You’re Stressing Me Out!
From 1970 to 1980 there were 2,326 academic publications in social sciences with the word “stress” in the title. Between 2000 and 2010 there were 21,750. The enormous rise in “stress related” citations coincides with our current immersion in the health movement that tends to see us as both the cause and solution of our problems. As more and more of us are focusing on the effects of stress we try to meditate, juice, Pilates, yoga and Zen away the stress in our lives. What we sometimes overlook in the process is that stress isn’t always something we can control.
Recent studies suggest that changing our relationship to stressful events may actually be more productive than trying to alleviate the stress caused by them. Keeping in mind that stress sometimes comes from work demands, loss, injuries, unexpected events, smog, traffic and noise, just to mention a few, as well as positive stress from marriage, children, homeownership and job promotions it may be equally beneficial to learn to be more adaptive to stress rather than just seeing it as a cause of our mental, spiritual and physical imbalances.