Isn’t the cooler weather wonderful?! After such a hot summer, it’s like diving into a cool, refreshing, clear pool of water.
How’s everyone doing? This was a tough weekend. I’m feeling that universal, low-lying, but seeping in kind of stress in the air, like we had when the pandemic first started. And when you have that kind of permeance of uneasiness, swirling all around you, it sort of punctuates your own individual stresses, doesn’t it? Whatever helps you with stress and concern in your mind and in your body and in your spirit, is your own “toolbox.” Don’t forget to open your toolbox, and to use and to utilize your own helpful “tools.” (exercise, prayer, meditation, music, friendships, nature, healthy, wholesome meals, crying, release, easy chores, funny shows etc.) Also, use this as a time to find and to test new, healthy tools to help ease your stress during eventful times.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.” – Carl Sagan
“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” – Mother Teresa
“For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”– bell hooks
“Humanity is good. Some people are terrible and broken, but humanity is good. I believe that.” – Hank Green
“We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.” – Albert Einstein
“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” – Mahatma Ghandi
“During bad circumstances, which is the human inheritance, you must decide not to be reduced. You have your humanity, and you must not allow anything to reduce that. We are obliged to know we are global citizens. Disasters remind us we are world citizens, whether we like it or not.” – Maya Angelou
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Recently I wrote that I keep a list of daily activities that I have decided are “must dos” for me to feel right in my world. I take into deep consideration as to what I add, and what I subtract from my list of daily essential activities. Below is something that I recently added to my “daily essentials.” If you are like me, and like so many others, you carry the bulk of your stress in your neck and in your shoulders. The following exercises were recommended to me by a medical professional. This video is short, easy to do, and invigorating. Give it a try.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Do you remember when you were in high school or in college, and you looked around, and you found yourself super stressed by all the people around you who seemed to have their whole lives already mapped out with carefully crafted, detailed precision? Do you remember those times when it felt like everyone around you was walking around with their vital mission plans in their backpacks and they were just chomping at the bits to get to graduation, and to get on with it? And you were thinking to yourself, “Oh my gosh, do I even have a backpack?” Maybe you were one of those people who came out of the womb holding your solid lifetime plan in your hand, but I was not. I was an achiever, yes. I did well in school. When I fell in love with my husband, I knew that I wanted to share my life with him. I knew that I wanted a big family, but all of the rest of it, seemed more like a hazy outline. (and honestly, sometimes it still does) When I was young, I was caught up in “the shoulds” and people pleasing and towing the line and “achieving”. I followed the script.
I bring this up because lately I feel like I am back in that scene with the backpacks, except now it’s all a bunch of middle-aged empty nesters, carrying weathered, higher quality backpacks, and it appears as if they all have been given their next ironclad missions. They can’t get their For Sale signs out fast enough. The moving trucks pull up, right after the graduation parties. And here I am, back to, “Oh my gosh, do I even have a backpack?” I had a text conversation with my sister-in-law the other day that looked something like this (and for context, our youngest child graduated from high school last year, her youngest child graduated last week):
Me (thinking she would need comfort and reassurance): Congratulations!! Don’t worry, empty nest is really nice and simple and peaceful. You do less dishes and less laundry.
SIL: Yay!! We are putting our house up in the spring, moving across the country to our dream town in our favorite state, we’re going to rent first and then we are going to buy. We’ve been dreaming about this very moment for years, and . . . . . . (on and on and on with precision detail and excitement). And then she asked, What are your plans for empty nest?
Me: Well, um, we don’t have our plans quite sewn down just yet. We’re still figuring it out, but we are having fun doing the figuring out part.
SIL: As long as you are having fun, you are doing it right.
