"Many people believe stress is caused by the inability to adapt to a changing environment. Dr John Demartini explores why adapting to change has less to do with your environmental circumstances and more to do with the way you perceive them.

This content is for educational and personal development purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any psychological or medical conditions. The information and processes shared are for general educational purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for professional mental-health or medical advice. If you are experiencing acute distress or ongoing clinical concerns, please consult a licensed health-care provider."

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Today I'd like to talk about the

stress that is involved in the changing

of the environment around you, and

you're adapting to it. In fact,

the definition of stress is the inability

to adapt to a changing environment.

And one thing that we all face

is a changing environment.

So in the process of doing that,

how do we deal with that? How do,

how do we adapt to change and not

drive ourself out of our mind doing it?

Because it's constantly changing.

There's changes in business,

changes in relationship dynamics,

changes in social dynamics. You name it.

We have resistance to change

when we become attached.

So let me address that. There's

two types of attachment.

This was addressed in Buddhist philosophy,

but it's basic common sense really.

Anything that is highly

polarized in your perceptions,

anything that's extremely

positive or extremely negative,

you're going to fear the

loss of and fear the gain of.

So our resistance to change,

our inability to adapt,

is because of our attachments.

And the two attachments we have

are basically responses from our

subcortical amygdala, our inner nuclei,

our kind of our older brain,

that is involved in survival.

So we are basically in

that area of the brain,

the amygdala assigns valency to stimuli.

So anything that comes into our awareness

that's either positive or negative in

our perception, the amygdala assigns

these labels of positive and negative,

and it represents prey or predator,

something we seek or something

we avoid. An impulse to seek,

an instinct to avoid. And the

more emotionally charged it is,

the more we fear it's loss,

if it's positively charged,

or the more we fear it's gain

if it's negatively charged.

So anytime there's a change,

if we're judging that change

and judging any aspect of it,

we're going to have either a

fear of losing something we want,

or fear of gaining

something we don't want,

and we're going to tend to want to

resist it and not adapt to that.

So there's basically, there's two forms.

There's the positive and the

negative form. Again, prey,

which is food,

which we seek with an impulse and

activates our parasympathetic nervous

system for rest and digest, and

is anabolic and helps us grow,

we fear the loss of, because we

can starve to death. Predator,

, which activates the

sympathetic nervous system,

the fight or flight response to fight

it or run from it and to escape, we

now have the fear of that coming into

our life, and there's a phobia there.

So anything that's highly polarized,

the greater the polarity of perception,

the more we resist change.

If you meet somebody that's highly

polarized, a religious fundamentalist,

an extreme political

fundamentalist or extremist,

they're the ones that have the most

resistant to change and they fight the

causes. Most of the fights we have

are a result of these extremists.

If you're completely neutral and

you have a balanced perspective,

and you see both the positive and

negative simultaneously in some event,

you don't fear the loss of it or the

fear of the gain of it, it's neutral.

But the second you add valency and

positive and negative charge to it,

it now becomes something to fear

the loss of, or fear the gain of.

So let's say you meet somebody

and you're infatuated with them,

you're going to fear their

loss. If you resent somebody,

you're going to fear their gain.

If you have things you like

and dislike about people,

which is what most of us do,

we're going to have the fear

of loss of the parts we like,

and we're going to have the fear of

the gain of the parts we dislike.

So anytime there's a

change, somebody moving,

coming into your existence

or out of your existence,

if there's any valency in charge

on your perception of them,

you're going to have resistance.

You're going to procrastinate,

resist ,

hesitate frustrate yourself because you're

afraid of losing something you want,

or fear of gaining something you

don't want. So these are normal.

These are normal biological

responses to our perceptions.

Our amygdala tends to assign

things with subjective bias,

anything that supports our

values we have an in-group bias,

and we fear the loss of.

Like all the people that remind us of

people like ourselves and our own group

and our own culture and

age group or whatever,

we fear the loss of and fear rejection of.

And the people that are quite

different than us, we fear the gain of.

So if we can have reflective

awareness and see both sides of

people around us and events

around us, and within us,

we're a lot more able to have

adaptation and our resilience.

In my book, the Resilient Mind, I

discuss this whole thing and explain it.

And but what happens is we have

natural resilience and natural

adaptability when we're living

congruently with what we value most,

where we have the most

objectivity and neutral,

balanced perspective on life.

But when we're in survival and we're in

our amygdala and we assign a valency,

and the more polarized it becomes and

the more subjectively biased and have,

you know,

false positives on the positives and false

negatives on the negatives and become

infatuated or false positives on the

negatives and false negatives on the

positives and become resentful,

then we're going to have resistance.

We're going to have a lot

more anxiety and stress.

So our life basically is

stress is a friend .

Most people say I want

to get rid of the stress,

but the stress is actually a friend.

