul content with her lot in life.

2. Put Theory Into Practice

If you are anything like me, you get to the parts of a self-help book where the author recommends that you should actually do what he is teaching and skip past them with a vague thought of “I’ll do that later, after I’ve finished the whole book”.

That’s all very well if you actually follow through, but do you? I often don’t (to my detriment) and it may be because I am a little addicted to self-help books and tend to always be on the look out for my next ‘hit’.

News Flash: Reading theory doesn’t usually actually get anything done. That’s why it’s called theory: it’s the opposite of practical action.

I was very depressed when I was in my mid-late twenties and so, desperate for a solution to the problem, I started reading lots of books about meditation for the first time.

I read all kinds of books about all kinds of styles of meditation and eventually I came to be aware of two common themes that they all shared. No matter how varied the details of the various meditation gurus and schools out there, they all say two things:

• Meditation offers many benefits, one being a more positive outlook on life
• Reading about it isn’t enough; you must practice it.

So eventually I had to put the books down, sit up straight and try meditation for myself.

It worked, by the way, so…

3. Learn How to Meditate

It doesn’t matter who you learn through or what style, just give it a go. If you are seeking deep, lasting happiness then it is a major milestone in your journey.

But for goodness sake, if you find yourself with any teacher who tells you that their way is the only way, get out. Chances are they are either misguided, delusional or downright manipulative. There is no right way to meditate; all roads lead to Rome.

When I was particularly despondent one evening, I invented (to my knowledge) this cool method of meditation that really helped me to get back on the good-foot, I called it…

4. Dwell in the Angst

Here’s how it works:

• Your really depressed or angsty or whatever and you want to feel better
• So you sit up straight and you just concentrate on how bad you feel
• You just let yourself feel it as intensely as possible; dwell on it as much as you can. Feel how crap your situation is, how rotten life is, what an A-hole he or she is. That kind of thing.
• Cry your eyes out if you need to, scream and rant and pull out your hair of you want to (but don’t do any serious self-harm please).
• Eventually the feelings will run their course. There’s only so long a person who is not clinically depressed can feel this intense level of angst before the feelings will start to subside. Why? I don’t know really, I guess you’ve just released all that pent-up energy and felt it all at once rather than bottling it all up and drip-feeding yourself misery.
• Now do some deep breathing and refer to the next point…

5. Get a Sense of Universal Perspective

You are very, very insignificant in the big scheme of things. Physically you are tiny. The time you will be alive is a mere blip in the history of the universe, if that. Same goes for all of us.

This need not be depressing, however. In fact I find it empowering.

Why would you get depressed about the way your life is when it really matters so little? If you never find your Prince Charming or get the promotion you have been striving for, what difference does it make in the overall scheme of things? Very little.

You might say “Hey Buddy, it makes a difference to ME”, but that is not some rigid fact – it’s just your choice. You can choose to get all pent up about the details of your life or you can choose not to fix as much value on outcomes. You can choose to relax and let go of your attachment to these fixed ideas in your head about you and how your story should pan out.

And if you do you might just realize that you are free. You are a tiny, little, minute, insignificant bug and you are free to be happy right now, right here, and forever, if only you will choose to be so.

6. Decide What Your One Thing is and Stick to it

You must search your heart and discover (or re-discover) what the one thing you want to do with your life is, and then you must stick to that at all costs.

This theory, called Curly’s Law, has been around for a long time, but is really beginning to gain traction because it solves a common problem that is crippling many people these days: Choice Stress.

This can be illustrated by the hapless consumer who strides into the supermarket intent on one simple thing, a carton of milk, and finds themselves trapped in there for 15 minutes, wandering around in a daze, completely scuttled by the array of choices he or she is faced with. Whole milk, one-percent, skinny, bio-dynamic, calcium enriched, soy milk, rice milk, organic, etc., etc.…

The same applies to the over arching purpose of your life. In the first world, despite pessimistic noises to the opposite, there are so many options available to you now as to what you can do with your life. Opportunities abound – but if you do not choose a single definite major purpose then you will simply bounce from shiny-thing to shiny-thing without ever making any real progress. And this will leave you unfulfilled.

For some reason it is important to your mental and spiritual health to feel that you are working towards a goal that for you holds meaning AND that this work is also meaningful along the way so that you can …

7. Get Your Head Out of the ‘Future Fantasy’

No. I’m not saying to stop playing computer games. It’s something else altogether.

This is where point 6 forms a feedback loop with point 5. Point 6 says you must choose One Thing (one goal) and stick to it. Point 5 advises you to remain detached from outcomes.

These two points may seem a bit contradictory, but in fact they are complementary.

Embrace the paradox. Choose a goal that you absolutely must achieve and work your butt off towards attaining this goal and meanwhile completely detach from the result and you will experience the form of deep lasting happiness that is called ‘flow’.

That’s why you must enjoy doing your One Thing along the way. You’ve got to love the work itself, not just pin your hopes for being happy on attaining the result.

