Internal Causes Of Stress: Are You Reluctant To Do This?

Dr. Mort Orman here and in the final two installments of this 6-part series, I want to focus your attention on two very common action patterns (including failing to take certain actions) that can cause us to have stress.

These are action patterns you are already familiar with, yet they are seldom singled out as frequent contributors to our stress.

In today’s 5^th installment, I want to focus on Failing To Ask For Help and how this action pattern can both create and maintain certain types of stress.

Failing To Ask For Help

As we go through life, we often encounter problems that could either be solved or avoided if we just sought help from others.

Unfortunately, we have many internal barriers that keep us from doing this.

For example, we have internal thought patterns that make us reluctant to ask for help, like:

“I should always solve my problems on my own.”

“Asking for help is a sign of weakness.”

“If I ask for help, others might think I’m stupid.”

“I’m much too embarrassed to ask for assistance.”

“I don’t want to burden other people.”

“I asked for help in the past and it didn’t work out.”

We also have other internal barriers, in the form of action tendencies, such as:

Procrastination
Being unwilling to pay for expert help
Not being open to, or accepting of, sound advice from others.

Thus, Failing To Ask For Help is a very common action pattern (within us) that frequently leads to stress.

And while we are prone to focus on external circumstances, or other events that occur outside of us, to explain why we end up having problems and being stressed, it is often internal causes like Failing To Ask For Help which play a huge but avoidable role as well.

Consider these typical scenarios:

You are having marital problems which aren’t getting better but you refuse to seek or pay for professional counseling;
You have a complicated health problem, but you go on the Internet to research treatment options on your own, instead of consulting closely with your doctors and other trusted and experienced health professionals;
Your business is losing money, but you are reluctant to seek help to solve your marketing or management problems;
You frequently feel stressed, but you’ve been disappointed by stress management in the past, so you stop looking for new or better solutions.

These are all common ways that we keep ourselves stuck, suffering from problems that cause us pain, but that could be solved or could have been prevented…if we were just more open and willing to appropriately ask for help.

So the next time you are feeling stressed and you don’t know what to do about it, ask yourself if being reluctant to ask for help might be keeping you from moving forward and feeling better.

To your health, happiness and success,

Dr. Mort Orman, M.D., International Speaker, Author And Founder Of The Stress Mastery Academy | http://DocOrman.com