Dr. Mort Orman here, and in this 4th installment of my 6-part series, I want to shed light on another common internal cause of human stress.
This internal cause is Cause/Effect Thinking.
Like Good/Bad Thinking and Right/Wrong Thinking, Cause/Effect Thinking gets us into trouble because it distorts our perception (and understanding) of how life actually occurs.
When we automatically fall prey to Cause/Effect Thinking, we make the classic mistake of assuming that whatever happens in life comes from linear, sequential cause-effect dynamics.
Real life, however, doesn’t usually happen in linear causal ways.
Real life happens mostly through complex, multi-dimensional causes.
For example, when something goes wrong, it is rarely because one single or primary factor was responsible.
Usually, there are multiple causal factors involved.
But we don’t see all of these multiple factors clearly for two main reasons:
- Because our bodies are not biologically equipped to view or consider multiple causes simultaneously; and
- Because our society has trained us to think in simplistic, linear causal ways.
How Does This Produce Human Stress?
One adverse consequence of linear causal thinking is that we tend to exclusively blame certain people (including ourselves) for things that turn out poorly.
This conditioned, automatic tendency to assign blame very narrowly results from our distorted perspective that there is usually only one primary causative agent involved.
Since this is rarely the case, our blame often results from a distorted cause/effect perspective.
The same type of incomplete view can lead us to assign credit too narrowly as well.
Consider the baseball pitcher who achieves the ultimate athletic accomplishment of throwing a perfect game.
When the lights go down and all the fans have gone home, the media typically focuses all of their praise on the efforts of the pitcher.
They speak (and write) as if the other players on the team had nothing to do with it.
But we all know intuitively, this is never the case.
Do you think the catcher might have called a good game? Do you think the fielders might have made a few saving plays? And what about the hitters who provided enough offense to have the game conclude with a victory in just nine innings?
This is how real life happens, so we ought to be very cautious about assigning unilateral credit or unilateral blame to anything or anyone.
Cause/Effect Thinking, Stress, And Our Health
Another area where Cause/Effect Thinking gets us into repeated trouble, and leads to considerable human stress, is when we apply it unwittingly to matters related to our health.
Once again, we are susceptible to many false conclusions about health and human illness when we think too narrowly in linear cause-effect ways.
For example, we have many incorrect theories about what makes people sick and also what keeps people well.
Here’s just one: if you believe the misleading drug advertisements and think that heart attacks are caused primarily by what you eat or what your cholesterol levels in your blood are, you are missing about twenty other causative factors.
And when we incorrectly understand what causes us to get sick, or stay well, this can lead to misguided advice, harmful or ineffective actions, unwanted outcomes, and unnecessary stress in many other ways.
Beware Of These Invisible, Internal Thought Patterns
So far in this 6-part series, I have pointed out four very common internal causes of human stress:
- Good/Bad Thinking
- Right/Wrong Thinking
- Cause/Effect Thinking (and closely related Credit/Blame Thinking)
In the last two installments this week, I will highlight two very common action patterns that also contribute to much of our stress.
To your health, happiness and success,
Dr. Mort Orman, M.D., International Speaker, Author And Founder Of The Stress Mastery Academy | http://DocOrman.com
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