Taming the Stress Snake

Some people must really like stress. I mean, they must like it even if they say they don’t, because they talk about it all of the time and they wear their stress like badges of honor. Just eavesdrop on a conversation between two or more people in an airport or a restaurant during lunch hour. People like to have “stress-offs”…this is when they compete to see who is under the most pressure; who has the least money, the meanest boss, the brattiest kids or the worst mother-in-law.

Say the word “stress.’ Now say it with a whispery voice and really hiss out the sssssss on the end. Sounds kind of villainous, doesn’t it? If you are reading this on an airplane or where someone can hear you, turn to them and hiss. They will be surprised and it will make you giggle. The sord “stress” reminds me of a snake which can squeeze the life out of you!

Anyway, thousands of articles are written every day on the dangers of living a stressful life. We all know these things. Stress puts a strain on your entire body and opens you up for diseases, etc. etc. etc. We KNOW that! When someone tells me to cut down on the stress, I am tempted to smack myself on the forehead and say, “Duh…why didn’t I think of that?” The fact is we’ll never be able to get rid of all of our stresses because we are alive and breathing and we live in a stressful world. The trick is to MANAGE our stress and keep it from causing us to explode into tiny little pieces, which would be messy and embarrassing.

The experts say that stress isn’t an event, as much as it is the way we react to a situation. And sometimes we allow things to take over our lives and eat away at us day after day, like water torture. Drip. Drip. Drip. There are little annoyances that we allow into our brains every minute; things like the screaming boss, the nagging spouse, the piled up laundry or the bozo who is driving the car in front of us, steering with his knee while he holds the cell phone with one hand and a hamburger in the other. While these things are indeed aggravating, allowing them to cause our blood pressure to soar is like being pecked to death by chickens….a slow and irritating process.

Then, there are the big things which really are frightening. It’s hard not to worry about a medical or a financial problem or a major life change, BUT we do have options. When we become aware of a challenge and are doing what we can do to make it better, we have to put the problem into perspective, do the best we can do with the situation and stay as mentally healthy as possible. There are choices here….you can just go the happy place in your head, smile and look at a people with a vacant stare, in which case they’ll know you’ve checked out for a while. Or you could take the more conventional approach and engage in stress-relieving exercises such as yoga, walking, cycling, or my personal favorite, going to the arcade and playing a few games of “Whack-a-Mole”. When I do this, I often imagine the image of the annoying problem on the plastic mole as I’m beating the tar out of it.

I am a great believer in toys. I think everyone should have a toy basket with stress busting tools close at hand. It might seem silly at first, but you’d be surprised how relaxing it can be to blow bubbles or simply sit in your chair, wearing a big red clown nose. Doing things like this will remove you from the harsh reality of your stressful situation and allow you to regroup and carry on with a more rational mind. People will also be inclined to leave you alone when they see you hitting a paper target with a little punching dinosaur puppet or waving a magic wand while chanting “Problem….be gone!” You get my point.

Life isn’t always fair and there often isn’t any logic to it. I have run out of energy trying to analyze it, so I just try to keep myself sane by looking for reasons to laugh, refraining from contributing to Global Whining, making time to play and choosing friends who will wear clown noses and blow bubbles with me. I am determined to take the snakelike hissssssss out of stress!