Stress-Free with Intellect, and Not Intelligence

Stress-Free with Intellect, and Not Intelligence

According to CNN health news “Learn to Live with It: Becoming Stress-Free”, use your intellect, and not your intelligence, to manage and cope with your everyday stress.

Intelligence is knowledge, which doesn’t help you with stress; intellect, on the other hand, is wisdom, which may help you coping with stress.

Stress comes from the internal, and not the external. Stress originates from the ego-self. You have an ego, and therefore you “expect” things, people, and circumstances to do things your way to satisfy your ego. If they don’t meet your expectations, they become your stressors. NO EGO NO STRESS. You need intellect, which is essentially human wisdom, to let go of your ego in order to be stress-free. It’s just that simple.

Here is the health news:  

“People the world over believe that stress comes from external sources.

One complains of a nagging wife or hysterical husband. Another finds fault with the demands of work or the exploitation of management. Someone else grumbles at summer being too hot or winter being too cold.

Everyone thus lives with the belief that factors outside themselves produce stress -- so their entire focus is on correcting the external world. Yet despite our best efforts to fix these external factors, the problems remain unsolved and our minds continue to be consumed by stress.

Pleasure or pain, joy or sorrow, peace or stress—these are not found in external objects or beings. They are found in the relationship you have with those things.

For example one person finds pleasure in smoking cigarettes. Another detests them. One man may go to his lawyer to divorce his wife while another waits, desperately wanting to marry her. A cigarette produces pleasure to one, pain to another. The same lady produces joy for one, sorrow for another.

In life, be it with business or family, relationships matter. Lack of a proper relationship leads to frustration and builds up stress. Ironically, people take utmost care to choose the "right partner," but fail to set up the "right relationship" with that person -- and lose peace and harmony in the process.

It is not whom or what you meet in life that matters but how you meet it.

Your relationship with the world is entirely dependent on the nature of your inner personality. Your inner personality comprises two things: the mind and the intellect.

The mind desires and feels. The intellect reasons, judges, and decides.

When the intellect loses control over the mind's desires, you become disturbed. Stress is the mental agitation caused by unfulfilled desires. Thus the fundamental requirement for a stress-free life is to develop a strong intellect and control desires.

Intellectual strength is distinct and different from intelligence. Intelligence is mere storage of information—knowledge acquired from external sources and educational institutions, from teachers and textbooks. Any amount of intelligence cannot, per se, develop your intellect. The intellect is developed by individual effort through exercising one's faculty of questioning and reasoning.

With the lack of development of the intellect, people fail to understand that every human being is distinct and different from another—that each is governed by his or her own singular nature.

Therefore, we should assess the nature of each human individually. But few follow this practice in life. Without making individual assessments you are not able to relate to others properly. As a result, you expect one to behave differently from one's fundamental nature.”

The bottom line: let go of your pre-conditioned mindset to think out of the box to attain intellect, and not intelligence, to live a stress-free life. Get the ancient TAO wisdom from China to reverse your thinking.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau