Stress Hardiness, Optimizing Stress, Being Fully Alive
May 15th, 2009 — Lifelong Learning, Stress Trap
How do you feel about exercise? Do you agree with the Enthusiast or the Couch Potato?
I love the way I feel when I exercise. Not only that, it will add years to my life.
I hate exercise. Besides, if God wanted us to do it He wouldn’t have invented the remote.
May 8th, 2009 — Lifelong Learning, Stress Trap
The Young Man and the Shirts
A young man was visiting his folks at Christmas and his mother gave him two new shirts. The fellow was pleased and immediately went upstairs to change into one of them. When he came down his mother looked hurt and said, “It’s too bad you didn’t like the other one.”
The Hunting Dog
Another fellow was tired of his friend being so negative, but he was sure the friend would be impressed by the fellow’s new hunting dog. So the two men went duck hunting, and when they shot a duck and it came tumbling down into the water, the dog went to retrieve it. But instead of jumping in the water and swimming, he walked on top of the water. He simply pranced over, picked up the duck, and came prancing back. The owner was thrilled and looked expectantly at his friend. The friend gave him a disgusted look. “That stupid dog of yours doesn’t know how to swim, does he?”
Sometimes You Just Can’t Win
Have you ever known people who always see things in a negative light? How do you handle it? Can you see the humor in it when it happens to you?
November 30th, 2008 — Lifelong Learning, Stress Trap
For this food we are about to receive, we thank Thee, Lord.
—A Christian pre-meal prayer
The picture on the left is of our daughter holding part of our harvest of potatoes from our garden in the woods years ago. I wrote about the garden last week at Cheerful Monk. It was a great family project and we all learned a lot from it. We especially learned to be grateful that we didn’t have to rely on producing our own food for survival… we would have starved to death. The fence in the picture was just one of our attempts to keep the animals out.
I was reminded of this blessing last week when I watched the National Geographic DVD Africa. Among other things the DVD showed the struggles of subsistence farmers. As if the backbreaking labor weren’t enough, some of the farmers had to spend some of their nights banging pots to scare hungry elephants away from the crops. Another family had planted rice and were hoping the rains would come in time so they could produce enough to make it through the winter. Then when some of the rice did grow, they had to stand constant guard during the day, throwing balls of hardened clay to scare the birds away.
And as the Obama family pointed out last Wednesday, the problem of hunger isn’t limited to subsistence farmers. The picture on the left was taken from a YouTube video showing them handing out food to needy people. They do it as a family every year so their children don’t grow up with a feeling of elitism and entitlement. They do it so the girls understand the needs of other people. (They’re also teaching the girls to be contributing members of society by having regular chores to do, and this practice will continue even when they’re in the White House. Good for them!)
Thanksgiving
For Thanksgiving here we had a simple meal served with a huge dose of thankfulness. Do you celebrate Thanksgiving? If so, how do you do it?
October 26th, 2008 — Lifelong Learning, Stress Trap
Our lives are frittered away in details. Simplify. Simplify.
—Henry David Thoreau
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality….
—Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth
I’ve always had a lot of inner drive, but I’ve never been achievement oriented…except when I was a kid, when I wanted to do well in school. I hear a lot these days about how hectic life can be as we try to juggle all the demands makes of us. I’ve never had that problem as an adult. I’ve always agreed with Thoreau: “Simplify. Simplify.”
Some people seem to think that would mean accepting an impoverished life. On the contrary. It means having the time and attention to appreciate what we have, to be able to do what’s truly important to us. (See Living Every, Every Minute.) For me it sometimes meant doing things that society doesn’t admire, like taking ten years out to raise a child…doing some volunteering, working together (including my husband) on family projects and just “hanging out” and enjoying my daughter while she was still young.
At other times it meant doing things that are more officially exciting and honored by our culture…see Building a Solid Foundation and Making Hay While the Sun Shines. What worked for me was to enjoy each period of my life as it came and not try to do everything at once.
I learned about the joy of simplifying when I was in grammar school. My sister and I were taking dancing lessons, and sometime in early December we had a recital. I don’t remember much about it, except that because it was so close to Christmas the organizers treated us by allowing us to go through a line with a long table full of toys. We could choose anything we wanted. My sister and I chose carefully and each decided we wanted one of the balls. As we were leaving we saw other kids with armloads of goodies…it turns out we didn’t have to choose just one thing, we could have had as much as our arms could have carried. At first we felt foolish and wanted to go back and try again, but then we decided that’s not what we really wanted. We really wished the rule had been what we had assumed, that we could each pick only one thing. If we had a huge pile of toys then none of them would have been special.
