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National Stress Awareness Day 2024
It seems that the first Wednesday of November is National Stress Awareness Day, so here we are.
Can’t Handle
God will never give you anything you can’t handle, so don’t stress. ~Kelly Clarkson
We’ve all been there.
Things stack up like death by a thousand cuts.
Any one thing is relatively insignificant, but in aggregate it’s an avalanche of rusty razor blades.
That’s stress and it sucks egregiously.
The point of stress is to motivate one to stop doing the stressful thing before something breaks.
Hunter-gatherers could balance the discomfort of picking berries against the hassle of being hungry later.
We usually don’t have that luxury. We live sedentary, modern lives, leaving us to stew in whatever is aggravating us.
This can have short-term effects such as putting us in bad moods or long-term effects such as developing ulcers, hypertension or neuroses.
You don’t have to succumb to the suck.
Stress is like the heat of a stovetop burner. Your natural reaction is to pull back. If you reach forward, you will get burnt.
Stress is a warning.
Sometimes you can push through it for a specific goal. That’s fine as long as the reward is worth the peril.
Keeping on keeping on until something breaks is just stupid.
Don’t do that.
Be kind.
Rewind.
Stress is a signal.
Don’t speed through that red light. Actually stop and give yourself a rest.
Be Aware To Take Care
National Stress Awareness Day – Matters of The Mind
“Easier said than done, Rob.“, I hear you say.
Well, yeah. If it was easy to shuck off all the stress we accumulate from work and daily randomonium exposure, it wouldn’t really be all that stressful now would it?
Never fear, it’s not as hard as it seems either.
Take a nap.
When you get up, take a walk.
When you get back, take a shower.
When you get dry, take a moment to do something pleasant.
It’s actually as simple as that.
Naturally, life will try to get in the way. Stuff needs doing. Kids needs minding. Dinner needs cooking, etc.
Another stress-reliever is having friends or relatives handy to share the load.
Let people know how you’re feeling. Good chance they are feeling the same way or have done some time in the past.
Load sharing is a wonderful form of stress relief. Just knowing somebody is concerned for you can lighten the load quite a bit.
Plow
In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive. ~Lee Iacocca
Well, this is the part where I’m supposed to talk about writing in some way that’s related to the overall theme of the post.
Sadly, the thing about stress is that it tends to cork my creative juices. I’m only written up to partway through December 6th.
This is not acceptable.
Be that as it may, I’m stressed rather severely and I have a lot of overdue work.
Naturally, that makes me stressed and the cycle accelerates.
That’s frustrating and it’s not helping me to get my work stuff or my writing done.
Nevertheless, all bad things come to an end. I’m not sure exactly when that is, but the signs are there.
Guess we’ll see what happens to change things up. It won’t be much longer now…
Don’t worry. Be happy. Stress sucks, so relieve yourself of it however you can as soon as you can.