Because results don’t always bring happiness, and when they do, they tend not to last. And results themselves tend to fade, which means they will require constant upkeep so you must enjoy the process of working towards your goal.

The way to do this is by getting your head out of the Future Fantasy. Don’t think “I’ll be happy when …” because you won’t. The only time you have to be happy is NOW and being happy now takes practice and is not determined by external factors alone.

So next time you are working away towards your big goal and you are feeling irritated and are just grunting your way through the work with half your mind on the next pleasure stop (coffee, lunch, the pub, whatever) stop for a minute and just be here now.

Because NOW is all you’ve got – don’t miss it.

Get your head out of the Future Fantasy.

Got a Self Improvement Question? Click Here!

About the author: Seamus Anthony blogs at Rebel Zen, is the author of two eBooks, Curly’s Law and Psychedelic Meditation and you can check out his music here.

I Was A Teenage Rock Star … kind of …

As a younger dude – sans cell-phone and computer oblivious – during the “upside-down 60s” (AKA the 90s) I had the weird experience of being the lead singer in the biggest indie band in my home city.

Admittedly, it wasn’t a big city – Adelaide, population 1.1 million – but conquering that molehill was an intense trip nevertheless. (After that it all went pear-shaped, but that’s another story.)

Step 1: Don’t Just Dream – Obsess

When I was a pre-teen bookworm, I wanted to be a writer, but at 12 years old I heard the squeal of a heavy-metal lead guitar solo and my focus shifted instantly to becoming a fully-fledged, card-carrying “Rock Star”. It was obviously way sexier. (Pfft! Writer. What the hell was I thinking?)

From that moment on, while my musical tastes matured, my chosen career path remained fixed. It was Rock Star or bust. School was useless to me, so I just stared out the window and obsessed about becoming a Rock Star. Church was useless to me, so I refused to go anymore and lay in bed listening to this month’s flavour and obsessing about becoming a Rock Star.

I remember standing at the bus stop after school and visualizing, in minute detail, the way it would look, sound, smell, feel, and taste. Never mind that I was a spotty teenage dork, I could handle that for now, safe in the knowledge that I was going to be a Rock Star.

My mother barged in one day and told me to turn my “horrible noise” down and do my homework. I patiently explained that I didn’t need good grades, because I was going to be a Rock Star. She flipped out at me.

“You can’t even play the guitar!” she screeched, pointing at the tennis racquet I had slung over my shoulder with a panty-hose strap. “And those stockings cost money you know!”

I smiled. Silly lady, couldn’t she see? None of this mattered because I was going to be … you get the picture.

Step 2: If You Do Things, Things Get Done

Finally free of school and now armed with a rudimentary knowledge of how to play my shiny new guitar, bought with part-time supermarket job savings, I got straight down to the work of forming a band.

I would stick up a notice around campus, in record shops, musical instrument shops (no internet then remember) and gather together some motley-crew of half-arsed slackers into a “group”. Some were freaks that had called me in reply to my “musicians wanted” ads, some were people I half-knew who had learned recorder at school and were too weak-willed to refuse my hardcore harassments. I would get them all to meet me at a recording studio I had booked (no home-recording software then remember).

I had a bunch of songs written, so I would just belt them out and get everyone to join in. The results varied from total crap to slightly palatable crap but I would force it through and walk out with a new demo. Then the “band” would promptly break up.

Undeterred, I would use the new tape to go get a gig somewhere – anywhere – under the pretense of a working band. Then I would use the impending gig as a ploy to get a new band together. We’d do the gig, the band would break up, and after a day of frustrated sulking, I would go book a new recording session and repeat the process.

I did this non-stop for one year. I was 18 and utterly naive (we grew up slower back then, due in no small part to the absence of the internet) but I was determined and bulletproof.

Some pothead I had roped in to play drums once asked me what my secret was (he mistakenly thought I was the real-deal). Without premeditation I said “If you do things, things get done”. I’ve always remembered that (I think I surprised myself and pleased the hibernating personal development writer inside).

It wasn’t just poetic though, it was true, and one of the things that got done was …

Step 3: Shoot Enough Hoops and Eventually You’ll Score a Basket

One day, aged 19, I got home from sticking up notices to form yet another new band and got straight on the phone (no cell-phones back then remember). I wanted to call and enquire about a guy called Matt’s “singer wanted” notice. We compared notes, realized we spoke the same language and arranged to trial me as singer in his garage band.

I went back to my room and saw a note left by my mother saying that somebody called Matt had called about my “band wanted” ad. I took one look at the phone number and realized it was the same guy. I called him back and we both agreed it was a sign.

The audition went well. I had found my partners in crime. Finally I was in a band making great music with people who had exactly the same worldview as me.

Step 4: Networking Means Helping Other People

Trouble was we had no gigs. And we were dorks from the suburbs; we didn’t know anyone who could get us gigs. We had no choice but to go forth and meet some people who could help us. We had to put on our networking hats and get busy – in the real world (no social web back then remember).

