I am not sure if you have ever really asked this question to yourself but truth is we all accept that living a stressful life is just what we do these days….and it is normal…
Reality is we accept this new normal without thinking what it actually means to us day to day…what it means to our bodies and our emotional state…the real effects on our physical and emotional body.
We even take pride in saying my job is stressful or I have a stressful life at times…
When I got cancer, I knew stress was one of the causes of my cancer. Nobody needed to tell me stress was one of the causes…I just knew it.
Growing back in Brazil I saw people living in constant flight or fight mode. Whether you are well off, constantly scared of being mugged/robbed or you are living in poverty fighting to meet your daily needs, it is fair to say it is a very stressful way of living.
So I guess my default mode has always been flight or fight…this is what I knew and how I dealt with day to day situations.
It is ok to have some situations in life where you need to activate your fight or flight mode but I think we all know by now that living in constant flight or fight is extremely harmful to our health.
It is like living running away from a tiger in a jungle…constantly….no human being can do that…not physically…not mentally…
When the body is continuously placed in the state of flight or fight we create the conditions of poor health.
And this is what I did…
I never stop to be grateful, truly grateful for being alive, for who I was, who I had become on my own since I left Brazil at 21, what I had accomplished after living in 7 countries, the friends I had made, how lucky I was to have the best husband in the world and to have two amazing perfectly healthy kids…
I allowed myself to get stressed about small things, when things didn’t go my way at work…I allowed myself to get super stressed about things that I thought were important…I gave too much of me…of my energy…
I knew I needed to find techniques to help me to deal with stressful situations but more important than that I needed to rewire my brain to look at life differently.
Every single bit of it…
And it all started when I noticed in my body the effects of being stressed…
I had a discussion with my family the day before chemo…I had an even bigger discussion with them sitting at the chemo chair…and when I got home…my body was a wreck…
I could not only feel the negative effects of the chemotherapy all over my body….this time I felt a much stronger level of toxicity and once more I was hanging on to my life by a thread….
Looking back my body suffered a lot more from the effects of feeling stressed about the discussion I had with my family than the physical effects of the chemotherapy.
I noticed it took me about 4 days to shake off that feeling too.
The recover from that chemotherapy cycle was harder.
I exercised…I meditated…I prayed….I wanted to get that poison out of my body and each day I felt everything I did, it wasn’t working…
I kept trying until 4 days later…I started feeling my body again….I started feeling balanced again…even when my body was full of chemotherapy, I felt balanced when the stress was out of my body…it was a noticeable difference.
So I started reading and researching about stress and how I could deal with stress differently.
I knew life without stress didn’t exist, I needed to create my own way to deal with stress differently, my own stress free life…
Stress is directly related to so many serious illness. If we do not manage or remove stress from our lives altogether, stress can cause a negative impact on the immune system, hindering the body natural defences against disease.
And that was enough to catch my attention….
I needed to look after my stress levels because I needed my immune system functioning at a 100% capacity.
I did and still do everything I can to help my immune system…
I believe if I cultivate a strong immune system, I can get rid of any disease…
So today I invite you to ask yourself this question:
How much stress do you put yourself under each day? At work? At the traffic jam? When together with your kids? When your husband, wife, partner doesn’t do what you expect them to? When people in general don’t do what you expect them to? When things don’t go your way? When you are facing an adversity or challenge?
And when it happens, how do you respond to it?
I found for myself that the first step into change is to observe and acknowledge…
Once I opened myself up to observe and acknowledge what was happening, I started my journey to change….
I am dedicating the month of May to talk about stress….so story to be continued….
It doesn’t take much to observe and acknowledge when something happens to you on the inside….try looking at it as a friend outside of the situation…try observing what happens to you as if you were someone else…sometimes it helps you to observe yourself without any self judgement.
I hope this is a constructive exercise…I hope this is an exercise that helps you to connect to your innerself….