Category Archives for stress

Why Do People Argue

People argue about silly little things that, in the big picture, really do not matter. Why? Join the conversation. Tell us what you argue about but what really bothers you by leaving a comment below. Who knows how many people your sharing will help?

Stress: Is Stress Inevitable

Stress seems to be present in all areas of life. Even people at play push themselves so far and so hard that their joy fills with stress.

People stride to do their best. Or more likely, to do whatever it is better than the next guy.

Hmm. Now there you have the paradigm that says stress is inevitable in life.

But does that have to be everyone’s truth?

How do you have to run your head to see circumstances and events as stressful for you? You have to be someone who interprets events in a negative way. Rather than seeing obstacles as stepping stones that lead you through life you would have to view blocks as insurmountable objects.

For people who see that proverbial glass as half empty it never occurs to them to go over, around or through the obstacle. They see it as something that stops them. Period.

When they see life that way they fail to see the solutions that abound. Absolutely every problem that comes into your life comes with solutions – always. But you cannot possibly see them or be aware of them unless you allow yourself to resolve your situation.

That choice involves feeling worthy and deserving of good things. Yet chances are that people who see the dark side of everything likely have low self esteem, do not feel worthy or deserving of good things.

Since they have a poor self image they project their self-defeating attitude toward others and to events. For them, life is a series of stressors. Their reality says stress is everywhere. They cannot escape its grasp.

Their habit of interpreting events has them looking for what is missing or what is wrong in every situation. Their automatic response is in the direction of not feeling good, not enjoying life, not succeeding without struggle.

In fact, when things go right in their world they nervously wait for the sky to fall! Obviously they create what they think about. And then say, “See I told you so!”

Is their reality yours?

You get to choose your reality. When you love yourself you allow good things to come to you. You see the good in the nasty situation. You see the lesson in the painful circumstance.

That kind of attitude will not see stress everywhere. That mindset will not go in the direction of pain. That habit of thinking will see far fewer stressors in their lives.

The bottom line is you always see what you expect to see.  And you always see what you accept to see. If you do not accept certain possibilities (like stressors everywhere) then you will not see that possibility even if others do.

Exercise Your Brain To Improve It

Your brain works like a muscle, the more you use it the better it works.  The less you challenge yourself with games, reading conversation or problems that require thinking in new ways, the faster your brain will deteriorate.

You get to choose whether you want to stay alive in your body or become a shell, a body with “no one at home.”

My knowledge about brain power comes from my first hand experience. Back in the late 1990s I suffered a closed head injury. The repeated hitting that rocked my brain back and forth across the bony skull caused many neuronal connections to break.

Thank goodness I did not buy into the paradigm of the psychologists and neurologists who said I had a short window of time to take action before my brain would shut down and any hope of healing would be lost forever.

Can you imagine telling someone with a brain injury they had to act immediately or lose their chance and face uncertain deterioration?  Personally I think there should be a law against stealing someone’s hope regardless of the situation. The bottom line is that nothing is impossible.

I knew that lots of information sat in my brain, info I could not access – yet. I could have believed I never would reach all those nooks and crannies within again. But I chose a different paradigm.

I knew I could create new pathways to reach the info already inside my brain. One way I chose to create those new pathways was to play video games. I played games on our computer for as long as I could. Unfortunately my eyes did not work right and sitting at the computer caused excruciating headaches and pain in my eyes.

The good news is what I did, all those hours at the computer, worked. My brain re-designed itself and I did recover most of my mental powers. Okay, sometimes I feel myself thinking and knowing I am not operating at the same level I once did – and not getting exactly the same caliber of results. But I am doing way better than the doctors told me I would.

Why share all this with you? Every year more than four million people suffer closed head injuries and likely hear the same message I did – learn to live with it because this is a good as it gets.

After the injury I learned a neurosurgeon considers the operation a success when the patient survives the surgery with no thought to quality of life. No, I am sure not all brain surgeons think that way. But the ones in my world did.

What I want you to know is no matter how long it has been since your injury (or the injury of someone you know and care about), it is never too late to awaken the sleeping cells in that brain and get it working again.

Video games, physical exercise that demands both large scale coordination and small scale activity too, are very helpful. Reading and writing may be challenging for a time. As soon as possible return to using those skills too. Make sure the eyes track properly to avoid eye-headache issues.