At first we just called every single gig in town. This was a disheartening experience for three green-gilled gringos with stars in their eyes. The snarling, world-weary reception we encountered at every turn baffled us. Couldn’t they tell we had the X factor? It was blindingly obvious to us…

Surviving on nothing but the worst kinds of front-bar dive gigs and unemployment benefits (easy money back then) we knew we had to try something different. I started helping out at the local public radio station, doing menial stuff for the DJs. Matt helped the more established bands load out. Peter offered to stick up posters for other bands and we all went to everybody else’s gigs and clapped our little hearts out after every song (even if we secretly didn’t like the other band much).

Pretty soon we started getting offered tips: “Call this bloke, he’ll sort you out with support gigs”, “Don’t bother with him; she’s the one to ask about airplay”.

We started getting better gigs. They trickled in at first, but soon we were on the big line-ups, rocking out in front of thousands, and getting media exposure too.

Step 5: Deliberately Be Great At What You Do

Going to see all of these different local bands was a real eye opener for us at the time.

You see we had survived our teenage years on a diet of the greatest rock n’ roll ever, and that was exactly what we set out to emulate, but it soon became clear that most local bands, despite noble intentions, didn’t really have what it takes.

Some of these bands were very hard working, easy-going and helpful people. But their music sucked – and worse – they seemed oblivious to the fact. The guitars were muddy, the singer inaudible. You could watch an entire gig and leave without catching a single hook, and they often looked like a pack of, well, geeks, (which, before one of the greatest cultural 180ºs in history, was not yet cool).

Meanwhile other bands had a great deal of talent, and good looks to boot. Sometimes you could even hear the singer and you might find yourself humming the chorus to their best song as you stumbled home.

Trouble was, these bands were often either snobbish and unfriendly or too lazy too promote their gigs properly beyond their trendy clique.

The three of us would sit around our pints until the wee hours and analyze what the other bands were doing wrong – and then we set out to quite deliberately learn from their mistakes. We practiced our fingers to the bone, and made a pact that every song we wrote had to be as catchy as we could make it, with each instrument ringing clear and contributing something worthwhile to the sound. We decided it was important for the vocals to be audible; what was the point of a man making silent fish faces for no apparent reason?

We made a genuine effort to be helpful and friendly to everybody, and we also made it our obsession to promote the bejesus out of every gig we did.

Step 6: Don’t Sleep With the Fans

The support gigs were great, because it meant there was a ready made crowd there to try impress, but our own gigs were still under-populated – just our longest suffering mates and a sibling or two. After two weeks of relentless promotions, it could be quite depressing.

But eventually, after a year of hard slog, we started to notice the odd tiny cluster of people that we didn’t know hovering up the back of our gigs, actually paying close attention to our music. We would walk up to them after and were pleased to discover that they were there to see us specifically and had willingly paid good money to get in. It was an amazing feeling.

Quite naturally, and without any ulterior motive, we would often end up becoming friends with these people. We were all young and beer was cheap so if you had happened to come to our gig and were the only group of people there besides the band and Pete’s Uncle Fred, chances are you’d end up partying the night away with us.

It was a marvellous accidental customer retention strategy because without fail, those that we had hung out with would be back next week, and usually with a couple more friends in tow.

As our mini-juggernaut rolled on, we were spending more and more time promoting our gigs, and one of the most successful strategies for doing so was sticking up posters – and I mean lots of posters (no Myspace back then remember).

But we didn’t just stick them all over the suburbs; that would have spread us too thin. We focused on the CBD (where all the action was) and the universities (where most of our existing and potential fanbase studied). As we did this, we would bump into person after person that we had become acquainted with through the band scene and we would take the time (we had plenty of that) to chat and hand them an invite to the next gig. It was a wonderful thing.

So we were very accessible to our fans (or, in your case, clients, readers, subscribers, what-have-you) BUT …

… we never slept with our fans.

I swear it’s true.

Why not? Because that meant we never soured our relationships with our client base.

But hey, that’s probably not a big danger for most of you out there in the physically isolated zone that is the social web!

Finally, in case you feel like I’ve been blowing my own trumpet a little too enthusiastically, please visit Rebel Zen now and read about how we stupidly messed up our good thing – Zen and the Art of NOT becoming a Rock Star.

Seamus Anthony is a writer, musician and entrepreneur. He is the author of “Psychedelic Meditation: How to Get an Awesome Cosmic High Without Drugs” and one half of the action at Rebel Zen. Image is courtesy of ValetheKid.

If you have been following this series on the health benefits of meditation, then hopefully you have given meditation a go by now, and as you meditate and relax, you may well have asked yourself ‘What is actually happening here?’

What is happening is this – The Relaxation Response is kicking in, thanks to your Parasympathetic Nervous System, which is the opposite of your Sympathetic Nervous System.

