What does stress mean | What causes stress?
What does stress mean, stress definition, stress management skills, emotional stress definition, and coping with all this is today’s topic.
For several years, we have heard more and more people complaining that they are stressed or that the century illness is stress. Myself included have often been overwhelmed by stress and not infrequently. For years I nurtured the relationship with stress, until, by chance, I came across an article on this topic and I realized what stress really is.
Table of Contents
What would you do if you won’t feel any fear?
What is stress?
Stress means fear. Of course, fear is also good when we sens any thread because is activating our defence system. Yet we won’t refer to this aspect now.
We feel stressed when our mind perceives a fear. Fear of not arriving on time, fear of not finishing in time, fear of not overcrowding, fear of losing someone in one way or another, fear of failure, fear of losing control over things or situations etc…
Once, someone told me that does not know what stress is and that is never haunted by thoughts or worries before sleep. His philosophy of life was: “if my boss will kick me out of work I will look for another job, if my puppy dies I will buy another one if the house collapses I will build another one and if my wife leaves me I look for another one. The important thing is that I am healthy! ”
In addition to the comic of the speech, I realized that it is a very healthy attitude. Individualist and selfish you might say but, extracting the main idea turns out the attachment is the one that generates fear and subsequent stress. Of course, a complete lack of attachment is not desirable, because otherwise, we will turn into robots or worse, into psychopaths.
The key is detachment. We should all work on the “art” of detachment, start looking at everything in a less biased way, know when to take a break, stop, re-evaluate our priorities, and especially our needs.
Stress should be a powerful driving force, not an obstacle
How do I deal with stress?
I had stress issue since I know myself. Having a look over situations I realised the main cause is the lack of sincerity. Yes! You read right. When we are not sincere with ourself we end up in all sort of stressful situation. Being sincere with yourself can mean a lot of things. Starting with people you are surrounding with, your life partner, your job, your expenses etc. Sometimes we try to pretend what we are not and that leads us to take all sort of decisions which bring us stress, in the end, some other time we settle for less out of fear or commodity. Which again we can find ourselves in all sort of stressful situation.
As I previously mention excessive attachment can also lead to stress eventually, last but not least time management and assessment is also major stress cause. Although I would tie the time of the self-honesty.
What do self-honesty mean?
We live in a world polluted by all sort of influence where we do not even know who we are, what do we really like, what we stand for and what we aim for.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
– Carl Jung
We want the job that x person is having, after we obtain it we discover that was not really how our mind projected it hence the stress is not delaying. We want the hair colours we saw to our favourite celebrity but we do not take into consideration our skin complex might not suit that colour or our hairdresser is not that well trained or experienced to obtain the perfect balayage. The stress reaction will get to you in just a minute. You will start to think that something is wrong with you, or that every time you are aiming for something like bad karma you will fail and so on.
Another example is about time and I will tell you why I said I would tie time management to self-honesty. In most cases, despite we do know deep inside that we will arrive late at the meeting or we won’t have time to finish the project within the agreed time we still snooze our alarm or we decided to take another task in between.
Self-honesty is the first to be consider prior to take any action or decision. We sould always ask our self if what ever wish, desire or will we have do represent us or is others projection on us.
Can we have a life without stress?
In my opinion, it is only possible if you are a monch or if you live in isolation or if you have no desire in life whatsoever. For the rest of us, I don’t see it possible.
As long as we get emotionally involved it is difficult not to face stress at some point. The difference is made by the dose of emotional involvement and by the level of attachment. The more we control these two the less stressed we will feel because any fear we might have will be diminished and any decision will be taken mindfully.
If stress burned calories, I’d be a supermodel.
Stay true to yourself, create your own style!
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4 Responses
Very interesting article! I had never thought of the connection between stress and fear but it makes sense! Thanks for sharing!
Me neither at first but the more I read about the more sense it made. Then I started to analyse my own reactions to stress and what are they triggered by.
This article is so interesting! Love all these ideas
I appreciate that! 🙂