Learning to effectively cope with stress can be as simple as getting a new canvass and drawing the picture that you want YOU to be.

One of the only good things to come out of the atrocities of the concentration camps of the Second World War was the life works of psychiatrist Victor Frankl. In his seminal text, Man's Search for Meaning, he revealed that it wasn't the physically strong that necessarily survived in those situations, it was those that could take themselves to another place, effectively creating a different reality.

A survivor himself, he found typified in those around him that they either had someone to live for, some thing to live for, or a reason for their suffering. Examples included thinking of a relative that they would see at the end of the war, an unfinished woodwork project they would finish, or that there was some kind of greater meaning to their suffering.

So what can the rest of us take from Frankl's observation and punishing experience? In every situation we choose to paint a picture of our reality. Sure, you may be sick to the eyeballs with your boss coming down on you and taking credit for the good work you have done. Or, you can chose to accept that you have done a fantastic job, the praise that he is receiving actually is going to you, and that by the laws of karma, everything goes around.

Further to the point, one interesting component of human thinking is that we literally think in pictures. If you close your eyes and just think to yourself something familiar like a beach, or a BBQ, you will automatically see an image.

It is these images that become our reality because the body orients itself towards the thoughts and pictures in our head. When you have a thought, messages travel along nerves to large and tiny muscles in response to the picture in your mind influencing your response to the situation.

This helps explain many phenomena, such as why you can easily walk along a narrow board if it is near the ground but things get a little more difficult if its metres in the air. In this situation we tell ourselves "don't fall", we can't not think about something therefore the mind only sees the falling bit of "don't fall" and the body orients itself accordingly.

So if we think in pictures and our body will orient itself toward those pictures, what's this got to do with stress? Stress is a natural response to things around yourself be it people, places, or things. It's normal and in fact has been an important evolutionary tool to ensure that we comply with Darwins' theory of survival of the fittest.

But on-going stress is not a good thing. It keeps our blood pressure high, raises triglycerides and sugars in the blood, and keeps the mind on tenterhooks, making us jumpy and jittery.

Changing this experience could be as simple as thinking a different way about those things that make us stressed in the first place. Try it today, when you catch yourself thinking negatively or responding in an unhelpful way, see if you can change the picture in your head, think of the positive in the situation or take yourself to another place in your mind. Repeat as often as necessary. At the end of the day you will probably find that dealing with stress is part science and part art.

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