When you meditate, or rest effectively, the Parasympathetic Nervous System takes over and gets to work reversing the ‘flight or fight’ stress response, counteracting its effects, relaxing the mind and taking your body on a healing journey back to a balanced state of homeostasis.

This is the Relaxation Response. It is proven scientific fact.

This is the single most tangible thing that beginning a regular practice of meditation can do for you and your health. Meditation can be of great help if you are a person who has trouble switching off the mind and unwinding. Even if you are a fairly chilled-out person, you will still benefit from the deeper levels of relaxation, and the healing that this will encourage.

How To Achieve Biological Balance

The Relaxation Response is important in achieving biological balance, or homeostasis.

It is when you are moving towards this state of homeostasis that your body sets about repairing itself and combating pathogens. In order to achieve this desirable state you need to learn to relax. Sounds obvious, but in fact it is a skill that many people need to consciously learn.

The idea of relaxation being a barbeque with friends or walking the dog just isn’t enough – helpful, yes – but not enough. Your mind keeps busy with worries when you walk the dog, and you just plain distract yourself from ‘your-self’ when you hang out with friends.

When you meditate you can measurably feel deep relaxation taking place. Firstly, when you sit down, take stock of yourself. Is your mind racing? How would you describe your mood? Are you irritated or stressed? Excited? Happy? Bored? Depressed?

Then notice physical things about your body like tense shoulders, headaches, or other discomfort. Even those of us who are particularly young and/or fit will notice the subtle imperfections inherent to life in the physical realm when you take the time to meditate.

The Many Benefits of Meditation

So to sum up: the benefits you can gain from meditation are increased physical health and increased mental health. This means that if it is possible that your body/mind can heal or recover from any condition or ailment, then a regular, effective meditation practice will assist this process to occur in a more dynamic and expedient manner. It does this by allowing the immune system to do its job better, and by helping you to be happier and less stressed.

But: an important point – meditation isn’t an instant cure-all. There are generally no easy ‘outs’ in this life – the fact is benefit must be earned, health must be preserved and damage is often hard to undo.

Encouragingly, meditation can represent a major breakthrough in your life. You are unlikely to suddenly meditate your way from down-in-the-dumps to on-top-of-the-world in your first sitting, but you can expect to make some leaps forward in your progression through life.

Beginning to understand and practice meditation can be a glorious eye-opening experience. It can take you (or rather you can take yourself) on a long and interesting journey inwards towards a more positive frame of mind and a happier, healthier and probably longer life.

Seamus Anthony is a writer, musician and entrepreneur. He is the author of “Psychedelic Meditation: How to Get an Awesome Cosmic High Without Drugs” and one half of the action at Rebel Zen.

PS – In case you missed them, here are Part One and Part Two of this “How Meditation Improves Your Health” series.

Meditation promotes good health by fighting off the adverse effects of stress – but what is stress anyway?

Stress is the response to a situation that motivates us to perform an action – whether that be fleeing from an attacker, worrying, or just mowing the lawn.

How Your Body Reacts to Stress.

If you become stressed (even mildly) your Sympathetic Nervous System works to cause you to act appropriately. Hormones like adrenaline and others kick in; we get excited or anxious; muscles tighten; blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing rate rises. We use up more energy. This is the “Fight or Flight Response”.

Whether it be a small event or a life-threatening one, our bodies respond to stress in a similar way. The difference is that the level of response adjusts to meet the perceived level of threat.

This system can get out of whack and people may find they are overreacting to some of the smaller stressors of life.

Are You Uptight?

You may be a lot more wound up than you need be. For example: doing something simple like mowing the lawn shouldn’t be all that stressful. But if you were to stop mid-task and take a minute to ask yourself ‘what is my mental state right now?’, you may find you are more stressed-out than you realize. This could be because the mower wouldn’t start immediately, or because you’re dwelling on job-related pressures, or because you are habitually high-strung.

Whatever the case, if you are stressed, you are over-stimulating your body’s sympathetic nervous system.

You Are A Bundle of Nerves

Your body is geared up to react to the signals it receives from the mind. Simply put, when you experience ‘negative’ emotions (fear, irritation, anger, stress, bitterness, etc.) your mind interprets this simply as ‘There is danger here; it is not time to relax. All hell could break loose at any minute, better stay ready for action.’

The human body is wired up to react to danger very quickly. At the first sign of ‘danger’ (which could just be slow traffic driving you nuts) the hypothalamus sends off a myriad of signals which prepare us to respond to the perceived threat. When the hypothalamus sends out these distress signals, our bodies redirect energy from other less immediately vital areas to the functions that are specifically needed to respond to the stress.

Why Stress is Bad for Your Body

When your mind and body are in ‘fight or flight’ mode, your immune system suffers because the body is redirecting energy reserves that the immune system needs to other areas of the body. Therefore the more ‘stressed’ you are at any given moment – the less work your immune system is doing to get rid of all the nasties that are in your system.

