Stressed About Work? How to Outthink Anxiety, with Byron Katie | Big Think

Stressed About Work? How to Outthink Anxiety

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An honest inquiry into the source of stress in your life will yield some surprising results. If you're mindful, present, and inquiring, you won't be able to fool yourself, says Katie Byron. Rather than analyze the source of your stress, simply ask yourself this series of yes/no questions. Analysis often leads to defensiveness of self-justification, but investigating your own mental state will reveal a more essential truth to you: how you feel about what's happening around you.

By reorienting the perspective from which you analyze your stress, you will come to think differently about it. This is especially powerful when we realize that we experience stress primarily as a mental condition. It may be that focussing on your job as the source of stress in your life may contribute to those very feelings.

Katie is the author of A Thousand Names for Joy.

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BYRON KATIE:

Byron Katie is creator of the inquiry process called "The Work." Through this process, Katie gives people the tool to set themselves free. In 1986, at the bottom of a ten-year spiral into depression, rage, and self-loathing, Katie woke up one morning to a state of constant joy that has never left her. She realized that when she believed her stressful thoughts, she suffered, but that when she questioned them, she didn't suffer, and that this is true for every human being.

The Work consists of four questions and the turnarounds, which are a way of experiencing the opposite of what you believe. When you question a thought, you see around it to the choices beyond suffering. One thought at a time, you transform the way you experience your life.

Katie has been bringing The Work to millions of people for more than twenty-five years. Her public events, weekend workshops, five-day intensives, nine-day School for The Work, and 28-day residential Turnaround House have brought freedom to people all over the world.

Eckhart Tolle says, “Byron Katie's Work is a great blessing for our planet.” Time magazine calls Katie “a spiritual innovator for the new millennium.” Byron Katie's six books include the bestselling Loving What Is, I Need Your Love—Is That True?, and A Thousand Names for Joy.

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TRANSCRIPT:

The Work is basic inquiry, and it takes one into a meditative state. Let's say if you're very stressed out you just become still. And you identify what you were thinking and believing in that situation. Let's say I'm at work and I have the thought, you know, “This job is stressing me out.”

So I would simply, now that that thought is identified, just write it down on a piece of paper. It's stabilized from mind to reality; it's solid, identified and anchored. “This job, my job is stressing me out. Is it true that my job is stressing me out?” And the first response might be “Yes, yes, yes it's true my job stresses me out. And he said this and she said that, and this is more than I can handle.” Okay, no that's not inquiry, that's a discussion. So now we slow it down, look at the paper. “This job is stressing me out. Is it true that this job is stressing me out?” Now the answer to the first two questions is one syllable, it's either “yes” or “no.” This is inquiry. Any defense or justification or story is not inquiry, inquiry is to get still and let the answer show you. It comes out as a “yes” or “no.” And so we just meditate on that until - that's why I say it could take a while for some of us.

And then, “My job is stressing me out. Can I absolutely know that it's my job that's stressing me out?” Okay. Get really still. “Can I absolutely know that it's my job that's stressing me out?” Yes. So to imagine that it's “no,” you're just guessing at the right answer. So it has to be authentic. You cannot fool you. You can't fool you. So some people say ultimately every answer is “no.” A “yes” to me is as valid as a “no” to someone else. This is personal work.

So let's say I'm at a “Yes. So it's my job that's stressing me out. My job stresses me out.” How do I react when I believe that thought? So I close my eyes; I see me taking it home with me; I see me frustrated at work; I'm short with my children, my husband; I want to quit. Then I worry about money and security, letting my family down. I blame even innocent people at work. I'm focused on work. Most of the time I'm paid for eight hours but I'm 24/7 waking hours I'm at work in my head. And a lot of us can go further with that. It's like “How do I react when I believe the thought. ......

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