Relativity Theory on Stress! E15

November 9, 2021

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In today’s episode, we are discovering how our stress situations are relative. What is stressing you out big time, might be not a big deal to the next person.

The relativity in this can help us to let go of some of the stress that is making us unwell. So tune in to find out how you can make yourself feel less stressed in your life!

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Stress is accompanying us like our own shadow. It is hard to imagine a life without stress these days. Over the last couple of decades, we have made stress the number 1 cause of most of our top illnesses.

It is pretty common knowledge now that we want to avoid being stressed all the time. It harms our health and wellbeing. More and more we are learning techniques and ways to decrease our stress levels.

Instead of going through a list of great practices that will lower your stress levels, I wanted to do something different in this episode. Instead I want to go to the beginning and understand more about how stress is created in the first place. I want to investigate with you if there is something that we can do so we don’t even get stressed that easily.

Giving people the tools for reducing stress isn’t the resolution of our problem with our common illnesses that are caused by stress. We cannot keep living in these prolonged states of stress. I´d rather focus on preventing it from happening. I want us to learn to change our perspective, our ways of living and our responses to our everyday demands, so we don’t even fall into the trap of constant stress.

So what is actually stress?

Stress is our body’s reaction to a challenge or a demand.

It’s very useful that our body has this functionality to create stress because it can save our lives in cases where we are in actual danger. When we are in such a situation, the body creates an immediate reaction that helps us react and take the necessary next steps – which is to fight or flight.

At that moment, our body releases and produces larger quantities of the chemicals that trigger physical reactions like increased blood pressure, heightened muscle preparedness, sweating and alertness. These are all needed in such stressful situations where every second counts. A wrong or slow movement can kill us. So stress in short bursts when it actually counts, is life-saving and an important defence mechanism of our body.

That’s what it was created for. What it wasn’t created for is the way we are living now. That is in constant stress due to our overly busy lives and demanding workplaces, schools and universities. We created a lifestyle that makes us addicted to stress – we cannot imagine living without it anymore.

“Our body gets used to having the trigger of stress, so it keeps repeating it like an automated program. Like an addiction!”

If this body´s reaction was not meant to be used for our work deadlines and our long to-do lists, then we want to look differently at our demands and challenges. We want to change our perspective toward them. We cannot just switch off this stress response, it’s in our DNA. It’s a program that has its need and we cannot easily change our DNA for it to not be triggered. So what is our option? Well, we want to avoid the stress reaction being triggered in the first place.

Challenges and demands we are having and how we classify them

Can we agree that what I call a challenge, you might find very easy? And can we agree that what you call demand in your life, I might actually enjoy doing? Therefore demands and challenges in our lives are relative. Agreed?

Let’s say you are about to close a sales deal for 1 Million Dollars and you just learned that this deal might actually fall through, this will probably stress you out big time. But do you think it would stress out Elon Musk? No, for sure not as he is a billionaire. Do you see how this situation is relative? If you are not YET a billionaire or multi-millionaire, this situation will highly likely create stress but Elon will just shrug his shoulders and move on in a second – if he even knew about this happening in the first place.

So, we can agree that demands and challenges are relative and different people might have different perspectives towards them. It can stress out some people and others might not even blink an eye.

Seeing the relativity in a situation will lower stress

If that is the case, I think we have a possibility to find situations in our lives where we might be able to turn from a stress reaction to a shrugging of the shoulder. I will give you an example, of where I was able to change my perspective and stop feeling stressed in the first place.

You might know that I am German and we Germans like to be on time. We hate to be late and we, even more, hate people that are late. If I transfer this to the workplace, it means we love our deadlines and deliver our work on time. In the past, I was so stressed out if I was not able to meet my deadlines.

And I am not even talking about situations that I could even influence. I was highly stressed when I was not able to meet my work deadlines. Even if the cause of that delay was completely out of my control or my responsibility. There was just this inner drive inside of me that said: We said we would finish this at this date and now we won’t be able to – this is like the worst thing that could happen to me. Jap, quite a lot of drama inside my mind.