It lets you know what you have

highly valent charges about,

which is another name for judgment.

Empedocles, the Greek philosopher,

said that there was love and strife,

unconditional love of the soul,

strife of the body, and the senses.

So anytime we are judging something to

extreme and label something extremely,

absolutely black or white or bad

or good or negative or positive,

we're going to have difficulty

adapting to changing environments.

We're going to resist change.

And our resistance to change is

letting us know we're judging strongly

and biased and in a sense more hypocrites.

Because if you stop and think about it,

if you try to be one sided

and avoid the other side,

you won't be able to succeed at it.

Just try to be kind all

the time and never cruel,

or try to be positive and

never negative, or try to be,

anytime you try to be one side without

the other or expect other people to be

that way, you're going to

have a challenge. You're

not going to be adaptable.

But when you understand that

people live by their values,

and if you expect them to live according

to those and make decisions according

to that, and that they have both sides,

and they're not positive without

negative or negative without positive,

they're not a hero or a villain, they're

just human beings with both sides.

An individual, which means undivided.

You can adapt and have more

resilience in relationship to them.

And the same thing in yourself.

If you see both sides of yourself,

if I went up to you and I said, you're

always positive, never negative,

always kind, never cruel,

and if you believed it,

well then you're going

to have a difficulty

adapting with a loss of the positive

and the gain of the negative when it

happens. But if you embrace

that you are two sided,

that you have positive and negative,

and you're kind and cruel and nice

and mean and positive and negative and

peaceful and wrathful, and you

have support and challenge,

and you have two sides,

and you don't need to get rid of any

part of yourself to love yourself,

you can love both sides simultaneously.

You're way more resilient and adaptable.

That's why I talk about values so often,

when people live according to their

very top values, their highest values,

the blood glucose, and oxygen

goes into the forebrain,

the medial prefrontal cortex.

That area of the brain is where you're

more reasonable and more objective and

more logical. Daniel Kahneman

called it systems two thinking.

And there you're more neutral.

You're less likely to be

polarizing your perceptions,

way more resilient and adaptable and

more functional. You're more disciplined,

reliable and focused about your life.

But if you're not doing

what's highest in priority,

the blood glucose and oxygen

goes into the amygdala.

The amygdala puts and assigns valency

to perceptions, distorts it. Why?

Because if it is on the positive side,

it tends to exaggerate that to make

sure you get adrenaline going enough to

capture the prey so it doesn't escape

you, and you fear the loss of it.

And if it's a predator, again,

it causes an accentuation

and dramatization of the

perception in order to

run from it or to have

the energy to fight it.

So anytime we're not

living by high priority and

we're allowing ourselves to be run

by our kind of our animal brain,

our amygdala and our

reptilian part of our brain,

and we're automatically going to be

in fight or flight or rest and digest,

and we're going to be polarized and

we're going to be fearing the loss or the

gain of things, and we're

going to resist change.

But if we balance out our

perspective we liberate ourselves.

That's why in the Breakthrough Experience,

which is one of my signature programs,

I've done the presentation of about 1,262

times, I believe is the exact number,

in there I take people who have a major

resentment and I find out what the

individual did that they're resenting

that they falsely assumed is the cause of

their discomfort or whatever,

and find out where they've

done it to the same degree.

Find out how it served them, until it's

neutral, it's not positive or negative.

And find out if they had done what you

had hoped they'd have done in that moment

they did the behavior didn't

like, what had been the drawbacks,

till you crack the fantasy about

how things are supposed to be.

And you don't live in

this basically resentful

situation, that they're not living up

to the fantasy expectation you have.

And now you have a

neutral perspective now,

and if that person comes into

your life, you're not anxious,

you don't have a resistance to them.

And if you're infatuated with somebody

and you're conscious of the positive and

unconscious negative, if I ask you,

where do you do the same thing and

own what you see and have reflective

awareness and what are the drawbacks of

their behavior and bring it back into

neutrality, and if they had done

what you would not want them to do,

what would've been the benefit? So you're

neutral on it. You're not judging it.

You get to more unconditionally love it.

You don't have a resistance to change.

The people can come in and outta

your life without an attachment,

as the Buddhist says. And the desire

for that which is unobtainable,

and the desire to avoid

that which is unavoidable,

is a source of human suffering

in the Buddhist teachings.

And so the stoics understood this.

Even Christians understood this.

Almost every philosophical and

religious perennial philosophy has

understood this.

So being able to have equanimity within

the mind and equity between yourself and

others and be able to walk the middle

path, the Daoist path, if you will,

or the stoics unattached

state is certainly a lot more

liberating than it is because

you're liberated from it.

Anything you're highly polarized on

is going to occupy space and time

in your mind is going to run your life.

