Stressed-Out

Do you feel stressed-out  much of the time? If you do, you're not alone. Feeling stressed-out has become the dominant way of life for many of us. Although stress is a fact of life in our world, definitions of stress cover such a wide range of meanings that any reference to stress is ambiguous. Stress can refer to a cause or an effect. Stress can be good. Stress can be bad. However, the description stressed-out is clear. Stressed-out refers to a way of life.

It's also essential to make a clear distinction between two types of stress. The first type of stress concerns external threats and potential catastrophes, such as wars, life-threatening weather conditions, dangerous people, and traumatic experiences. This is traumatic stress, caused by terrifying circumstances, with life-changing impact.

The second type of stress concerns responsibilities in your daily life, such as personal relationships and conflicts, health problems, financial struggles, jobs, housework, home maintenance, paying bills, buying food, fixing meals, doing laundry, taking care of children, driving on busy roads. This is chronic stress. Chronic stress produces stressed-out lives.

This book focuses on chronic stress. If you feel stressed-out most of the time by the ordinary stresses of daily life, feeling stressed-out has become a way of life. The good news is that you can change stressed-out to peaceful by how you think.

Always On

Ponder David Ballard's claim that most of us are operating in a state of chronic stress and are always on. Certainly, life on Earth is no picnic. As long as human beings have existed, our species has experienced every type of stress imaginable, endured every kind of catastrophe, every kind of climate, including ice ages, engaged in horrendous wars, killed wild animals or were killed by them, endured the hardships and struggles of finding shelter, food, and water, and the pains, sufferings, and sorrows of childbirth, illness, injuries, and death.

Now, most of us in the western world live in buildings with hot and cold running water, indoor plumbing, electricity, central heat, air conditioning, stoves, microwaves, refrigerators, TVs, computers, internet access, cell phones, and iPads to name a few of the essentials of contemporary life our not-so-distant ancestors couldn't have imagined. We buy food in supermarkets stocked with an abundance of food—some of it real and much of it not so real—including exotic food from around the world that has become ordinary and available almost anywhere at almost any time of the year. Meanwhile, we travel the world in automobiles, trains, airplanes, and ships, while orbiting satellites allow us to communicate with almost anyone anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. No generation of people on Earth ever had so much.

So why is it, in the beginning years of the twenty-first century, when we have more available to us than any other people in the long history of Earth, why are we so stressed-out? If we re always on, who turned us on? How do we find the Stressed-Out Off Switch?

[Original Post November 5, 2015]

If you are feeling stressed-out and want to read the whole book, Stress Relief That Works: How To Think Your Way from Stressed-Out to Peaceful is available on Amazon in either Kindle or paperback versions. Click  Buy Now From Amazon  to get your copy right away!