A lecturer was giving a lecture to his student on stress management. He raised a glass of water and asked the audience, “How heavy do you think this glass of water is?”The students’ answers ranged from 20g to 500gm.
It is the exact same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, we will not be able to carry on, the burden becoming increasingly heavier.
What you have to do is to put the glass down, rest for a while before holding it up again. We have to put down the burden periodically, so that we can be refreshed and are able to carry on.
So today at some point - put the burden down. You can pick it up again tomorrow if you need to. Whatever burdens you are having now on your shoulders, let it down for a moment if you can. Pick it up again later when you have rested.
Recently I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, and we were talking about Starbucks reward cards. She had been poorly of late, and I offered to go and get the coffees and take them round to hers. “Swing by” she said “and pick up my reward card, so that I can get the points”.
Now if you didn’t know, Starbucks register each visit you make, and you build up the points until you qualify for a Gold card status. Not really sure what you get exactly, but my friend is close to the gold status and is keen to get there sooner rather than later.
I knew there was no point in arguing about it (she can be very persuasive!) although I did protest. However, after getting the coffees, the conversation continued and I begun to feel quite agitated, mostly by the need to manage yet another ‘loyalty’ card. In fact, I then went onto to rant about how I now seemed to spend more time carrying out administrative duties for company’s services than I have ever had to do in the past.
It was the look on her face that told me I was over reacting, and indeed I was, at which point I apologised and parked the topic.
Fortunately, my friend knows me very well.
But the point is, I was getting really agitated over something that was in fact very unimportant, so I knew that there was something much bigger going on, as I rarely get that cross these days. J
I wonder how long I had been carrying around that burden!
So, what sort of issues cause your blood to boil, your heart to sink, your tummy to churn?
In a recent poll I carried out, https://www.facebook.com/#!/KimSearleHypnotherapy, money seems to be the biggest stressor for people followed closely by time, or both and made me think about what causes stress.
Major Events
Everyone understands (and is probably more sympathetic) if stress is brought about by external events such as bereavement, loss of a job, divorce, or illness. These events can wreak havoc in our life and threaten everything we have come to believe about ourselves and our lives. For most people there is usually plenty of support available from loved ones, and society to help us through this difficult time. These events tend to occur infrequently, and as a result, long term health effects can be minimal.
Daily Hassles
But could it be the daily hassles that cause us stress?
You know the sort of thing, the daily, minor irritations such as misplacing your car keys when you are in a hurry, traffic jams, minor arguments with family/colleagues, lack of sleep, job dissatisfaction, time pressures, money etc. Research by Lazarus and Folkman (1984), at the University of California, indicated that it was these daily hassles rather than the major life events that affected us the most.
Any constant, daily frustration caused by these hassles can result in our body frequently responding to what it sees as a threat, by releasing doses of adrenaline to help us react with the fight or flight1 response. Because these events occur so regularly, they become a natural part of our life, the constant release of Adrenaline which is not then used, can overtime, potentially begin to undermine our health. (Regular coughs and colds, headaches, poorly tummy etc).
And yet for many people even these daily hassles, are something that most people have learnt to live with, and do not experience any side effects.
Internal Stressors
Internal stressors, however, are more insidious stressors. These are caused by our own internal processes, and invariably we are completely unaware of their presence and effect.
These internal stressors are like the programmes on your computer, happily running away in the background, and you only know they are there, when you experience difficulties. They can cause us to be have in ways that perversely lead to stress. Expectations of how we should be behave, finding that we 'believe' we can't do some things or constantly pleasing everyone, but ourselves. As we nearer Christmas, these internal stressors can become even louder when everyone has expectations of what a good Christmas should be, the need to make the whole event perfect for everyone or just endeavouring to keep everyone happy.
These internal stressors are more difficult to identify and then address, as it calls for some honesty in what we ask our selves and this is where hypnotherapists can help. We can find out if there are any internal programmes running that may be creating even more hassle for you than necessary, for example:-
· Our own expectations of how things should be (particularly at Christmas)
· Our belief in our abilities
· Perfectionism
· People pleasing
· Low self esteem
· Believing we have no control
· Believing everyone else is better than we are
· Lack of self belief
· Lack of confidence
We can all recognise the major events in our lives that cause stress and have access to extra support. We can even recognise when the day to day hassles are beginning to be an issue and the various distraction techniques we employ help keep us sane.
NB: Stress is an individualistic, subjective experience and therefore what one person finds stressful another may not.
1 flight or fight - http://psychology.about.com/od/findex/g/fight-or-flight-response.htm
