Good stress and bad stress: how to manage both
Stress can be good for you.
That’s not something you see written every day but it’s time that we properly discussed stress and how it affects your body.
Stress is a natural part of walking the tightrope of life and it has two types: there is the damaging dis-stress and there is the uplifting eu-stress. That word has the same origins as euphoria.
Walking the tightrope of life requires balance and how you think about this walk has direct affects on your health.
Many of us allow the balance to swing negatively. Our thought process goes into a terminal dive and we fall off the rope, crashing into poor health and even premature death.
A fascinating study was done on people’s perception of stress. Over an eight-year window, 183,000 died prematurely, not from stress, but from the ‘belief that stress was bad for you’. Such belief increased their chance of dying by a whopping 43 per cent.
The science of this survey went on to conclude changing your mindset about stress can change your health.
So how do you change your mindset in order to maintain balance on the tightrope of life not only this school term but happily through the school holidays to come?
It starts with ABC:
A = acknowledge … you are not superhuman – you have limits. Walking the tightrope is a balance and overloading will cause the rope to break.
B = balance … pay attention to the dominant thoughts circling your brain. Irrational thoughts become dis-stressing and destructive. Eu-stress in your life empowers you to feel happy, inspired, challenged and industrious. When stress is no longer controllable the balance shifts into distress. Consider the colouring in link below.
C = cure … take an inventory of the forces at play in your life – relationships, your body’s symptoms, your personality disposition and spirit that dimension that transcends. See your doctor and get regular health checks. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
You can control whether your stress, overloads and become unbalanced distress or whether you live with eu-stress.
Further reading:
Abiola Keller et al., “Does the perception that stress affects health matter? The association with health and mortality,” Health Psychology, September 2012
Jeremy P. Jamieson et al., “Mind over matter: Reappraising arousal improves cardiovascular and cognitive responses to stress,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, August 2012
Michael J. Poulin et al., “Giving to others and the association between stress and mortality,” American Journal of Public Health, September 2013
Fascinating article on the power of colouring in, for adults – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/13/coloring-for-stress_n_5975832.html?utm_hp_ref=tw