When you are highly agitated, the immune system pretty much packs up shop and has a siesta while all the drama unfolds elsewhere. Same goes for your digestive system, which is why you may lose your appetite when stressed.

Hormones also have a starring role in this picture. Adrenaline, noradrenalin and thyroxin are amongst the many hormones that get released into the system to perform their role in the ‘fight-or-flight’ scenario. These hormones have specific jobs, such as speeding up the heart rate, or raising body temperature, or swelling a fresh wound.

While this is all natural and necessary, problems arise when we don’t know how to switch off these responses. The body remains on stand-by for trouble, due to negative patterns of thought (worrying about the future, anger, dwelling on the past, etc.), or even just because we are so busy in general. This means the immune system isn’t getting enough time to do its job – so healing does not take place, or if it does, it is at a reduced rate of efficiency.

Unless you meditate, you typically never give the parasympathetic nervous system a go, but rather you settle into a pattern of swinging between a state of high arousal and one of habitual, low-level tension. Even when you go to bed, your dreams may be full of the day’s stress, and your body is so busy playing catch-up that you never quite get to a more desirable state of balance.

What is the Relaxation Response?

The basic theory behind the effectiveness of meditation is that it helps to take the mind (and thus the body) out of the stressed, ‘fight-or-flight’ mode that humans tend to get stuck in, and into the mode known as the Relaxation Response.

This was recognized by Dr Herbert Benson, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, in 1967, who reportedly sneaked a number of practitioners of meditation into the laboratory to measure what was happening to them biologically when they were meditating.

Benson measured their vital statistics and found that the meditators were using less oxygen, lowering their heart rates, and generating more Theta brainwaves, which are associated with the relaxed state of sleep, or in this case the mental stage just prior to sleep. Dr Benson coined the term the Relaxation Response in his book of the same name and began a process whereby western empirical science began to understand the biological implications of meditation.

In the third post of this three-part series, we’ll look at how meditation strengthens your immune system, how to use meditation to achieve biological balance and what the benefits of this are.

Seamus Anthony is a musician, writer and entrepreneur who lives in the beautiful Dandenong Ranges, near Melbourne, Australia. You can check out more of his personal development writing at http://rebelzen.com

Fact 1: Meditation assists healing. If you have any kind of health complaint at all then meditation can help you to get better.

Fact 2: Meditation can help you to stay healthy. If you are in good shape and want to stay this way, then regular meditation is a good idea.

Twenty years ago these would have been considered fringe ideas rather than facts, but not anymore…

Meditation Goes Mainstream

Meditation no longer belongs solely to the worlds of pseudo-science and spirituality, but has now been embraced by modern science as well.

Good western doctors know how meditation works to relax and heal. A recent survey of General Practitioners found that up to 80% of doctors had referred patients to practitioners of the three most popular Complementary Therapies – which included meditation, along with acupuncture and hypnosis.

Meditation has been extensively tested in laboratories around the world and is proven to help heal the body and mind of illnesses and disorders. As a result, more and more people are turning to meditation as a simple, cheap, and effective method of self-therapy.

In August 2003, Time Magazine (U.S. edition) ran a cover story on meditation in which they reported that over ten million U.S. citizens say they regularly practice some form of meditation, an increase of 100% in the ten years prior. Furthermore, Time went on to say that “it’s becoming increasingly hard to avoid meditation. It’s offered in schools, hospitals, law firms, government buildings, corporate offices, and prisons.”

Meditation is recommended as a way to cure or improve many disorders. Key to this is the fact that meditation helps lower blood pressure and strengthens the immune system. It is effective both as means to prevent disease, and as a means to cure, manage or slow the effects of existing conditions. It is used as treatment for “heart conditions, AIDS, cancer, and infertility … depression, hyperactivity, and Attention Deficit Disorder” (Time).

Eric Harrison, Australian meditation teacher and founder of The Perth Meditation Centre, claims to have received around a quarter of his 15,000-plus clients as referrals from the medical profession. In his book ‘How Meditation Heals the Body and Mind’ (1999, Perth Meditation Center), Harrison claims that an even wider array of ailments can be managed with meditation. He suggests that by initiating the popularly cited ‘Relaxation Response’, the body is able to ward off or effectively slow and manage the effects of not just high blood pressure, but insomnia, fatigue, headaches, gastro-intestinal problems, infertility, sexual problems, and anxiety attacks.

Another respected Australian meditation teacher, Dr Ian Gawler, who used meditation to defeat a diagnosed terminal cancer, also cites the Relaxation Response as being a powerful tool for self-healing (we’ll look at exactly what the Relaxation Response is later in these articles). His work promoting meditation as therapy for cancer and other illnesses earned him an Order of Australia Medal. In his book ‘Peace of Mind’ (1987, Hill of Content) he says that meditation “rapidly and reliably brings immediate physical and psychological benefits.”

Stress – The Dark Side of Our Connectivity Culture

Modern humans are, in the majority, perpetually stressed out. An article on depression in the Medical Journal Australia** recently cited that stress levels “…among people living a Western lifestyle have risen by approximately 45% over the past 30 years.”

