The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
~William James~
Most Olympic athletes interviewed in Sochi admitted shaking in their boots before their events. A survey of teens in southwest Florida revealed a high rate of suicidal thoughts among high school students. Feeling unequal to the demands of our lives can overwhelm us. Stress squeezes most of us from time to time and paralyzes a few others.
Where does stress come from and what can we do about it? The Hungarian endocrinologist Hans Selye who brought stress to medical and psychological attention described it as "the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change." He researched the body's reaction to stress and its ability to cope with it.
While our bodies struggle to manage stress, our minds also vie with the challenges posed by life. Minor stress inconveniences us. Major stress can immobilize us. Yet not all stress is bad. A certain amount sharpens us and helps us do our best. Completely relaxed, we tend to be lackadaisical.
Selye concerned himself with the physical effects on the body. In addition to our body's reaction, our mind and emotions also become involved. In extreme cases every fiber of our being becomes involved as stress accumulates unchecked.
Athletes contribute to their own stress by setting lofty goals for themselves. The teenagers mentioned above live in a part of the country largely populated by people much older than themselves. They do not feel taken seriously by the senior citizens who surround them and receive most of Florida's attention. Feeling overwhelmed by life may be partly our doing and partly from circumstances in which we find ourselves.
What can we do about our stress? We often choose the stress of competition in order to excel. Here we have a choice of whether the stress we place on ourselves is worth the effort. We also face this choice in our daily lives. Whatever goals we set for ourselves often involve challenges and adversity. Again, it is our choice whether to continue pursuing our goals. We might lower our goals or alter them to less stressful ones.
Others' expectations may be more difficult to manage. Parents sometimes expect their children to renew the quest for their own failed dreams. Others' reactions to our differences in skin color, bodily characteristics or variations of the human traits we all have can lead to their prejudice and our doubts about our value as a person. Although easier for adults than for children, we can decide how much weight to give others' judgments of us. We should remember that others form their opinions for their own reasons. Their ratings of us do not make us any more or less valuable.
We would do better to concentrate on being the best person we can be. Then we can judge our worth by our own standards. We can then more easily ignore others' opinions of us
Article Source: EzineArticles.com; written by:Joseph Langen
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