STRESS TEST

We live in times when a day can literally run non-stop 24/7. With employers thinking nothing of texting us in the middle of the night; our work day and the rest of our lives are now instantly accessible to anyone we interact with anywhere in the world.

On top of this, the ‘small stuff’, those little detours and unexpected glitches that turn up each day, just seem to pile on more for us to manage in our already overloaded day.

With so many demands on our time and energy, most of us find ourselves in a kind of endless marathon throughout our day. This already makes most of us unable to give our full attention to anything.

I wonder whether we might reach the point where even a small addition to our stress and the demands made upon us, will push us beyond our personal ‘tipping point’.

If you, like me are reaching your tipping point, I’d say it is time to consider that a little bit of reflection might do us both some good. A small step in the right direction may be for us to consciously stop, look up from our texts, or put down our phones for a minute. 

Were we to take even a few seconds, we might metaphorically take the pulse rate of our day. I believe we could benefit from such a conscious pause. It might enable us to figure out just how tense and stressful we have become. It might give us just enough of a break so that we might consciously regroup and make the rest of the day better.

Otherwise it might soon be you or me yelling at the ‘barista’ at the coffee shop that our well-being is in their hands, because we have somehow decided that, that ‘perfect’ coffee will either make or break our day.

Many of us today, myself included, believe age is largely a state of mind. We often hear that soon people will regularly live to be a 100 years or older.

Personally however, I am sceptical that we are prepared physically and emotionally to experience a life that is both long and good. I am convinced that any advances in longevity won’t apply to those of us who don’t find an effective way to reduce our critically elevated levels of stress.

Our ‘sandwich’ generation, has many of us trying to do things for our parents and our children at the same time. This has made life even more of a relay race, when added to a 24/7 communication and work cycle.

We can only imagine the steady progression over time with which our parents and grandparent’s generations marked the passage of time in their lives. The ways other generations used to ‘wind down’, of necessity, needs to be different from what might work for us today.

Teaching yourself the survival skills we need will come to us, when we consciously learn more about what we need to do to maintain our sense of balance and perspective. This will take self-mastery and self-knowledge, since each of us responds to stress differently.

How we recognize stress and how we teach ourselves to decrease and diffuse it, has become crucial, if we expect to live a longer life that is also a healthy one.