Stress

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No matter where I am, it seems like people are stressed.
Between work and family ~ sports or fitness and social activities ~ most of us seem overcommitted and feel the results of that overcommitment as stress in some form.

Another source of stress are those things in our lives that have tension associated with it, like exams. But also things like changing jobs or moving house ~ and even the things we celebrate like births, birthdays and weddings can bring tension into our lives, and with the tension stress usually lurks right around the corner.

When we are stressed, we may be feeling hyper (even when on decaf). Or perhaps we discover that we don’t feel rested as we wake up ~ either because we have had trouble sleeping, or because we didn’t allow ourselves enough time to sleep; or because even in our sleep we were too busy keeping tabs on everything we committed to do during the daytime hours...

Our system, body, mind and spirit, were designed to handle a certain amount of tension, and the resulting stress. So when we feel ‘stressed out’ because of a specific event in our lives ~ something that is part of our lives now, but will not be after the event has happened ~ this is unlikely to cause us any problems.

But when stress becomes a fixture in our lives; when it is always there to some extend ~ we may find that at some point our system of mind, body and spirit start to protest this continuous tension.

This protest may start out pretty innocuous. For instance as a cold that is hard to shake, but that doesn’t give a whole lot more discomfort other than that we keep ‘sniffling’. Nevertheless, when something like that happens, it is a tell-tale sign that our system is under stress. So much so that it has trouble cleansing the body and get rid of the cold...

The wise thing, or maybe even enlightened thing to do when something like this happens, would be to step back, and take a look at what is happening in our lives. After all, our body is telling us it is literally ‘sick of it’.
So we may ask ourselves; are we burning the candle on both ends, overcommitting ourselves? Is the stress we feel due to a specific event, or is it something that we have been living with for so long already that we don’t even notice it anymore? Until we get something like a cold, that is...

On the other hand, it is just a cold. Nothing serious, so why cancel those appointments? And even though it is stressing us out, we keep pushing on!
Someone has to do it.

It does make me wonder at times what would need to happen to us in order to re-evaluate our lives to the point where we can begin to remember what life was like before stress was our continuous companion...
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