All Stressed Up And Nowhere To Blow…

04/13/2010 in Featured Leave a reply

I thought since we were a couple of days from filing our income tax, as well as headed into summer, that we might spend some time talking about the great American pastime. I am not talking about baseball, football or even that great American sport basketball. I would like to submit to you that the great American pastime is now stress. It is the game we all play. None of us like playing it, but we all do.

I have heard stress talked about and read enough books and enough articles about stress to know that when I read some of those books or hear some of those talks I come away having more stress than I started with. My goal in writing this article is that you and I will begin to make some plans to live in such a way that we reduce the level of stress in our lives

Let me start with a little list of some of the things I came across that can happen in our lives. We will see if we can recognize ourselves in any of these. These are symptoms of when stress has gotten really bad, or when we are facing stress overload in our life. See if any of these Top Ten symptoms fit you.

1. Decision making becomes more difficult, both major and minor decisions.
2. Excessive daydreaming.
3. Increased use of cigarettes, alcohol or prescription drugs
4. Thoughts trail off while speaking or writing
5. You live with a fear of heart attack or another sudden illness.
6. Sudden outbursts of anger or hostility.
7. Paranoid ideas and mistrust of friends.
8. You dream of escape all the time.
9. Frequent spells of brooding and feelings of inadequacy.
10. Reversals in usual behavior.

If any of those ten fit you, you are a victim not just of stress but also of stress overload. The sad but funny thing about this is, we have come to accept normal stress like it is ok. We want to deal with both. Whether you are overloaded with stress or facing normal stress, how do you deal with stress since it is something we all face?

Harris Survey says that one in three Americans say they live with stress every day of their life. Six of ten of Americans say they experience great stress once or twice a week. An article in Newsweek a couple of weeks ago – the cover makes you feel stressful – talks about the fact that stress has an accumulation factor in our lives and once you have felt stress the next time you experience stress it has a greater impact on you. As you go through your life, stress accumulates. It has more and more of an impact on us throughout our lives.

What is stress? The dictionary says stress is the mental, emotional, or physical strain caused, for example, by anxiety or overwork. It may cause such symptoms as high blood pressure or depression.

Simply put, stress is the result of carrying too great a load. When the load gets too great, whether it is on a truck or foundation or a life, then you have that feeling of stress. When we carry too great a load in our time, or our finances or with our relationships, the inevitable result is going to be stress.

In the next few weeks I want us to look at some wisdom from the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament of the Bible about stress. Solomon the writer has great wisdom for all the practical areas of our lives and he has incredible wisdom to give us about how to deal with stress. What I would like to do based on this book is go through a simple checklist of four of the greatest things that seem to cause the most stress in our lives. As we look at this checklist, we will consider some practical ways that we can begin to reduce stress now as well as down the road. As we go through these four things, my hope is that you will pick out one of these four to work on. Look, do not pick out all four at the same time. That will create more stress in your life. Just pick one of them and say, That is the area I am going to concentrate on.

If you want to have less stress, the first thing you might do is take a look at your schedule.

1. CHECK YOUR SCHEDULE
Check you schedule this week and we will take a look at our schedules next week.