Is Some Stress Actually Good?
Are there benefits of anxiety?
Can Stress Actually Be Good?
We tend to think of emotions and feelings as good or bad. But are they? Is stress inherently bad? Actually, it is a fact of life unless you are a monk meditating all day long. And I bet even they feel some stress.
First, what are some beautiful things about our anxiety? What does it say about us and our core values? Did you know that scientists say that almost all people who have anxiety are KIND people. Anxiety is a kind of high alert where you are trying to be on guard against something bad happening to us or to our loved ones. A mom or dad has natural anxiety around caring for her children. I know that even though my kids are adults, I still worry about them and feel stress at times.
Anxiety around a work project means that you care about doing a good job, that one of your core values is that you have high standards. We stress about doing and saying the right thing in a group or with a loved one. That means we care about how others see us. Think about bullies and cruel people who don’t care who they hurt. If you have anxiety, that is not you!
So, there are some real benefits to our anxiety, but having said that can we dial it back so that it doesn’t rule our thoughts. Yes we can.
Our emotions are really just markers giving us data. In fact some like, Dr. David Burns believes that our thoughts create our emotions. When we feel stress, the best thing to do is ask what is the underlying cause of the stress. What are the thoughts causing it? In future blogs I will be going into more ways to question those thoughts.
Perhaps we are being asked to do something that does not fit our values. It is certainly good to recognize that.
Maybe we feel stress because we forgot to have lunch. Or didn’t sleep well the night before. Perhaps we have a deadline that is looming. Each one of these things is very different and when we dial down we learn valuable data.
If we are being led to do something that is totally out of alignment with our values, we really do want to know that so we can course correct. We can refuse to go along or we can start a conversation that could be truly valuable.
If our stress is consistently due to hunger or lack of sleep, we can put in place some systems to alleviate this. If you find that you don’t have time for lunch, or just forget to eat, find a way to have some healthy snacks on hand to counter this.
And if you realize that you tend to procrastinate and are always feeling stress because your tendency is to procrastinate or put off important projects until it’s crunch time, look at ways to set up some systems to correct this habit. Make your own deadlines a few days before the actual deadline. I bet you will find that getting a project finished early will give you great satisfaction!
Stress is not bad or good when we take some time to look a little deeper for clues as to why we are feeling stress. Remember the next time you are stressed out, pause, breath, and look to see what’s really going on.
Betsy Smith
Certified Happy For No Reason trainer and coach
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