Practitioners of meditation believe this springs from the average person’s inability to disconnect from the stress of past events or perceived future threats. Whilst walking down the street, a person may not be doing anything stressful in that moment but may nonetheless be highly agitated due to the tendency of the mind to constantly mull over past or future problems. This occurs even though none of these problems may have anything to do with walking down the street.

In short – we are a society of perpetual ‘worry warts’, and many people fail to recognize this as fact, or indeed simply lack the skills to do anything about it. Even those who would not be described as ‘highly agitated’ or ‘chronically stressed’ are often still afflicted by a subtle level of tension which inhibits the mind from switching back into the Relaxation Response.

Our modern culture of 24-hour connectivity has made this even worse. Even low-tech hippies like me still compulsively check work emails “just quickly” before dinner and get interrupted on weekends by work related calls. This might be part-and-parcel of an interesting and otherwise rewarding career, but nevertheless it takes its toll on our ability to deeply relax. If you are always contactable, then you are never really “switched-off”, and yet, as you will see in my next two articles, this is a vital requirement in the quest for good health.

In the second post in this three-part series we will look at what the Relaxation Response is, how your body reacts to stress and why it’s bad for you.

Seamus Anthony is a musician, writer and entrepreneur who lives in the beautiful Dandenong Ranges, near Melbourne, Australia. You can check out more of his personal development writing at http://rebelzen.com

Common wisdom has it you should plan out your career in detail otherwise you set yourself up for failure. So why should you do something as crazy as setting fire to your detailed career plan? Here’s why:

1 . The Most Successful People in the World Often Don’t Have a Detailed Plan

I’ve read loads of biographies of the most successful people of the last couple of hundred years and about 80% of them followed their bliss – not a detailed plan. The formula is this: Outrageous Goal + Action Habit = Score!

But then what will you do with each day? Well, Jerry Seinfeld once said something about how he never had any plans to become the most successful comedian ever, all he did was work hard at the one thing he was passionate about, come what may. I am sure you’d like to be as successful as Jerry (or even partially) and of course you can because your future is unlimited – so there’s your answer – just pursue your passion relentlessly.

And for those who are worried about spending too much time on irrelevant tasks. Well, surely you have enough intelligence to recognize a complete waste of time when you see one? Always be doing the next thing you can do that will move you closest to your goal.

2. You Don’t Know What You Will Want in the Future

Studies have repeatedly shown that humans are useless at predicting what they will want in the future. About half way down this post there’s a great story of an experiment where students were asked to predict what sandwiches they would like to eat for the next week. Most of them reported being unhappy with their choices when the day came around to eat what they had pre-ordered.

The Who’s Pete Townshend once wrote “I hope I die before I get old”. He jokes about this now.
You shouldn’t assume that you know now what you’ll want in the future – you don’t and it probably isn’t what you think it is.

You may have a fantastic plan to become a world famous Frisbee champion, but if you wrote this plan without accounting for the lifestyle that would naturally accompany such a career, then you may be confusing a nice fantasy for what you actually need in order to be happy in real life. I don’t know any, but I would imagine that professional Frisbee dudes spend a lot of time traveling and running around on beaches. Now if you hate flying, hate the sun and miss your girlfriend when she goes out shopping with her sister, then you might want to consider if your grand plan is actually congruous with your reality-based needs.

Further, the more detailed your plan is, the more pressure you are going to feel to be getting all those little tasks you’ve set yourself done. And this will mostly be future-based activity – grunt work – which will not necessarily be all that fun. You may wish a lot of those tasks were over as soon as you’ve begun. While adhering to a detailed, demanding plan, you may be putting most of your attention on the future instead of enjoying the moment. And, although we don’t always remember to do it, I think it’s pretty much common knowledge that the best way to enjoy life is to live in the present moment and be grateful for your blessings.

If you are truly happy to live a simple life, spent strumming your guitar on the porch while your husband bakes you a nice cake, then burn your plan to become a rock star and just chill.

3. You Don’t Know What Will Happen in the Future

What does your future hold? Flood? Fire? War? Plane crash? Financial ruin? Ill health?
Or maybe you are but a couple of years away from an incredible, unexpected stroke of good fortune – a sudden windfall or a surprise career opportunity that you never could have anticipated.

Even barring something outrageous, the truth is you don’t know what the world will bring over the next few years. The rate of change we are experiencing is at an unprecedented high and predictions are that it will continue to increase exponentially. Changing factors that may completely alter the work environment in the next five to ten years include technology, economics, market demands, the oil crisis, politics, global warming, and population growth.

If everything changes around you while you’re slavishly adhering to your detailed plan, you may wake up one day to find demand for your business has waned.