My sister-in-law is correct. Having fun with the process is important, but I still feel envious of my fellow empty nesters, purposefully walking around (sometimes running around) with their seemingly long thought-out, highly anticipated master plans. The one thing that I know for sure, during this next stage of my life, is that I won’t be stuck on “the shoulds” nor “the script.” When I reflect back on my life, the decisions that I made when I followed my heart and my intuition, have brought me to my favorite people, and my most memorable places, and my most treasured activities (such as starting this blog). Perhaps, my own master plans are never meant to be in step-by-step form, held in a handy backpack. Perhaps the compass in my heart is really all that I have ever needed, and it will take me everywhere that I need to go. I just need to trust this fact, let go of my comparison anxiety, and let the needle steady and point me in the direction which always seems to lead to my most authentic, deepest self and my most profound experiences, often in the most spontaneous of ways.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
My youngest son is taking a stress management course this summer which is required for his business degree. He was telling me that in these early days of the course they are going over the facts of just how bad stress is for your health – physical and mental. As someone who has had many different kinds of pets over the years, it is always the common mantra in animal wellness, that the animal must avoid stress in order to remain happy and healthy. Stressed birds pluck out their feathers. Stressed fish sink to the bottom of the tank in despair. (And remember, we are animals, too.) While the stress/health connection is an obvious truth, the idea of how just how bad stress is for one’s health, honestly, just has the tendency to stress me even more.
A big component to stress is overthinking. So, you know, don’t overthink. Ha! Don’t think about elephants. Don’t think about lemons in your mouth. Are your lips puckered? I am an overthinker. If you are one of my regular readers, you probably have already gotten that sense about me. But overthinking is not good nor helpful. It is a major component in fueling stress. So, how do we stop overthinking?
As with any problem in life, the only way to get a hold of overthinking, is to become aware of it to begin with. That’s when our feelings and sensations come in handy. If you are feeling stressed, why are you feeling stressed? Chances are, if you aren’t right in the middle of a stressful crisis that actually requires action on your part, and yet, you are still feeling stressed, you are overthinking about it. Get curious about yourself. Become aware. Awareness is the first step to any meaningful change in your life. If you become a highly aware person, you will feel more control in your life, and more control equals less stress.
Once you notice your own stressful rumination, lead that rumination and overthinking to problem solving. If it turns out that you are stressed about a problem that you have no control over, then lead yourself to think about how you can take steps to change your attitude about the problem. Challenge the thoughts that are popping into, and swirling around your mind about the problem. We have a tendency to be dramatic and to use black/white thinking when we are stressed. We have a tendency to use absolutes like “Life will NEVER get better!” when we are overthinking. Look at your statements from a detached point of view. Laugh at yourself. Tell yourself how over-the-top and ridiculous that you are sounding, like you would say to a good friend if they were saying some of the theatrical statements that are dancing around in your head, out loud. Roll your eyes at yourself. Keep it all in perspective.
Many people have success with giving themselves a certain time period of the day, when they will allow themselves to ruminate. They give themselves an “overthinking block of time.” The key here is to put an absolute time limit on this overthinking period. What often happens is that when you give yourself the “comfort” of having a time block when you will allow yourself to overthink and ruminate, by the time that you actually get to that said period in the day, you no longer feel the urge nor the need to do it any longer. Sometimes, by that time, the problem has already been solved.
Finally, to avoid the stress of overthinking, deploy mindfulness techniques, like focusing on your breathing patterns, or distract yourself with activities like the alphabet of gratitude. I am grateful for Apples, Breakfast, Candy (hmmm, I am noticing a theme here. If you can’t concentrate on simple one-word things, while going through the alphabet of gratitude, go into more detail for each item that you are thankful for, such as, “I am grateful for fabulous Breakfast Buffets that include things like savory bacon and chocolate muffins and eggs however I want them cooked, with delightful spicy sauces to put on anything and everything” . . . you get the picture.)
Stress is an unavoidable fact of life, but overthinking about your stress is avoidable and curable. Overthinking does nothing to alleviate stress. In fact, overthinking exacerbates stress. Don’t worry about how much you stress. Don’t overthink about how much stress that you have in your life. Uh oh. Right now might be the time to play the elaborate alphabet of gratitude game. A, B, C . . . . .
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
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.
