With so much focus on the externals, life is lived on the surface.
- Emotional needs are placed second or are not faced honestly.
- Little or no attention is paid to chronic, low level stress
- Relationships settle into routine habit
- Physical activity and contact with nature begin to diminish over time
- Life becomes gradually more sedentary
- There is no higher vision of possibilities thanks to the burden of constant demands and duties form family and work.
- Paying attention to health issues is temporary and intermittent
- For the most part, little is done until actual symptoms appear
This is a shocking list of things we take for granted, or manage to put up with, even though they keep us in sympathetic overdrive.
- Stress follows in the wake of each item on the list, which means that stress is a much bigger issue than we assume.
Putting up with stress and adapting to it are bad strategies. The cells aren’t adapting even when you think you are.
- A good example would be workers of the night shift. Long stretches of night work disrupt the body. As a result, the most obvious detriment is the loss of good sleep.
Stressors aren’t isolated things. A blanket behavior or attitude can spread its bad influences very widely.
Let’s say you are at the airport and find out that your flight has been cancelled. The airline won’t bring another airplane into service but tells you that you must wait five hours until a flight arrives that can accommodate you. With no alternative except to comply with the airlines mistreatment, passengers look passive as they sit and wait. But on the inside many people will react with the following responses. Worry, complaining, pessimism – all are self-defeating
- Worry is self-induced anxiety. It solves nothing and blocks the possibility of dealing with things more positively.
- Complaining increases tension and anger as a display of hostility that encourages other people to act hostile in return.
- Pessimism induces the illusion that a situation is hopeless. It fosters the belief that expecting a bad outcome is always realistic, when in fact, it isn’t.
In any of these behaviors or attitudes, you are fooling yourself that you are adapting to stress. As your body experiences it however, you have become the stressor yourself.
- That is because an external event (cancelled flight) must go through an internal investigation before it triggers the stress response.
Re-source: Re-evaluate
Like a crisis of losing your job, a flight delay belongs in the category of everyday chronic stresses, which means that you have a choice to respond.
- Worry, complaining, and pessimism are unconscious responses.
- People who are stuck in them have become the victims of the old reactions that have become glued in place because the person didn’t reevaluate them.
How do you combat it? detach yourself from the stressor
- Become centered
- Remain active
- Seek positive outlets
- Rely on emotional support
- Escape as you must
These are all positive adaptations as oppose to the negativity of worry, complaining, and pessimism.
- They bring awareness into a situation where falling back on passive acceptance isn’t the right answer.
- Beneath the attitude of “I have to put up with it,” lies stress.
A cancelled flight is usually not fixable by you and it could happen any time without warning.
- Therefore, it fits the two conditions that make stress worse – unpredictability and loss of control.
You have the option of turning the situation around by interpreting it not as bad luck but as a non-stress, to which you respond by doing things you actually want to do like meditating, connecting with a friend, or shopping.
- When you become adept at this turnaround, chronic stress is nipped in the bud.
- You cut short a process that otherwise would have affected your body like Chinese water torture, drip by drip.
craving and resource from “The Healing Self” – A Revolutionary New Plan to Super Charge Your Immunity and Stay Well For Life – by Deepak Chopra and Rudolph E Tanzi