I’ve decided to start a separate Tuesday posting that has nothing to do with the web or tech, I call it Techless Tuesday, and the topic of todays Techless Tuesday is something I’ve been researching for about 3 weeks now…Stress.
So what is Stress and what can we do about it.
It’s all pretty standard question but what I’ve discovered about stress really amazed me , not just about how little I knew but also how dangerous it really is. I learnt how pervasive stress can become in our lives and how if left uncheck it would invade not just our health, but our relationships with our spouses as well. Stress wasn’t some concept, stress was something real that had a real impact.
Today is the first part of a series of post I intend to do about stress and I’d thought I clear up a misconception that most people have about stress namely that the stress is all in your mind something conjured up by your thoughts, and the way to avoid stress is to ‘think happy thoughts’ and ‘take it easy’. Research however points in a different direction, suggesting that stress isn’t just psychological (caused by the mind) but physiological (caused by the body)
Stress isn’t just Mental
I was always under the impression that stress affected different people differently, but most importantly I believe (quite strongly) that stress was self-imposed by people who just couldn’t let go of things or insisted on being perfect.People who were hard-asses for the sake of being hard-asses or just preferred to be Obsessive and Compulsive.
The truth is that stress has a physiological component (brain structure, body chemistry etc) as well as a psychological one, and certain people are just genetically and biologically prone to more stress than others. Telling these people to ‘take it easy’, or to ‘forget about it‘ is like telling someone to stop being diabetic. There is nothing mentally you can do to stop being diabetic, just like there’s nothing these people can do about being stressed.
Consider people with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) or even Autistic children, left unchecked without proper therapy or medication these children would be living extremely intolerably stressful lives. ADHD and Autism aren’t things conjured up by the mind, neither are they psychological, they’re extreme cases of physiological conditions that impact people. The same can be said for a host of other issues, that impact the delicate balance of chemistry your brain juggles everyday, if the balance isn’t right you become irritable or easily agitated, you lose focus, you lose motivation, you have trouble learning and even cognitive ability.
Most cases aren’t so severe, so people don’t realize it, and therefore think it’s normal blaming irritability and mood swings on psychological conditions rather than physiological ones.