Where does stress really come from?
Let’s go on an adventure to understand what stress really is…
Stress is a feeling. A feeling that comes from thought. That’s it.
However…!
It looks to us, as we go around living our human lives, working in our human jobs, trying to meet the requirements that we believe exist for us day to day… that the feeling of stress comes from what’s around us. From having too much to do. From being under pressure. From being responsible. From not having enough hours in the day. It looks very much like that doesn’t it?
Well it does if we take our experience at face value…
In fact there is a lot of advice about how to avoid stress in the workplace, how to have a good work/life balance so that you don’t get too stressed. The benefits of yoga or meditation to counteract the stresses that come from our 21st century lifestyles. Even what foods to avoid if we don’t want to feel too stressed.
I’d like to propose an alternative point of view for your consideration. The one I started with, which is that stress is a feeling. A feeling that comes from thought. I’d like to go even further to say that it’s a perfectly normal feeling. It’s a feeling that we experience when we get jammed up in a state of busy human mind, trying to work things out, make things better.
Grinding, grinding. Resisting…
When we are doing this, we forget that we are actually perfectly okay. That none of the scenarios that cloud our minds can actually do anything to hurt us. It just looks like they can. The scenarios, like the stress, are part of our perception. And actually, the feeling of stress is our body’s way of letting us know that we have forgotten that we are okay. That we are looking in the direction that we need to control external circumstances in order to be okay, and that just isn’t true. The pain of this feeling lets us know that it’s time to stop looking in that direction and believing that we are not okay. Just like if you touch a hot stove, the pain lets you know to stop touching the hot stove.
When we remember this, we can be grateful to the feeling of stress for having alerted us to the fact that we’d got off track. Soon we will be seeing things differently and remembering that we are okay. We’ll be feeling great, but without any external circumstances having changed. This is the psychological immune system at work. Let it do its magic and you’ll get better. Work harder and harder on changing things so that you don’t experience stress anymore, and you’ll stay in the jammed up state of mind for longer.
Thanks for reading.
Want to know more about how I can help? Drop me a line or give me a call. A successful coaching relationship depends upon a great rapport, so it’s important to talk. I want to get to know you, see inside your world and we can assess how we’d go from there!