Stress and the Care of the Self

by Cassandra Tribe

Our lives are full of demands: to keep up, to get done, to maintain and to handle emergencies. The older we get the more our lifestyle takes over our lives and all this keeping up and doing takes the majority of our time and energy. We lose our energy. We lose our enjoyment in life. Changing that, bringing back energy, purpose, passion and joy to your life requires that you begin to understand what causes stress and how what you may be doing in your life to relieve it - may actually be adding more.

Stress comes from the loss of control over the details in your life.

With no control you are placed into a position of constantly reacting rather than being able to respond, resolve and move forward.

If you are constantly reacting you are living in a highly charged emotional state.

It may not seem like you are moving through your day at the office being a 'highly charge emotional' person, but if you pay attention to how you respond to new responsibilities and new demands throughout the day you will notice a pattern of very emotional reactions. Feelings of resentment, disappointment, being overwhelmed - these are all emotions.

What is the difference between responding and reacting?

We are driven by emotions. If someone sustains damage to their right brain, they lose the capacity to do anything of their own volition. The emotions of the right brain are where we make our connections between events and can generate motivational energy that is expressed through the organized and logical actions of our left-brain dominated life.
Your emotional reaction comes first. Babies, with no language and or even focus, will respond, even if they are hungry, to an expression of love and comfort over food. You may not even be aware of the emotions that come first because emotions trigger thoughts and it happens faster than we can process in our waking state. You are not capable of efficiency if you are reacting out of fear.
Even faster than our emotional reactions can trigger a thought that we then act on, the thought itself becomes an event that can then trigger another emotion.

We take a small amount of stress and we make it larger.

When you are reacting to new responsibilities and demands and 'getting them done' you are actually destroying your sense of control over your own life. Without evaluating each thing for its needs and then placing it into your schedule where you can best deal with it you lose control over your time and begin to feel overwhelmed. The expectation you then create is that at any moment, anything can happen that will 'take your life away from you.' That is a kind of anticipatory stress that few people can survive.

We do not equally focus on what it takes to maintain the life that is needed to be present in the lifestyle. We lose the connection between our interior lives and our exterior life because we are used to seeing the elements of our lives as separate, as if we were sending off a different version of ourselves to live each hour.

This creates a kind of disjointed feel to our days that not only makes us exist in a state of constant discomfort mentally, physically and emotionally; but also creates even more stress because our ability to respond is damaged due to our unwillingness to allow all of our knowledge and experience to form our response to a need. We create a conflict of longing between the responsibilities of our lives and the life we dream of by seeing only the contradiction between the two and not the similarities.

We become incapable of responding to anything with the totality of our experience that would allow us to be competent and to handle responsibilities without stress because we disallow ourselves from being present in all the areas of our life.

Yoga, meeting with friends, a run - good ideas , but we do them in a way that is not only self-defeating, but can create more stress rather than relieve it.

We treat the things we do (like yoga) as a means to handle stress. While yoga may be a successful way of temporarily relieving stress, we miss the purpose of the experience. Yoga is not about handling stress; it is about developing your body and mind so that the experience of living becomes more integrated. If we only see it as a response to stress then if we are not experiencing 'enough stress' we will be incapable of recognizing the benefits of the yoga session. We will not have that kind of bliss of relaxation and control that comes from the contrast to our stressed and out of control feelings we had when we arrived at the yoga class. We work against ourselves when we choose to do things because of stress.

In planning out the week we set our yoga class on Thursday because we expect to be stressed by Thursday creating the opportunity for a self-fulfilling prophecy to occur. Never underestimate the power of your subconscious. If we approach it that on Thursday we have blocked out time for yoga because it is a benefit to who we are, then it will not matter if we are stressed or not. It also does not exist in conflict with our lives; we do not view the hour or two set aside as 'the only time I get a break.' Yoga and its benefits become a part of our lives that washes its effect over every moment.

The key to looking at the things in your life is to remember that the goal in your schedule is to stop reacting and start responding. Only you live your life. Mostly we live in a state of constant reaction to outside things - from emergencies, to demands, to deadlines to other people's perception and judgment of our actions. We react without thinking if our reaction (while perhaps filling an immediate and created need) benefits the totality of our lives or even is the best response that we can give.

You cannot acknowledge the totality of your life unless you can accept that every moment is connected to every other moment - from the job you do, to the love you have, to the passion that drives you they are all connected.

Outside sources that place demands on us do not know or recognize the totality of our life. If you need them to do something for you, then you are focused on getting that one thing and not weighing and balancing how it fits into the totality of their life. Maintaining the integrity of the schedule you created is essential; integrity comes from an integration of all the aspects of your life.

You have to guide your life.

You need to begin to view everything 'new' that comes into your schedule as a part of your total life. Does it really demand that it disrupt your plans and be taken care of now? You need to begin to know how each element of your life effects you. A prime example of this is work, most of us - if we have been in a job for a while - have wandered away from our job descriptions but never made any adjustments or effort to accommodate this through salary, recognition of responsibilities, or an acknowledgment of how this impacts our lives outside of work.

Here are 7 ways to begin regaining control of your life and relieving stress.

1. Do the Mandala Key Exercise. This will start you on your way to understanding how each element in your life connects to the totality.

2. Make a schedule in which you block out the time you need to spend on each of the elements of your life.

4. Respect the integrity of your schedule.

5. Begin to learn to respect your time.

6. Plan ahead for time to be with yourself, your friends or family and let nothing intrude on that time.

7. Sit and think when your week really begins and end. Find what day is the end of your week and plan your schedule for the next week on that day.

The ideas are simple but it does take a commitment and effort to begin to unravel the life that has been built around you and make the life you want.

(To read this full article go here.)

About the Author

Cassandra Tribe is the author of 'Eat not the Heart: How to live without losing your life.' A practical guide to relieving stress and changing your life. 'Stress and the Care of the Self' is part of a free series of articles written to help people learn to overcome stress and discover happiness through regaining control of their lives.