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Important
Note
I’m not a Doctor
or any kind of medical practitioner, but I’m on
safe ground in saying that stress is a killer.
There are literally hundreds of studies,
surveys medical journals that definitively
link, high blood pressure, stress and heart
disease as a major killer of both sexes of all
ages. We will be providing some links on this
site where you can go and get accurate up to
date medical information on this topic.
Sufficient to say that addressing stress and
the role it plays in your life is very
important to all of us. I will be dealing with
stress from the perspective of how it effects
your every day life in terms of Productivity,
Time Management issues, the results your are
achieving, and basically how happy you are with
how things are progressing for
you.
Welcome to our
site where we will be dealing with stress, that
feeling you get when you feel your head is in a
vice and everyone around you is slowing turning
the handle and laughing about it at the same
time. Stress can take on many forms but the end
result to us is the
following:
* Stressed out
people are not happy people
* Stress
needlessly rob you of enjoying the events
around you
* Stress will
make organizing and controlling your time a
difficult if not impossible
task
* Stress makes
difficult and pressure situations become
intolerable and untenable
* Stress puts
tremendous pressure on us physically as well as
mentally
* Stress reduces
our ability to rise to the occasion and makes
us substantially less
flexible
This is list is
no where near complete. Stress is very
pervasive and has a very tenacious reach into
our everyday lives. Lets look at a few ways
that stress can be part of our everyday lives
and the effect that can have on
us.
What Is
Stress ?
Its hard to nail
down exactly what stress is because it effects
so many people in so many different ways. Its
easier to look at stress and see the impact it
has on us than to try to come up with a
definition of stress.
I’ve listed above
6 ways that stress can effect us. There is a
constant theme running through all of
them.
Stress
has a negative effect on any situation that it
is brought to bear
on.
Regardless of
what you are doing, reading a book, talking on
the phone, giving a speech, driving your car,
doing a task at work, when you find your self
under stress, your results will suffer. The
degree that your performance will suffer will
depend entirely on the circumstances and the
person. Part of the learning process is getting
a clear picture of what you are up against. In
this case, over the course of you looking at
the material we have on this site as well as
seeing what role Stress plays in Time
Management and Productivity issues, it will
become clear that reducing your stress levels
is an important objective.
Stress is
an emotion, like fear, hate love,
anger.
All of these
emotions have one thing in common, we can, to a
great extent, control them and determine to
what extent we will let them enter in to our
lives and what impact they will have when they
are present. Some of you may have a different
feeling about this but in order for us to have
a positive impact on the results you will have
in the area of reducing your stress levels, you
will have to take the lead on this issue. More
about taking responsibility for allowing stress
to enter into your life else where on the
site.
Its sufficient at
this stage to agree that stress is in fact an
emotion , and being an emotion has all of the
characteristics of emotions. One of the basic
characteristics of emotions is they become
present or active when we experience events or
emotions that trigger a specific emotion. These
events, emotions are called stressers. Example,
when you see a dog being mistreated you become
angry, the stressor is the dog being
mistreated. This stresses you out, you become
stressed, another person may see the same event
and show no signs of stress at
all.
If we become
stressed out when we see an events or
experience an emotion that triggers the stress,
why don’t we just eliminate those events or
stop feeling those emotions? Great question.
The answer is, if life was that easy and
simple, we would all be able to live peaceful,
successful, profitable contented lives.
Unfortunately we all know life is not that
simple. We have to live in an imperfect world
which means finding ourselves exposed, every
day to events and circumstance that are not of
our choosing or choice. The secret is, finding
a way to not only survive in this imperfect
world but to prosper and
flourish.
Before we move
on, one more piece of the puzzle, what is
stress? I’m not sure where I first heard this
expression, but it fits here perfectly, “ It is
what it is “ Stress is what it is as it
pertains to you at any given time under any set
of circumstances. Two people see the same event
and experience two completely different sets of
emotions. One feels agitated, angry and nervous
Are they experiencing stress ? You would have
to ask them because the other person, seeing
the same event is amused, calm and in a good
mood. Different strokes for different
folks.
Stress Is
A Terrible Waste Of Time , Energy and
Emotion
Of all the
emotions we can experience, no other can wreck
as much havoc on us as stress. It’s a waste of
time, energy, emotion and brain power. The
reason it is a waste of all of these valuable
resources is because at the end of a stress
full day , are net gain is far less than it
would have been if we had been able to control
our emotions, not allowed ourselves to become
stressed out and performed up to our pre stress
level of efficiency. The issue of recognizing
that stress is something we do to ourselves is
an important level of acceptance to reach. We
raise the same issue on our Time Management
site, our Productivity site and our Business
Management site, there is a time when you have
to assume responsibility for your own actions
and results
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