I recently opened the email newsletter from my home warranty company American Home Shield and saw along with tips about air conditioner maintenance and weed removal there was the headline Household Activities to Relieve Stress. What followed was one of the most comprehensive lists of stress reducing activities that I have seen. None of these notions were new to me but the fact that these were made so accessible to people in such a unique way was very appealing. The opening line was “Home is the last place you want to feel stressed”. I know as a therapist that HOME is one of the major sources of stress and we are not just talking about an overflowing toilet on Thanksgiving. Home can be a place of great comfort and a source of great dis-ease.
The list covered the importance of the deep cleansing breath, eating well, good sleep and a relaxing shower or bath among other pretty basic things. All things which we can control by taking an action. The stressors which can bring us to our emotional, and sometimes actual knees, are the ones we have no control over but take acres of energy trying to control to no good end. Have you ever been sitting helplessly on the San Diego Freeway the infamous 405, or a similar freeway wherever you live with absolutely no place to go because traffic is completely stopped and there feels like there is no hope? Of course you have. What do you do? You can put on your music, listen to a podcast of your favorite writer or comedian, let your mind wander-just not too far-or you can rage, scream at whomever is unlucky enough to be in the car with you or other completely unproductive behaviors such as yelling at other drivers who are also by the way stuck in the same mess you are. The outcome using the first suggestions is some measure of calm and control of yourself or if you take the screaming route you get a purple face and no sense of control. My point is you have a choice in how you respond to a stressor more often than you think.
Han Selye, M.D. was a pioneer in studying stress and identified it as a physical response which can feel stressful whether the stressor is good or bad. Buying my dream house I feel stress, facing surgery I feel stress. Stress is an equal opportunity physiological response. We need to unload the complete negativity the word has been assigned. Dr. Selye said “man should not try to avoid stress any more than he would shun food, love or exercise”. I suspect that were he around today he would say people instead of man and he would talk about avoiding internally created, self created stressors.
We are approaching the Labor Day holiday which most people see as the end of summer and therefore the end of vacation, freedom, holiday or any other term for not working all the time. People say about the end of a vacation “now back to reality”. I have a proposal of a major stress reducer. See your vacation or holiday as another part of your reality. This part of your reality is a time when you don’t go to work, have a break from running a household and can be “off duty” which also means a major disconnect from ones technology and screens.
For many of us thankfully we have the reality of work to go back to! Integrate your realities.
Stress reduction is really about controlling the stressors which can be controlled by you.
I hope that you have had a very good summer so far and look forward to September 22nd which is the first day of autumn. September 4th is not the last day of summer so go on a picnic a great stress reducer.
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