According to happiness expert Mo Gawdat, us Brits like to brag about stress. ‘We carry it like a badge of honour,’ he tells Metro.
He’s speaking to Metro in a video call from his Dubai home, as he sits against a very calming backdrop of houseplants and fish tanks.
Mo, who loves simple pastimes like meditation and gardening, wasn’t always this chilled, though.
When he embarked on his career 30 years ago, the former Chief Business Officer of Google X worked so hard he had everything he could ever want; he was rich, successful and had a beautiful family.
However, he also suffered from persistent stress-related headaches that lasted for weeks on end, and aches and pains all over his body.
Mo, 57, tried to enjoy the trappings of his wealth – once buying two Rolls Royces just because he could – but admits the experience not only left him in pain, but also feeling very empty.
Then, the worst thing he could ever imagine happened: his 21-year-old son Ali died due to medical error during a routine surgical operation.
It was a sudden and preventable loss that broke Mo’s heart and changed his life.
‘Ali truly was an angel. He made everything he touched better and everyone he met happier,’ Mo tells Metro. ‘You couldn’t miss his energy or how he affectionately cared for every being that ever crossed his path.’
The 2014 tragedy spurred Mo to leave the safety of his well-paid job and instead make it his life’s mission to share his son’s message of peace and joy.
Setting himself the task of making #onebillionhappy, Mo created a movement through podcasts and books, which has led him to his latest challenge of helping one million people live as stress-free as possible.
While it might sound impossible, Mo insists it is achieveable through his unique mix of philosophy, brain training and practical advice.
After all, he says, as a nation we are stressed.
We google ‘how to reduce stress’ every ten minutes and nine in ten of us reported experiencing high stress in the past year. Meanwhile, it’s the number one reason for work-related absence, with 17.9 million working days lost in the UK to stress alone every year.
One of the ways you can avoid it is by training your brain to better serve you, explains Mo, who has written the book Unstressable, with Stress Management Consultant Alice Law.
‘The message is that it is not your life that stresses you, it’s the way you deal with it. It’s all about how you reduce the number of stressors and how you increase your abilities and skills. Right?’
To do this, Mo starts by listing three types of thoughts; joyful thoughts, useful thoughts and all other thoughts which he describes as ‘incessant’.
Dealing with incessant thoughts
‘Incessant thinking is the type of thought that occurs over and over; short lived and frequently occurring.’
They are the ‘should haves’ and ‘what ifs’ that can be dark, critical, fearful, regretful or victimising, he explains.
‘The deal is that I can train myself to identify which thoughts are occurring, and only allow useful and joyful thoughts, because incessant thoughts are a complete waste of my life, they don’t lead to anything and they make me feel bad.’
The trick, Mo explains, is to understand the brain as an organ that helps the body survive that has a bias for negativity, rather than something that produces thoughts that must be obeyed.
Take the quiz
According to Mo and Alice, there are four types of stress; mental, physical, emotional and spiritual. You can take the quiz, to find out which problems are causing you the most tension.
Turning a thought into a useful one
‘This is how I took Ali’s departure. Instead of thinking, “I should have gone to another hospital’ for example, I thought about ‘how can I make his essence last?”
And it’s worked as #onebillionhappy and all of my books and podcast is an attempt to make Ali’s essence live beyond my son’s physical presence.
To deal with a negative thought, he advises using the ‘three anchors of sanity’ method, which involves asking ourselves three simple questions; Is it true? What can I do to fix it? And can I accept it and do something to make life better?
Making the most of joyful thoughts
‘This is about not reminding myself all the time that Ali died, but to remind myself all the time that Ali lived. It is the same topic but it gets me to remember all the jokes and games and conversations and the music we played.
‘It is the biggest chunk of the experience of Ali; he lived for 21 and a half years and he [has] died for ten. And believe it or not, I’m eternally grateful for that.’
Any parent will tell you that their worst nightmare would be to lose a child, but Mo is ‘a realist’ and he says the way he dealt with grief was that every time his brain came up with something negative, he would come up with nine positive things.
‘At first our minds resist; they say: “How can there be any good things about losing a child?” But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean I didn’t love my son.
‘Ali died so he didn’t witness the tough parts of life. Ali died asleep so he didn’t feel any pain. Ali died after having lived a life full of love. Ali died and triggered this movement… Nothing is ever all good or ever all bad. And most of the time there is more good than bad.’
Of course, Mo is not immune to stress and continually makes plans to deal with it.
‘I do get into burnout, twice a year, because of the pressure of my mission. I know for a fact that I will approach burnout soon, because publishing books is very stressful. So I will take a break.’
Mo plans to go on a silent retreat for 40 days, where he will recharge his batteries and allow his creative juices to flow. There he will also have what he calls ‘regular meetings’ with his brain to deal with unhelpful and incessant thoughts in favour of new ideas.
Mo adds that he uses equations, algorithms and processes to find peace. In his first book, which he began writing just days after Ali died, Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy, he outlined the Happiness Equation: your happiness is equal to or greater than the difference between the events of your life and your expectations of how life should behave.
In his latest book Unstressable he explains that stress is caused when the sum of the challenges we face are greater than our ability to accurately perceive or deal with them.
And the maths seems to be working. Mo regularly gets messages of thanks on social media, his Slo-mo podcast has had hundreds of thousands of downloads, and he will continue to try to help people beat stress, because Ali tells him too.
‘My son speaks to me frequently in a very clear and unmistakable way; through mathematics and music,’ explains Mo. ‘I know it sounds crazy for someone as logical and scientific as I am, but sometimes science doesn’t explain everything.
‘We are in this mission together. Ali is 100% invested in reducing stress.’
Unstressable: A Practical Guide to Stress-Free Living by Mo Gawdat and Alice Law is out May 9, £16.99.
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