GREAT Morning Everybody!
Since busy season is officially behind us (well, most of us), I want to touch on a topic we ALL experience during the busy times of our lives; S-T-R-E-S-S
“Stress is killing you. It is linked to the 6 leading causes of death: heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, liver cirrhosis, and suicide. 75-90% of all Doctor’s office visits are for stress-related ailments and complaints. Overwhelming amounts of stress weaken your immune system, increase your blood pressure and shorten your lifespan. ” – WebMD
Did you know the top 3 stressful cities in America are Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York?
Experiencing stress within your comfort zone can help you stay focused, energetic, and able to meet new challenges in the workplace. Stress is what keeps you on your toes during a presentation and alert to help prevent accidents or costly mistakes at work. However, when stress exceeds your comfort zone, it stops being helpful and can start causing major damage to your mind and body as well as your job satisfaction.
Personally, overbearing stress just about crippled me a year ago. I was working too much, eating the wrong foods, and not taking care of my body. I was mentally and physically drained. My relationships with others suffered. My relationship with myself suffered even more. I lost sleep, experienced low energy, and was often sick. I was so misaligned that I lost touch with the human experience. As a result, I took 2 months off from all job duties to recover from the damage I was doing to my mind, body and soul!
While we cannot completely rid our lives of stress, we can learn to manage stress and leverage the beast to be more productive, happy, alert, and creative! Exercise, silence (meditation), a daily gratitude practice, sufficient sleep, and social connection are all ways the modern human can turn stress into her companion. Additionally, by focusing on helping others, our thoughts shift from “poor me” to “how can I help you?” By making this shift, we learn to come at all circumstances, events and people with a GIVE mentality, rather than a GET mentality. This is where the magic lies!
As you navigate through the rest of the week, I encourage you to take some time out of your busy day to reflect on everything you are grateful for. Everything that is going right in your life. Help another human. Give your time to those in need. By getting out of our own heads and focusing on all of the awesome things going on around us, feelings of joy, compassion and love replace feelings of stress, angst, and misery. And remember, “you are sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere. You are floating in an empty space in a Universe that goes on forever. Be happy and enjoy the experience.”
Enjoy what comes of today!
With Gratitude,
Rob