4. Short, One Page Plans Are Better

Australian self-made multi-millionaire real estate agent and author, John McGrath, says he never bothers with detailed plans. In fact he specifically writes that “a business plan’s success is inversely proportional to its length”. The reasons he gives for this are that people have a natural resistance to reading wordy documents therefore long plans tend to wind up stuffed away somewhere, never getting reviewed or acted on.

He recommends one page plans with bullet points to make it easy to scroll through. It should be able to fit onto one PowerPoint slide.

I would also add that in my opinion while spending days or weeks constructing a long detailed plan you are wasting time “thinking” instead of “doing”.

5. Over-Planning Indicates a Lack of Trust in the Source to Provide.

Ok – I admit – this is pretty hippy.

And I just don’t think that this sort of thinking applies to people living in Third World countries, but it does apply for the First World. The fact is, if you are working class or higher, you are, in fact, comparatively rich. And if you are sensible, and don’t make yourself miserable by focusing on the gap between what you want and what you actually have, you should be able to relax and be grateful for the blessings in your life, even as you work for tomorrow’s bread.

If, however, you just spend all your time being scared about not having enough, and therefore over-planning to try and control life’s outcomes, then you are sending out the wrong vibrational message.

And hey – maybe that Law of Attraction phooey works or maybe it doesn’t, but even at a pragmatic level, others will smell your fear and run a mile (taking the opportunities they may have sent your way with them).

6. Your Plan May Be Limiting Your Success

Your detailed plan is a product of your imagination, and while you may think you’re a pretty creative cat, you may be limiting your options to what you can imagine while writing it.

For example: You are a software developer running your own start-up. You write a spiffy, detailed plan that involves marketing your products through different online channels. Things are going well; you’re busy and making okay money but not exactly setting the world on fire.

One night you’re at a bar and a friend introduces you to a woman who is interested in your business. She asks you to come along and give a talk about how you market yourself online at a local small business meet-up. You mentally check the plan – nope, no mention of public speaking there, and plenty of online marketing to do – so you politely refuse. Stick to the plan, you tell yourself. Meanwhile, who’s to say that your product, surreptitiously mentioned in your talk, wouldn’t have appealed to a number of the business people present, should you have been so crazy as to give spontaneity a go?

7. Planning Actually Achieves Nothing

Nobody ever wrote a business plan that didn’t make a huge profit, but plenty of businesses crash and burn. Why? Because it’s not the detailed plan that makes things happen – it’s you. It’s your actions, your hard work, your focus, your persistence.

The Taoist school of thought recommends that you abandon planning altogether and instead “flow like water”. Although that sounds pretty goofy, if you stop and think about the qualities of water, it makes sense. Water is flexible, passive, and it flows around the rocks rather than trying to push through them – yet it always reaches its goal – the ocean. I personally take this approach. It has worked wonders for me and I believe this counter-intuitive strategy will give you great results also. If you allow yourself to open up to the mystery of life, then your future will be a grand adventure – and the best way to do this is to click on that detailed plan and drag it into the trash.

For those not game for a complete no-plan approach then some less “out-there” advice is to keep your plan simple, brief and focused on a specific result. That way you can be flexible and responsive along the way, whilst always keeping your eyes on the prize and your ship heading in the right direction.

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Seamus Anthony is a musician, writer and entrepreneur who lives in the beautiful Dandenong Ranges, near Melbourne, Australia. You can check out more of his personal development writing at http://rebelzen.com

Image by Nestor Galina.

“No regrets!”

It’s a popular stance to take, an uber-cool Hollywood cliché – but I don’t buy it. Just sounds like they’re kidding themselves to me.

Ask yourself this: can you honestly say that you have never done anything that in hindsight you don’t regret?

What about when you lost it at your partner and said something really hurtful that you didn’t really mean? Or the carefree way you racked up thousands of dollars worth of credit card debt when you were overseas?

Obviously these specific scenarios might not apply to you, but surely you can see what I’m getting at right?

You can say “no regrets” but I don’t believe you.

And anyway, what’s so uncool about regret? Why do people see it as some kind of badge of honor to take this stance?

Regret Serves A Function

Personally I regret plenty. I do!

I don’t stay up late berating myself over the things I’ve done, but if I think back on some of my less glorious moments – and believe me there have been more than a few – I do feel a tinge of regret. But I think this is healthy and normal. As long as you don’t take it too far and get all hung up on the past, I think it’s okay to feel some remorse because regret serves a function.

Regret works as a warning system in our brains, an alarm that goes off whenever we ever find ourselves in a similar situation (to the past scenario that caused us to regret our actions). Regret should work like a little red flag that pops up with something like “Whoops! Look out!” printed on it in bold type to advise us to refrain from making the same mistakes twice.

I may regret this (!) but allow me to use some of my most shameful and inglorious misadventures to illustrate…

Do Unto Others

Like most teenage boys, when I was younger I found talking to attractive girls difficult.

Eventually I got the hang of it though and by the time I was 17 I got my first proper girlfriend. She was a pretty, intelligent girl who only had eyes for me. Ours was an in innocent, puppy-love that over the ensuing few years deepened into a great romantic friendship (otherwise known as real love).