Most important, believe in yourself. You can heal if you really want to. Healing does not mean you will be how you once were. Healing means you accept yourself as you are now and be the very best you can be exactly as you are now.

Stress Relief: Your Environment Reflects Your Level of Stress

Everything comes into your life for a beautiful and Divine reason – everything and everyone. The people, or pets, and even your plants all have something to teach or share with you.

When you realize there are no accidents and everything and everyone who enters your life is supposed to be there (yes, even those who cause crummy to horrible experiences) your stress level begins to fall.

Are you kidding? Not at all. Stop and notice…

How do your plants grow? Do they grow? Do they look the way you expect them to?
Many years ago scientists monitored plants while shrimp were being boiled alive nearby. The plants showed stress.

I know my plants do better when I take the time to talk to them. And I most definitely know that trees communicate with me as do stones.

Hey, that is why I am able to make such beautiful sculptures and carvings. Basically the stones or wood tell me what to make. After all, the finished form lies within. All I need to do is remove the excess wood and know where to place which stones!

No, I do not hear words coming from seemingly inanimate objects. I feel their energy. Even rocks have very distinctive energies. You will feel them when you allow yourself to do so.

You will also see the energy that surrounds things you think have no living energy. Auras are energy fields that can actually be measured with manmade instruments and scales.

There is a whole world out there most people never see because they do not believe such things can be real. They fail to accept other dimensions and possibilities into their world.

Back to the subject of plants and how we learn from them.

If you grow plants, either indoors or outside, observe how they fare and under what conditions they thrive or wither away. Pay attention to the conditions under which they are living when you look at their vitality.

How does what happens with your plants reflect what is going on inside you? When your stress level rises do your plants need more water because they sense your dehydration?

Do they manage to make it through long periods of drought when you forget to water them – the way you make it through tough times?

Ever seen a plant come back to life when you were preparing to throw it away?
How vulnerable are your plants to insects or fungi and parasites? How about you? Is there a correlation between the health of your plants and your own health?

The connection with pets is pretty clear. So “getting” that everything in your environment impacts and is impacted by you takes stepping outside your box.

You may know some people who can’t wear watches. The watches explode or stop running. Many of my friends (and me too, dang!) experience sensitive electronics, especially computers. Others can do things on my computer with no problem that I cannot do at all when my energy goes out of whack.

You don’t need to judge anything. Just take notice of how things, living or not, in your environment seem to react to you and how you feel.

Stressed Women Over 40

Women over forty often find stress closing in from all areas of the lives.

For those who were stay-at-home moms or homemakers the work place is unfamiliar territory.

Women who have been out in the work force may begin to question the value of what they contributed to society or to the planet. Most likely they also awakened their drive to connect with their spirituality. Of course their bodies are going through changes that may magnify the emotional journey on which they find themselves.

For many women over forty, the move toward introspection accentuates their empty feeling or loneliness – even when they find themselves still married. They begin to acknowledge just how unhappy they are.

These days you find many marriages, of more than 30 years, ending. The women who made that conscious choice decided they could no longer live in deep unhappiness and preferred to jump into the unknown.

For those women, the thought of living out the rest of their lives with the stress of not feeling fulfilled is way more scary than stepping out of their comfort zone.

Just look at the statistics for middle-aged women and feminine cancers. How many of them are looking for a way out, a way to end the disappointment of not giving birth to their own desires and taking care of their own needs for themselves.

Stress takes its toll on those who get caught by surprise. Without healthy habits and independent thought paradigms one easily succumbs to overwhelm—whether those be emotional or physical states.

Yet there is another way to live, a way that reduces, eliminates and avoids stressful situations from taking over one’s life. That way is to replace habitual thoughts, emotions and actions that currently disempower you and cause stress with new habits, new ways of thinking.

Remember that thoughts lead to emotions that lead to actions that create results. Then that cycle repeats.

So when you start with new thoughts you will experience new and different feelings which means you will take actions you never took before. The result you create will compose your new world and different life.

What you have been doing up until now got you through life—at a price. If you feel unhappy I guarantee your health is not optimal. Eventually your physical health and emotional health will become a major issue (if it hasn’t already) requiring medical intervention of some sort.

You can choose to stay in your stressful life or you can do something different. Nothing will change for you until you decide first and act second.