No, I’ve never been tempted by the idea that the more we do and the more we have the happier we will be. As I’ve said, I do have an inner drive, so when my husband and I got back from our 15 months in Europe and traveling around the world (again see Building a Solid Foundation) it was time for me to figure out what I wanted to do next. The usual advice of envisioning your ideal future and setting goals to achieve it didn’t work for me. I just wanted to live deeply and find work that I loved to do. I wanted to enjoy the process of living, and that was something I couldn’t envision. I finally realized it wasn’t something I could see, it was something I had to feel. Maybe I couldn’t see around the next corner, but I could tell when I was on the right path. I still remember where I was standing when I realized that. It was another life-changing moment. I suddenly had an inner gyroscope…I was free to explore without worrying about becoming lost.
I don’t always consciously know where I’m going, but my inner path is there and I can tune into it. The important thing is taking this approach means there is no rush, there is no frustration about not moving fast enough to meet external goals. All I have to do is follow the path, one step at a time.
The Life Balance Project
This post was written as part of Stacey Weckstein’s Life Balance Project. Balance, in terms of juggling priorities, is seldom a problem for me now. If I find myself having conflicting priorities, I step back and simplify my life so I can focus on what’s most important. It goes back to the Traits of Stress-Hardy, Resilient People:
2. They realize that the quality of our lives depends on how we focus our energy and our attention. They try to align their thoughts and actions with their values. They know how to motivate themselves to take action.
I don’t know if this approach would work for everyone. I enjoy working and don’t have trouble motivating myself, assuming it’s something I want to do. And because we’ve kept our lives simple and have always lived beneath our means, my husband and I have a lot of financial freedom. It works for us.
What About You?
Is your life in balance? Are you trying to do too much? Do you need more challenges? Do you have an inner path that you’re tuned into? What works for you?
September 14th, 2008 — Lifelong Learning, Love and Compassion, Stress Trap
We lived in a small town/semi-rural area when I grew up and I was fairly isolated from other kids except for school. The first picture was of me in seventh grade…one of my happiest years of late childhood. I had a close friend, Mary, who was interested in the same things I was, and I was always excited to get to school.
What a difference a year makes. One morning in eighth grade I went up to her in the school yard, happy to see her, and she cut me dead. She made it clear she never wanted to talk to me again and wouldn’t say why. I figured it was because I was such a mess…I mean my body was changing, I had gained a lot of weight, and I hated that part of life. Yeah, yeah, it would have helped a lot if I had combed my hair….
Anyway, it still hurts to think about it. I knew the standard reaction…”If you don’t like me, then I don’t like you, so there. If you’re going to be mean to me, I can be mean to you too.” That didn’t work for me. I was hurt and I still liked her. I wasn’t going to deny it. So I made other friends, and I didn’t push myself on Mary but didn’t avoid her either. I was in that horrible self-conscious stage, but I forced myself to be kind and polite whenever we saw one another. It was hard at first, but like anything else, it got easier with practice.
That went on for two years. Then in high school, in tenth grade, she started thawing out and we became best friends again, a friendship that lasted until she died of cancer a few years ago. One night in 11th grade we had gone to a meeting and she drove me home. She told me why she had done it…it was because her mother had died when she was in sixth grade and her father was an Italian immigrant. He was 50 years old when she was born, and he spoke little English. They had nothing in common so she felt lonely and alienated. She was jealous that I had loving parents, and she had hated me more when I was so nice to her.
Talk about life-long lessons… I cried, of course, when I got home…what a stupid waste…but I learned two valuable lessons from the experience:
That’s when I first started learning the traits of stress-hardy, resilient people. That list comes from hard-earned experience, and the traits were an integral part of my life before I tried to articulate them. They work for me.
What about you? Have you ever been rejected? What did you learn from the experience?
August 17th, 2008 — Lifelong Learning, Self-Worth, Stress Trap
Last week we talked about Life As a Shared Adventure:
Life doesn’t always go smoothly, and it’s a lot more fun when we think of it as an adventure rather than complaining because things aren’t going our way.
