“I am so stressed!!!”
“What’s wrong?” “Nothing ya. Same old, work stress.”
Work stress or personal stress; in the last 5-10 years, the word ‘stress’ has come creeping into our lives and just may have become the most used word in our lives. We use the word on the smallest instance; complain about it every day (maybe every hour, but hey! Who’s counting?) Children as young as pre-teens use the word STRESS (do they even know how to correctly spell the word? I wonder!)
But yes, we all are stressed in our everyday lives, day-to-day activities. We may name it differently; calling it home stress, work stress or simply burn out. But it all roots to the same thing. Constant worrying, steady anxiety, feeling like a headless chicken for the smallest of things is how we recognise it. And even if we call it the 21st century, new world problem; it still is a problem.
We all want to combat it, get better, get rid of this emo-demon but we can’t treat something we barely know about. So let’s get to know this foe, before we find out more on how to defeat it!
- Acute Stress: Picture this, you wake up in a good mood. Right when you leave for work you get into an unnecessary argument, with your partner, sibling or even parents. Mean words are exchanged and suddenly your mood drops. It affects your day, decisions are slower and procrastination is easier to do than have a productive day. This is ACUTE STRESS. It comes unexpectedly, out of nowhere and throws your day off-balance. Varying situation to situation, you are left with feelings ranging from fear to anxiety and most commonly, anger. Anger that something small and unexpected had the power to throw you off guard. And when this happens more often than not, we find ourselves at the door of our next form of stress.
- Chronic Stress: So many times our complaint sounds something on the lines of “I feel like the weight of the world is on my shoulders.” On a good day it could mean that we have a lot of responsibility and we are taking the world by the storm. But on a bad day, it’s more like we are caught in a storm; unable to deal with the problems of life. Chronic stress is the unwelcome guest, who has been with us for more than a few bad days. It is sitting in our house (our head) and eating up our ration of positivity, completely draining our system. Your mood-o-meter is static at worry or sadness. But it isn’t something that can’t be combated with a few good tools.
- Mind Worms: This is hardly a category of stress for many but rather just how we millennial generation are as people, stressed or not. Think! How often do we catch ourselves worrying about something that is beyond our control. Even worse it is in our control but rather than doing something about it, we are only worrying about it. It could be that next promotion, some taunt that came our way recently, those 5 pounds or love handles that refuse to go and so on. It could be just about anything. These are called mind worms because they continuously keep crawling through our squishy looking brain. They creepily move around destroying our peace of mind, creating nice little homes of self-doubt, inadequacy or uncertainty related worry.
The only way to start handling stress is to introspect on it!
Try this: Take 10 minutes today and make a list of all the things that are creating problems or stressing you out. Try and bucket them in one of the 3 categories above. Very soon, we will share with you the tips and tricks to brush-off the word ‘stress’ from our lives.
