We’ve all felt it, the looming deadline, the quarterly reports, the employee reviews that should have happened last week. Pressure... it’s there, it feels very real, and it’s affecting us whether we want to admit it or not.
With up to 90% of doctor visits related to stress and a divorce rate of 50%, we have become the working wounded.
Stress has a huge effect on our health. We all know the statistics. We all have friends and colleagues suffering with a debilitating health challenge. Our health is suffering, and our productivity is plummeting.
Worker productivity is only at 33%... and that includes us.
So, what do we do with all this pressure? How do we weave our way through it, over it, or around it so we can continually make a high level contribution in all that we do?
There are lots of ways to reduce stress physically. We can:
- Get some exercise.
- Go out in nature.
- Meditate.
- Sleep.
- Engage with others who make us feel good.
But,what if we could diminish the amount of stress we feel by the simple act of changing our perspective?
Our life is filled with incredible amounts of stimulus. According to a recent article in The Telegraph,the average person fields, on average, the equivalent of 174 newspapers of data per day! Whether through email, regular mail, social media, text, pings, or phone calls, we are inundated with data.
Most of us move directly from stimulus to response, stimulus to response, stimulus to response, all day long. We are completely reactive and thus let this flow of information control us.
The interesting thing is that most of our responses are based on our own individual past experiences and the learned emotional responses we have repeated over and over again during our lives. We build stories about everything that happens in our lives. An interaction with someone, an email that may have a tone to it, an error someone may have made, a difficult conversation, even how quickly the barista completes our coffee order.
The stories we create are based on how we habitually perceive the world. The actions we take, or the behaviours we continually exhibit, are a direct off shoot of those stories.
When you’re ready to step off the hamster wheel of your life, take some time to check in and question your current perceptions:
- What are they?
- Are they valid?
- Are they serving you?
- Where do they come from?
- Are your responses to the stimuli you receive an accurate depiction of what you want to create in your life or are they simply a method to re-create the same outcomes over and over and over again?
When we give effort to examine, question, and change our perspectives, the outcome we call our life will naturally change with it.
Awareness is the key. You cannot change what you are not willing to acknowledge. So get out those magnifying glasses and take a look at what is real and what is not.
Your stories just may change... and your level of stress diminish.
To your continued success!
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