In the previous chapter of The Stress Pill, I described some ways people make themselves stressed. I call them “stress pills”. Others call them Stressors.
Here are another 30 tips on how to increase your daily dosage of stress. Of course, if you can avoid them, your stress level will go down and your happiness will go up.
Stress is known to be the number 1 killer in the world today. More even than accidents and war (which are also attributed to being stressed). Even the disease in the world are related to stress.
In my work with my coaching clients, I explain that our feelings and thoughts are a choice. My slogan is “happiness is a choice”. With this choice, there are three main pills: the happiness pill, the chill pill and the stress pill.
The happy pill
Smiling bouncy balls falling out of a bucketOver the years, I have collected many strategies to make people happy. I have tried to share them in this blog. When I write about them, I want each of them to be a happiness pill. Ever psot contains a “pill of happiness”.
The thing is, people seem to understand happiness better when they can compare it to stress. I have written some posts about stress in the past and found this to be true. That is how the idea for this series was born. So in this chapter I will describe thoughts, beliefs and ideas in the form of a “stress pill”.
I have written a lot about happiness over the years. I think happiness (in all its variations) is what everyone wants in life. For example, researchers found that parents name happiness as the ultimate goal of their parenting role. Happy parents = happy parenting = happy kids.
Happiness is not only the goal of parenting, it is also a most basic human goal. We are here to be happy, to find happiness and to enjoy it. We want to be happy with our relationships, with our families, at work, with our health, with money. We want to be happy with our friends and hobbies, with our achievements, with our homes. We want to be happy with what we have and we also want to be happy about some things we don’t have. For example, if I don’t have sick kids, that makes me externally happy.
One small thing that gets taken away from us helps us feel happy about what we have in our lives. For example, it’s only when you get a muscle cramp from lifting too much that you learn to appreciate the simple ability to raise your hand to the steering wheel or to take off your shirt. That is basic human nature, to define happiness by comparing it to unhappy times.
The most common obstacle to happiness is stress. In reality, stress is fear. It is fear that manifests in tensions that drive us into primal behavior (fight or flight). In the old days, it was what made us freeze in the face of a lion. While in the past, it was very obvious that lions, snakes and other scary animals were the enemy, today, the enemy is inside of us. We get anxious and stressed just thinking about a possible scary future.
The emotional bond between people depends on their ability to connect and the style of the connection. The attachment we have with the people in our lives (partners, children, siblings, friends and even our own parents) are strongly associated with the attachment we formed in our early years of life, with our primary caregiver (usually our parents). Similarly, the challenges we experience in our relationships as adults are shaped by the patterns of challenge from our early attachments.
According to John Bowlby, attachment is the connection a baby forms with its parent to ensure their basic needs of safety, comfort, care and pleasure are met. He described this attachment as “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings”. Bowlby believed that the style of the relationship between the parent (mainly the mother) and the child in this critical period of the baby’s development becomes a blue print for later relationships.
The main idea of attachment theory is that the caregivers provides the baby with a safe and secure base from which to explore the world. The baby knows that it is safe to venture out and explore the world, and that the caregiver will always be there to come back to for comfort in times of stress and discomfort.
Read Attachment Theory: Main Characteristics of Attachment »
Teens are often criticized for not being able to stand up to peer pressure. In my parenting workshops I show parents and teachers how much they, as mature adults, grownups and parents, submit to group pressure. They are usually very shocked to discover how many things they do that do not match their own thoughts and beliefs, and how strong their desire is to be accepted, not judged and not criticized by the people around them.
Being social creatures makes us compromise our thoughts and beliefs to match those of the society we live in. It is in some way a survival mechanism that got out of control. In the beginning, we did it to survive in the group. Later on we have to obey the group if we want to be accepted in.
The power of peer pressure was examined many years ago in a famous study called “Asch’s conformity experiment”. This short video can explain how easy it is conform.