You've been in a sleeping situation

where you were highly infatuated with

somebody or manic about something and

you couldn't sleep or highly panic and

resentful and nightmarish about

somebody and you couldn't sleep.

The more polarized it is,

the more your body is at fear of losing

something or fear of gaining something

and the more it stays awake out

of anxiety and you don't get rest,

you don't get sleep,

it affects your health.

But if you balance out the equation

by living by priority and learning

questions,

the quality of your life's based on the

quality of the questions you ask and

learning questions that

equilibrate the mind,

you liberate yourself from all this

attachment, these polarized perspectives,

the amygdala's biased interpretation,

the ingroup outgroup biases,

the false positive and false negative

interpretations of your reality.

And you become in touch

with what's actually there,

because the individual that's in front

of you is not a nice person or a mean

person. They're an individual

with a set of values.

And if you support their values,

they can be nice as a pussy cat.

If you challenge values, they can be

mean as a tiger. They're a human being,

and you are a human being, and you

deserve to be loved for both sides.

And they deserve to be loved for both

sides. So if you balance out the equation,

you're way more adaptable,

way more resilient,

less preoccupied by space and time,

occupation of and intrusive thoughts by

all these things that are highly charged

and valent. You're not as

judging. You're more present.

Because when you're judging,

you're living in the past or future and

storing things in your hippocampus and

creating all kind of anxieties and

ecstasy fantasies that are torturing your

life. And so what happens is you liberate

yourself from all that, that baggage,

emotional baggage is what they

sometimes call it, and become present.

In that moment of presence when

you see both sides simultaneously

and you have a neutral view,

which is what happens when you live

according to your highest values or what

happens when you finish the Demartini

Method that I teach in the Breakthrough

Experience and how to dissolve the charges

that you have on past experiences so

you're not carrying around the baggage

that keeps you in anxiety of change,

you're more adaptable. And

life is changing nonstop.

We're being perturbed every single

day of our lives. And the question is,

is how fast can we return

to homeostasis? You know,

Walter Cannon wrote a book the

Wisdom of the Body and Claude Bernard

talked about homeostasis.

Our brain and body and psychology and

our physiology is doing everything it can

to stabilize us in a nice, nice

changing environment constantly.

We're constantly being perturbed.

We're constantly being quote,

stressed or distressed by our perceptions.

And if we can balance out our

perceptions to see both sides of things,

we're resilient, adaptable, and we

don't have resistance to change.

So I just wanted to go over a few moments

of that and let you know that you have

that capacity,

the quality of your life's based on

the quality of the questions you ask.

If you have a valent perception

and it's polarized, you can ask,

where's the opposite side and balance

it. It's there. No event is one sided.

Every event has two sides.

Every individual has two sides.

Every goal has two sides.

Every experience has two sides.

At least those two sides so,

if you ask the right question,

see the other side and

balance the equation,

the world around you is not

running you, you're running you.

You're a victim of your

history when you don't see it.

And you're a master of

your destiny when you do.

And you can sit there and be

polarized or synthesized as I call it.

And if not, you're living in

past and future, never present.

Or you're living in the present,

that's where the power is.

And people that do that are

empowered. And remember,

whenever you infatuate with

somebody and put them on a pedestal,

you're going to inject their values

and try to live in their values,

and that's futile, non-sustainable.

And when you resent somebody,

you're going to want to change them

to be more living in your values,

which is non-sustainable and futile.

So you live with a lot of futility when

you're highly polarized and you live

with a lot of maximum utility

when you're synthesized,

when you've got a balanced view.

So I constantly talk about,

I'm not a positive thinker

or negative thinker,

I'm a more of a balanced thinker.

I try to see both sides of events

so they don't run me, I run them.

You're a victim of the history if

you see only one side, you're again,

master of destiny if you see both sides.

You're a creature if you see one side,

you're a creator if you see both sides,

because then you're facing what's

actually there and not just realizing part

of it and dividing your mind into

conscious and unconscious portions and

disempowering yourself and being in

the dark and being unenlightened and

unaware. You're fully aware of both sides.

And that's what enlightenment's about.

That's what resilience

and adaptability is about.

That's what the Buddhist

middle path was about.

That's what the logos that

Heraclitus described was about.

And equanimity in Christianity

and the Krishna story with

Arjuna, all the traditions of philosophy

and theology and mysticism and

psychology and neurology and physiology

all point to that realization.

So I just wanted to take a few

moments to go over the idea,

if you're having resistance to change,

just know it's your perception of what's

happening that will determine your

resistance.

Balance out your perceptions

and you liberate yourself

and become more adaptable

and whole lot less stressful, stressed,

and you're free to be able

to love your life again.

So that was my little message.

And just know that the quality of your

life is based on the quality of the

questions you ask.

That's why I teach people these

questions in the Breakthrough Experience.