In particular we talked about the importance of attitude and developing our skills. In the comments section Karin pointed out there’s a combination of acceptance and trust in my favorite prayer:
Thank you, Lord, for the opportunity. I sure hope You know what You’re doing.
I’ve been thinking of that a lot this past week. I certainly don’t believe in the Law of Attraction, that if we think the right thoughts and play our part well we will get what we want in life. I’ve seen too many cases where things haven’t turned out that way for people…one of the most recent being Randy Pausch. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue living life to its fullest. As Randy said:
Cheating the Grim Reaper doesn’t mean living longer. It means living well.
For me that means not fighting life, not defining ourselves too narrowly, but instead understanding that our view of life is limited, that to grow we must be willing to change. As Kathleen Norris puts it,
Prayer isn’t asking for what we want. It’s asking to be changed in ways we can’t imagine.
Or, one of my very favorites, Richard Bach’s:
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.
Amen to that!
Obviously I’m inspired by quotes.
But quotes aren’t enough. I also need to remember stories, examples from my own life where scary changes have turned out just fine and from the lives of other people. Three of my favorite stories are about James Whistler, Mary Kay Ash and Scott Adams.
Had silicon been a gas, I would have been a major general.
—James Whistler
Whistler was attending the West Point military academy until he failed a chemistry test. So instead of being successful in the army, and being forgotten by history, he became a world-renown artist.
When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.
—Mary Kay Ash
Mary Kay Ash was a highly competent salesperson and trainer until she was passed over for a promotion in favor of a man she had just trained. She was so frustrated by the discrimination against women that she decided to write a book to help other women succeed in business. The book turned out to be a business plan for the company she founded…a company which had over $2 billion in sales when she died. She wrote three best sellers in the course of her career. One of them, Mary Kay on People Management has been included in business courses at the Harvard Business School.
Most success springs from an obstacle or failure. I became a cartoonist largely because I failed in my goal of becoming a successful executive.
—Scott Adams
When Scott Adams didn’t move up the corporate ladder, he created the popular cartoon Dilbert, about the frustrations of working in a large corporation. He has touched the hearts of millions of people.
So detours may be frustrating at first, but that doesn’t mean we won’t end up liking the new path better than the one we had started on. Have you ever been forced to take a detour? How did it turn out?
June 1st, 2008 — Lifelong Learning, Love and Compassion, Stress Trap
I’ve never been lost, but I was mighty turned around for three days once.
—Daniel Boone
At the moment I can identify with this rat in the maze…I’m exploring new territory and expanding my mental map of the world of blogging. In the process I’m going through a period of confusion. But like Daniel Boone I’m not lost…I’m just a bit “turned around” for a while.
Why the confusion? I just switched to a MacBook from the PCs I’ve been using for years. I also installed a more recent version of WordPress, which has a different interface from the old one. Neither of those changes are difficult, but it takes some practice to be able to work without having to think of the mechanics.
And if that weren’t enough to keep me amused, I decided to change my blog themes from three columns to two. That means going into the inner workings of my WordPress files and learning something about PHP (a scripting language for building web sites) and becoming more adept at CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). When I developed my sites last year, I took an open source theme and hacked around until my site looked the way I wanted it to. The resulting coding wasn’t very elegant, and I knew someday I would have to spend a lot of time understanding how to do it correctly. That time is now. It’s a big job, but I’m breaking it down into bite-sized pieces and am learning a lot. Being confused in the process is a small price to pay for a bit more mastery. All it takes is the courage to be confused and the courage to be patient.
What about you? Are you trying something new at the moment? How do you feel about it? Please share your experience in the comments section.
Thanks to bikehikebabe for commenting on last week’s post.
November 25th, 2007 — Stress Trap
Preparing for the holidays is a great time to practice our stress-management skills. It’s easy to slip out of our optimal stress zone into being overly stressed…where we feel frazzled, waste energy in nervous tension, and lose our effectiveness. I slipped into this state this past week…I had an attack of the “hurry sickness”, that stressful feeling that there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it. Taking action doesn’t make the tension go away…when I’m working on one thing part of me is worrying about the ten other things I’m not doing. I have this feeling that I have to move faster and faster to keep up.