Moving house can be a stressful situation. To make your life easier, find trustworthy and reliable movers. Adding unreliable movers to your list of things to deal with will make the move more expensive, not to mention draining emotionally, and you need all the energy you can get to manage such a big transition.
Some professional movers will take advantage of your situation and put pressure on you. To prepare, get 3 quotes for everything. Make sure there is an agreement they cannot get out of.
Some movers (called “removalists” in Australia) will come to your door on the day of the move and say that you have to add more money because you have more furniture than they thought when they gave you a quote. Or a cleaner might say, “Oh, I didn’t realize the carpet was so dirty” and since you are rushed to get it done on the day, you have no choice but to pay the extra before they are willing to start working.
Sleep is one of the key ingredients for success. I have the perfect example to illustrate the point.
My son Tsoof is 18 years old. As his mother, I am slightly biased, but he is very smart and talented. He is in his third year of university and is excelling in everything. He is taking extra subjects, plays in three bands, he teaches two music classes and is simultaneously composing music and working on producing a show..
This week, I read an article that explained one of the reasons why Tsoof is so successful. He sleeps a lot.
Sounds funny, right? Keep reading to see what I mean.
The article I read talked about the damage of not getting enough sleep. Tsoof, from a very young age, was a good sleeper. When other kids in day care did not need to take an afternoon nap, he still slept in the afternoon. Later on, when he was in primary school and even in high school, no matter what movie was on or what he had to do for school, he slept an average of 10 hours a night. Our two daughters consider sleep to be a waste of time, but Tsoof never needed to be “encourage” to go to bed. Today, he is busier than ever before and he still averages over 9 hours a night.
Read Sleep is Important »
I started looking into workplace stress recently, after attending a networking breakfast. It was after some talk by the Australian Government about efficiency at work. They seem to have invested a lot of money in technology to improve efficiency. Unfortunately, they do not seem to feel there is a need to invest in people more than machines.
Let me tell you, this breakfast meeting made me stressed. Unemployment is stressful for people and creating machines to do the jobs of human beings is going to have some negative consequences. I realized that the hope that less and less people will need help managing their feelings though therapy and coaching is disappearing.
I do not know if you know this but in Australia, the number of people who take “sick leave” (or as they call it, a “sicky”) is quite extreme. I have to admit that this really surprised me because as yet, I have never in my life missed work because of sickness.
During a recent presentation, someone asked me to share some tips on how to feel good. In the first post of the series How to Feel Good, I shared the science of endorphins – the feel good hormones. In the second, I covered the science of smiling. In this post, I suggest another great way to feel good – taking time off.
Last year, I took time off from everything (home, work, kids and Gal) and went overseas to spend some time with my family. It was a wonderful reminder for me about why we have take time off to recharge out emotional batteries.
Taking time off from daily life can have a positive impact on our health and wellbeing. It helps us regenerate and start fresh. Sleep is the body’s natural way of giving us time off. It “forces” us to rest so we can function. Did you know that without sleep, we would die? If you want to torture someone, you do not need to hurt them. Just deprive them of sleep for 2-3 night. Just ask any mom!
In over 1,100 posts on this blog, I have covered a lot of topics that lead to happiness. Today, I want to talk a little bit about the flipside of happiness – depression, because depression is a big issue for many families these days.
There are many depressed couples, depressed parents and more and more depressed kids. The most concerning of these are parents who suffer from depression, because they often raise kids that cannot handle life very well.
Some say depression runs in families. That is not surprising because I think if you take a perfectly normal and healthy child and raise them in a house where one or both parents are depressed, they will definitely grow up to be troubled.
Depression is something people do not like talking about. I know many families in which the depressed parent is dragging the whole family down but no one says anything. It is very much like having a parent who is alcoholic or terminally ill. Everyone walks around on eggshells but tries not to say anything. Not always because they are afraid, but often because they have given up trying to speak up.
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