Fortune for the day – “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.” – Goethe
For the last week or so, I have been feeling a tad scattered. Historically, spring time has always been a particularly busy time for us. Late winter/early springtime brings with it an uptick in sports and activities, three family birthdays, Valentines, Easter, two different spring breaks, taxes and the propensity to take on spring cleaning/house projects/small spruce-ups that always seem to have the tendency to roll into much larger, more complicated and doubly expensive projects. All of these things swirl around me, causing my agitation and irritation levels to uptick on a daily basis. So this morning, as an oven repairman and a door contractor were churning around my house, and turning my energy (and my dogs’ sensitivities) into a more frenetic mess, I decided to look up on the internet, ways to feel less frazzled.
Nothing I read wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before. No earth shattering advice came my way. The usual stuff: Stay in the moment. Focus on your breathing. Think of things you are grateful about. Simplify where you can. Take some moments in nature. However, there was one interesting fact that I read. This fact is, that supposedly stress is really only harmful to you, if believe that it is harmful. This is from an article by Louise Stranger, writing for Thrive Global:
“In the Ted Talk, McGonigal discusses a longitudinal study of 30,000 adults on their experiences with stress. The participants who believed that stress is harmful to their health saw a 43% increase of dying from stress-related issues. However, this only held true if the participants believed stress was bad for them.
Conversely, the participants who experienced high stress but did not believe it was bad for their health saw the lowest risk of death in the study from stress-related causes. As such, she reveals a key insight about stress: it doesn’t have to play a negative role in our lives if we don’t let it. A typical stress response is a pounding heart, sweaty palms and shallow breath. She points out that’s totally okay – not the harbinger of chronic disease. In fact, her research found that when participants in the study viewed their stress response as helpful, blood vessels in the body remained relaxed.”
My eldest son swears that he appreciates feeling stress. He believes that it makes him perform better and he likes the rush of adrenaline. I don’t necessarily agree with my son, but I do believe that stress is generally just part of modern day living. And if we want to believe this article, we certainly don’t want to add to our stress by stressing about being stressed. It seems that if we can find a way to accept our stress, and find reliable, comforting ways to deal with it, maybe our stress becomes less of a frightful monster, and more of an annoyance which we can live with, and perhaps maybe even on our best days, giggle about.