To me that’s a signal to step out of the stress trap. My favorite strategy right now may seem strange: I start by getting on my Nordic Track treadmill and play some Sudoku. On first glance that might seem like a time waster, but it works for me. It stops those racing feelings in my mind by focusing on something else, and the physical activity releases the tension in my body. (I’ve fixed up a stand on my treadmill to hold reading material/puzzles, so I can also use my arms in the exercise.)
Once I’ve cleared my mind and relaxed my body, I get out a pencil and some paper and write down my “possibility” list…all those items that have been going through my mind. I look at each one and decide where to put it in my time-management system:
The question I ask as I look at each item is “What do I do with this in the spirit of the season…with feelings of love, joy and generosity of spirit?” Once I look at the list from that viewpoint, the answers are usually easy.
So that’s my strategy. A friend of mine does something similar, only she brews a hot cup of tea and listens to music as she makes her list. And some people have the opposite problem, their problem is loneliness rather than too much to do. What about you? How do you handle the holidays? Please share your experiences in the comment section.
Monkey picture by amateur_photo_bore via Flickr. Creative Commons license.
Sudoku photo by psd via Flickr. Creative Commons license.
Photo of girl writing by youngdoo via Flickr. Creative Commons license.
Thanks to Galba and bikehikebabe for commenting last week.
Related posts: The Stress Trap, The Stress Trap Redefined.
October 21st, 2007 — Stress Trap
For every problem
under the sun,
There is a solution
or there is none.
If there is one,
try to find it.
If there is none,
never mind it.
—Anonymous
Like many words of wisdom, the above poem is easier said than done. And that’s a great reason for blogging, to remind us to keep trying. And that we are not alone.
In a comment to last week’s post Bob mentioned he sometimes gets stuck rehashing a conflict long after it’s over. I’ve been thinking about that a lot this week…for most of us learning to let go is a lifelong challenge.
One thing I use is a list of traits that I’m trying to develop in myself. It’s now included on its own page, Stress-Hardiness Traits, in the menu on the left. I review that list often and check to see where I’ve integrated it into my life and where I need more practice. It’s a big help reminding me of the bigger picture and of what I’m aiming for in life. It’s the day-to-day practice that prepares us for challenges.
I also use a powerful image to help me let go. It’s of how hunters in Asia used to trap monkeys. They would hollow out a coconut, leaving a hole just big enough for a monkey to slip its hand in, but not big enough for the monkey to pull its fist out. The hunters would then attach the coconut to a tree with a rope and put a sweet treat in the hole. When a monkey came by it would smell the treat, reach in with its hand to grasp it, and get trapped. It was incapable of letting go.
So whenever I get stuck I think of myself as that monkey, keeping myself trapped because I can’t let go. Being able to see myself from that outside perspective helps me see the situation more clearly, and eventually I’m willing to let go of the trap and get on with my life.
What about you? How do you you let go? This site is about sharing, so please tell us your thoughts in the comments section. I especially invite Bob and Galba to continue this discussion.
Photo by RomuloArrais via Flickr. Creative Commons license.
May 23rd, 2007 — Stress Trap
Last Monday Ronni Bennet at Time Goes By described a nightmare trip home on an airline. The whole tone of her post was just the opposite of yesterday’s post here. It was primarily complaining about the airlines. I suppose I wouldn’t have minded so much if she had at least taken some responsibility for her feet hurting. It had been her choice to wear impractical shoes.
I posted the following comment:
“The airlines are in trouble, so I’m afraid things are not going to get better soon. They’ve been downsizing and the workers are stressed, so don’t expect much catering. I keep thinking of J. K. Rowling’s, ‘Have a stout heart. The worst is yet to come.’
My husband and I won’t fly any more. We can live without it and have too much respect for our dignity.
I’m not sure I agree with your statement:
‘As the population ages in the coming years, air transportation must be improved for those who are slower or disabled.’ I’m only a couple of years older than you and can still remember the time when flying was not an entitlement. I’m not convinced it should be today. We all might be better off if we simplified our lives and reduced our expectations/demands.
In the meantime, good luck! I hope you wear more sensible shoes next time. When I used to travel as part of my work about 20 years ago, we always wore running shoes at airports. Even then we expected long walks and having to run to catch planes.”
I’m not saying we should never try to change things, but somehow complaining out of a sense of entitlement doesn’t work for me. I want to be doing something constructive to make this world a better place, not just demanding that other people do it for me.