But this was my reality! Some of you are probably chuckling and shaking their heads at this and some of you completely resonate with this description. Again, a pointer that this is so relative.

Nowadays I do not get triggered about this anymore. If my project or my work is being delayed and I had no say or influence in the cause for this delay, I just take it as it is. I don’t let it stress me out anymore. Why should it? I was not able to do anything about it. I did my work to the best of my ability and knowledge and if something outside of my influence changes and delays my work, well then my work is being delivered at a later date.

Your possibility to change your stress levels

I know for some of you this is so clear and not a big deal whatsoever! I get it, but for me it was. So do you see the possibility here? Do you see that you could have something in your life that stresses you out and I might say: Where is your problem? We are all different and unique.

Now, you might be asking what I did to change this from bothering me? I really reflected on this and was trying to find something magical or drastic that I did. But I was not able to find anything where I can give you a 12 step process.

“No, the only thing that I did was change my perspective.”

Sure, I might have improved in my skill of reflecting on myself and my triggers. But so can you! And yes, I have been on a self-discovery journey for the past year – but again, so can you. In the end, I just decided that my perspective of wanting to live up to German standards of stressing about timeliness was just not enough reason to keep creating stress and illness inside of me. I looked at the things that kept stressing me out. On this one, I decided it’s just not worth it.

And with a non-German brain, this makes complete sense, right? So what do you think you might carry around with yourself that is linked to your nationality, your religion, your gender, your job title – that you stress about but others would just not care about?

Bit by bit empty your shopping basket of stressors

I think we can all look more closely at our stress catalogue and select some of the smaller items. Let’s see if we cannot delete them from our shopping baskets. Something that if we look at it from a more neutral perspective is just not worth it. Maybe we can decide to look at these differences in the future and eliminate a few stress triggers from our life. Just as a start. How does that sound?

And please don’t start with the big ones. Get your practice in first! Start small! You don’t just start running for the first time and straight away go for the marathon. No, you will probably want to practice the 5k or 10k first and then move on to the bigger goal. Same with our stressors!

An example

I promised I will give you another example of where I am just not so successful yet in letting go. So here it comes. In the last apartment, we had a major renovation and something needed to be fixed all the time. It was a flat in a 1970s building and something was broken all the time. That was for sure one of the reasons why we moved out. But because of these few years of constant stress about building sides, appointments, and dealing with builders and the management company, this has now created an automated stress trigger. We are now in a new house for 6 months and with all places sometimes things break, need fixing or sorting out. Every home is like this.

Now when 2 or 3 things are going on at the same time I start to get stressed again. It triggers this memory of the old apartment of constant problems and issues. When something small happens now and then, I am fine. But if this small thing comes on top of something that had to be dealt with on Tuesday. And then somebody comes around on Thursday, and this small thing happens now on Saturday morning – I could literally scream. Inside of me an ocean of disaster is unleashed and I ask myself why the world is out to get me. Seriously! These are the kind of thoughts that are going on in my mind. They are of course the reason why I flood my body with stress reactions for the next few hours.

“There is it – one of the major triggers that I have not been able to overcome.”

For some of you, this story will completely resonate with you. As if I can read your mind and for others, you probably stopped listening. This is how relative all of our demands and challenges truly are.

I hope you know I am not talking here about true demands and challenges that we would classify as painful and a struggle. I am talking about little things that we decide to make a big deal out of where others wouldn’t. And I think this is a good indicator for you to find something in your life that you might want to change your perspective on. Just ask yourself next time: Would everyone in the world see this as a problem? Is there someone I can think of who would see this as not an issue?

As soon as you can see the possibility of someone NOT seeing the same situation as a problem, YOU can see it as not a problem, too. Believe me! In the second you can see another way to look at something, you can decide to change your perspective and go to another way of looking at it. It’s that easy!

Will you try it out?

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So whether you choose to donate, leave a rating and review, or both, know that you’re an integral part of my vision. You are helping everyone who struggles with burnout or high-stress levels to experience how awesome their life can be. So, thank you for your support!

Step out of survival mode and into your life Episode 33
Overcoming burnout once and for all Episode 65
What are the emotions of stress? Episode 72

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