Stress! What does it really mean? How many times have we gone to our doctor or talked to a friend about a pain that we have and the reason always seems to be STRESS!
The Merriam Webster Dictionary describes stress as: a physical, chemical, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation.
So stress can cause disease! Well in my opinion only if you let it! Everything can cause us stress; relationships, our jobs, kids, traffic, the economy and anything else that happens to us on a daily basis. The question you have to ask is: How much of that stress will you allow to affect your life? I like to think that we still have free will and that allows us to determine how we are going to absorb or deflect the stress that comes into our lives. We have the choice to take the information, for example you get in a car wreck. The choice is to take that stress and worry, internalize it, affect your sleep, mess with your stomach, increase pain and inflammation and alter your overall mood, or acknowledge the stress. When we acknowledge the stress and realize that all our worrying won’t change the outcome, stress doesn’t win. We only have control over this moment not what happened in the past and not what’s going to happen in the future. Once we accept this fact we can handle our stress instead of letting our stress handle us. One moment, one hour, one day at a time.
