We hear or use the word daily, we feel stressed or have friends who feel stressed. Marketing professionals sell products offering ‘stress relief’ and people jump to buy these products with the hope to have a stress-free life.
What is stress?
Definition from thefreedictionary.com:
“A mentally or emotionally disruptive or upsetting condition occurring in response to adverse external influences and capable of affecting physical health, usually characterized by increased heart rate, a rise in blood pressure, muscular tension, irritability, and depression.”
Let’s face the truth: We feel stressed when we are in a situation we don’t like and we think or feel that we have no control over it. We are the effect of something (lack of money, work overload, antisocial boss etc.) and have a constant stone in our stomach. Even more than that, we cannot sleep, we have no patience with our family, our friends, ourselves.
Stress is getting bigger and bigger and we start living inside of it. Does it sound familiar?
What can you do?
First things first: You should change that situation which causes you stress.
Easy to say it? I know. It is always easier to say it than to do it.
The problem is that when stressed, we feel less and less capable of doing things that would actually help us getting rid of stress. It is a vicious circle, unless you decide to get out of it.
When we are stressed, we feel like not in the mood to meet our friends, we feel like not having time for relaxing, we feel too stressed to do some exercise. And therefore we dig deeper and deeper in the pit called stress…
How can we step out of it?
We have to find activities which make us to forget totally of the stressful situation. Even if only for an hour. Once we manage to forget about it, we managed to get out of it for a short while, not living inside of it any more. And once you are not inside of it, you can see more clearly and you can make rational decisions about changing the situation, not just temporarily forgetting about it.
But in order to change it, we have to step out of it first. To see the whole thing from outside, relaxed and full of energy. Go and do it now! Read a book, dance, run, unwind for an hour! Then you will be able to take the responsible and rational decision to get rid of stress in your life.
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