But trouble brewed in paradise.

By the time I was twenty, far from being shy around pretty girls, my position as lead singer in a rock band had brought me a ridiculous level of popularity with the fairer sex. Unfortunately, due to life-inexperience and over-active pants, I soon decided it would be a great idea to break my girl’s heart by running away and having affairs with other young women (these trysts were mostly embarrassing failures too, I hasten to add, which makes the story even sadder).

After a few years of dragging my girl’s heart through hell and back (we were officially a couple for 9 years), I came home and lying in bed while she slept one night, I realised that I truly loved only her. I was ashamed of my behavior; I knew something had changed inside of me (how noble – not) and I knew I would never cheat on her again. I genuinely wanted to marry the girl and make up for my past transgressions. I decided to save for a ring, but unfortunately it was too late.

Before I knew what had happened, I heard those fateful words coming out of her mouth: “Seamus, we need to talk…”

She had despaired of me ever getting it together and had given her heart to another man. She was the kind of rock-solid person who doesn’t do such a thing lightly and I knew that once it was done, it was done.

So she married her new (very nice) man and I slunk off to lick my wounds. I decided to keep my vow never to cheat on a partner. After several romantic misadventures, I met my darling lady-friend of 8 years now (and mother of my child) and I am glad to report that all is well again in paradise.

But I still regret the bad behaviour I described above.

Sure, I understand that I was young, and that I probably had “wild oats” needed sowing, but nevertheless I feel regret that I acted in such an inconsiderate and selfish manner.

BUT the upside is that I have since leveraged off this regret and used the experience to improve my character.

I used my feelings of regret for my past actions to establish a moral framework in which to live my life. You’ll have to take my word for it I suppose, but since then I have never cheated on my partner and I never will because I know without doubt that trust between two lovers is the rock that stable, happy lives are built on. It is a sacred trust and a tragedy when abused.

Take the Long Way (Forget the Short-Cuts)

Here’s another thing I regret, but which I have leveraged to my advantage.

16 years ago when we started our band, I was a sober young fellow with quite a good head on my shoulders. I had no illusions that if I wanted success as a musician then I was going to have to devote all my energy to the task and work very hard. I knew I would have to chip away at it, pursue every single opportunity and just plain do the hard yards.

Then after a couple of years of solid effort, the band started to do well. We became a home town phenomenon and, bar financial wealth, all of the trappings that success brings (admittedly parochial, fishbowl success) were thrust our way.

Seems silly now, but I fell for these old chestnuts hook, line and sinker.

Yes, I am talking about free drugs and alcohol. (Hey, it was the ’90s! They were the upside-down ’60s!)

Besides the health ramifications, these indulgences lead to an inability to focus and work hard. Before you could say “err, hello-oow” (like Billy Crystal), the band split up and the whole soufflé deflated before our squinty, red eyes. And yes, I do partially blame the substances.

My drug and booze addled state didn’t stop there however, and while I certainly spent the rest of my twenties having an absolute ball – an gonzo adventure par excellence – I do regret making one big mistake over and over:

I kept looking for short-cuts to success.

My attention span became so short, and my capacity to be easily distracted so great, that I just bounced from one scheme to the next. I would quickly knock something together (a recording, a band, a gig, a nightclub, whatever) and expect that this would be “the one” that would bring the world clamoring to my feet again.

Then when it didn’t I would stick my tail between my legs and just give up.

Meanwhile, Fast Forward Ten Years…

Whoosh! Wow! That was a quick decade!

You know what I mean? Youth really is but a fleeting glory. It’s like one day you’re twenty and all of time just infinitely stretches out before you, and then you wake up one morning and suddenly you’re in your mid-thirties!

This October I turn 35 and, thankfully, I now know better than to look for short-cuts to success.

Now I know that if I had just done a little bit every day towards a single goal then I’d have achieved a lot more by now. So while I am very happy that I had a wild, fun, adventurous youth, I do also regret my lack of focus and commitment.

BUT that’s okay!

Now I can leverage off this regret and use the knowledge gained to change my ways. And I have; I am now very focussed on what I want and have already seen great results over the two or three years since I really pulled my head in and started to chip away towards unwavering goals in a patient and consistent manner.

And whenever I feel my focus slipping, I just call on the regret I feel for being so unfocused during the springtime of my youth. I imagine how I’m likely to feel if I turn 45 and still haven’t done squat about making my dreams come true.

So, Yes – Regrets!

I say down with all this cocky “no regrets” talk – it’s just immature posturing.

It’s okay to regret your past stuff-ups. It’s an opportunity to learn from the experience and become a better person.

What regret have you leveraged for greater personal growth?

Seamus Anthony is a musician, writer and entrepreneur who lives in the beautiful Dandenong Ranges, near Melbourne, Australia. You can check out more of his personal development writing at http://rebelzen.com

Image by *Zara