Stress in a Chaotic World.

I started by removing the news media from my life. I was lucky that social media and the internet were not yet a thing. However, I liked to be informed about what was going on in the world. So, I made a point of watching the news and seeing that I didn’t have enough going on in my life between being newly married, worrying about my job because I was taking chunks of time off. After all, I was sick. Being sick and constantly concerned about the next flare-up, the next cold, or the flu going around the shop. Plus, you have the stress of the what-ifs, which are a thing.

When I started understanding my illness was caused by what I believed was stress, I started looking at how to reduce stress in my life. I turned off the evening news. I decided that if nothing was happening in my front yard, then nothing was happening; I didn’t need to worry about it. I know it sounded selfish, but after living that way for some time, I realized it wasn’t.

Every morning, I made time to read books that lifted my mood. Ones that created curiosity and wonder. I read books on meditation, spirituality, wisdom, the mind, and how to craft it into the tool I needed to heal. I read books on the placebo effect, visualization, propaganda, and how it is molding modern culture. I read books on hypnosis, EMDR, craniosacral therapy, Reiki, and other energetic treatments, either to take classes to become a practitioner or to receive treatments from other practitioners.  I started working on my future self, reading about finance, and how to stay healthy as I age. I removed future stress by learning to save money and make it work for me, so I could retire when I wanted and enjoy my golden years.

I began developing my stress strategy, which I still practice today, to feel more in control and resilient in daily life.

1.      If I have a stressful situation in my life and I can solve it using the best information at that time, I move forward on solving it, I do right then and there. No stressing over it or putting it off. If I made the decision, and in the future, it turned out not to be the best outcome. I didn’t beat myself up; I fixed it and moved on.

2.      If I have a stressful situation, but I couldn’t do anything about it at that time. I will wait until I can do something about it, then I will fix the problem. Not worrying about it because I was moving forward, understanding it was on hold until I could solve it.

3.       If there is a problem that I have no control over. It's not worth worrying about; let it go.

4.      Take nothing personally at work, in politics, or anything that doesn’t affect yourself or your immediate family or close friends.

Stress is not bad; it builds resilience, it creates growth, and it creates grit, which we need every day to get out of bed every morning. Stress is a problem when too many stressors come at you 24 hours a day. We live in a world where we are being manipulated every day, believing that what is posted on our social media pages is real, and that we might miss something happening. Checking our phone every minute, thinking we have missed something.

Just think for a moment, if everyone in the world stopped looking at their phone for 1 day, what do you think would happen to social media? The chaotic world would come to a screeching halt. The world's chaos is being manufactured for you and you alone. They do not make money; they do not have power over us if you're not living in the world of their creation. That's the key: we are living our lives through a 3x8 screen. Watch people, they use their phones to look at what's happening right in front of them.