"Oh, I'm stressed..."

In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, "Oh, I'm stressed!". Guess what? You are too. The whole world is stressed out on a daily basis. Long ago, when the world made sense, we only had to stress on occasion, like when being chased by a lion. That sounds pretty stressful, but it wasn’t a daily occurrence and the biological gift of adrenaline is provided to get us the hell out of dodge (hopefully). Fast forward to today and people are getting that same rush of stress and adrenaline, only now it comes from all angles all day long. This keeps our body flooded with chemicals, which were only meant for sporadic emergency situations. Of course this leads to medical problems and worsens your health. That’s why you are always hearing doctors, and heart attack patients, singing the praise of de-stressing. It is easy to understand the importance of keeping our stress levels down when we are trying to assist our bodies in healing themselves. However, figuring out how to keep stress at bay is a well kept secret, untapped by most. A lot of people I come across or read about suggest meditation as their number one stress reducer. I agree meditation is fantastic and the benefits are endless, but for me, sitting somewhere for that long is total torture! I have so much going on in my head and so much on my mental to do lit that the only thing I can think about while meditating is how much time I am wasting sitting there! A challenge for a later date.

Another technique I have gathered from my Buddhist readings is the importance of being present. One of the prevalent lessons was that we expend many of our thoughts focusing on past guilt and future what ifs; not a lot of time in the present. I encourage you to spend a day analyzing your thoughts. Calculate how many of your thoughts are actually based in the presence, completely unattached to the past or the future. I bet you will be as shocked as I was in the end. I found that I was spending most of my day glazed over, internally agonizing over things that I had done in the past that might catch up to me (like paying a bill late) or things that might go wrong in the future (like my health, job, life!). It is no wonder I am riddled with stress, I haven’t been taking any time to appreciate what is right in front of my face. I am spending more time worried about what has already happened or what will happen and no time on what is happening! How crazy is that?! The teachings go on to point out that if we focus on the present and simply make the best possible decisions in each minute that we can alleviate the need for worrying about the future; everything will work out because of our careful actions and we will be eliminating things to feel guilty about in the future. Additionally, to remedy guilt that currently exists, it is important to remember that we are no longer the people we were when we committed the act in question. How can we possibly hold our present selves captive and responsible for something past us did? We can’t. Thus, this is meant to eradicate the symptoms of stress; guilt and worry. It is a solid bit of advice and I try and incorporate it into my life. I still find my mind wandering back and forth through time often, but it is something I am now aware of. I don’t know how important to our cause de-stressing is, but I know that I have seen the effects of stress, or lack thereof, on family members suffering with cancer. My Grandma was determined to live and had a positive attitude the whole time…she has been a cancer survivor for over 10 years now. The mind controls everything. I don’t thinks this means that we can use visualization to get rid of the cyst, but it might help in conjunction with a more positive outlook, less stress, a healthy lifestyle, and more time spent laughing in the moment.