ARE YOU STRESSED? IF SO IS IT GOOD OR BAD STRESS?

Good Stress is a little stress that motivates us. But when our imagination starts to a write pretty detailed and unhelpful (and usually unrealistic) scenarios it is Bad Stress. Our little demon of an imagination can conjure up some great catastrophes if we have already started to allow our emotional brain to take over. For instance when someone doesn’t arrive when they say they would our imaginative brains believes that they have either had an accident or didn’t really like us enough to turn up; Or if we miss that bus – we’ll be late for work and then we will get the sack so we will lose our house and be destitute!!, or if we don’t always “people please” both at work and at home no one will like us and we will never have friends or relationships – ever !!!
Stress is a feeling of pressure and some stress is inevitable. If we have just been robbed, or someone has died we will naturally be stressed. We would need time to process this at least partially but when we have done this if our beliefs are healthy, we would engage our thinking brain to rationalise things. But the more our imagination gets fired up by our negative beliefs, the more pressure we feel which results in more stress. Prolonged stress can cause changes in our bodies that affect our physical, mental and emotional health and could lead to anxiety, depression and worse. Worse being addiction. We often hear of people having or doing “something” to unwind after a “stressful” day/week at work and this in itself would not be particularly harmful but when it turns into being more than that and a crutch it could be a problem.
So what can we do to keep our stress levels down? Bill Clinton said “Sometimes when people are under stress, they hate to think, and it’s the time when they most need to think” Our imagination can be powerful and fired by the Beliefs we hold about ourselves and the World. i.e If we feel people abandon/leave us we will get stressed by the thought someone else has “left”; If we don’t feel secure we will look for signs that we will be vulnerable/friendless. Even joyful events can be stressful because of the pressure they can bring – Weddings, Holidays, New jobs, new relationships etc. can be difficult if our core beliefs are negative.
One sure way of engaging our thinking brain rather than our imagination is to firstly look at our core beliefs and, if they are negative, work with a trained counsellor to explore them. And when our imagination gets out of hand STOP it in it’s tracks as they are just thoughts and thoughts can be such bullies. We can’t do a lot about real situations that are genuinely stressful but if we firstly work out if the stress is Good or Bad Stress and then by adopting the Mantra “If I can do something about it let me do it but if I can’t let me let it go and be wise enough to know the difference” we can relieve the pressure by taking back control.