Stress? Yes, please!
I once met a psychotherapist who said she didn’t believe in stress. I thought that was a very interesting thing to say. I didn’t get the opportunity, but I wanted to ask her if she believed in gravity.
A strange question, but I wanted to know, because gravity is stress.
In reality, everything that puts pressure on us, our bodies, our minds or hearts, is stress. Gravity puts a kind of pressure on our bodies. Welcome to earth, humanoid! It pulls downward on us relentlessly making our walking and standing upright as bi-pedal human beings on this planet a constant challenge! This is especially apparent over time as we age. Hamstrings tighten, the pelvis locks up, the shoulders roll forward, and it becomes increasingly difficult to hold the head up. Pain and discomfort start to set in, and so on, spiraling downward.
So is gravity our enemy? I think not earthling. The problem of course is mal-alignment. If we are correctly aligned, the pull of gravity actually works to our advantage! Maintaining structural integrity enables us to weight-train, build lean muscle mass, and strengthen our joints and bones. When we carry gravity well, it makes us stronger.
This same principle applies to other aspects of our being as well. Mental, emotional and spiritual “gravity” pull on us all to varying degrees at various times. Demand on our time, schedules, and relationships are things we can’t always get away from. Nor should we! The things and people we have responsibility and accountability for are appropriate stresses to carry. Assuming we are appropriately “aligned”, we can manage these demands and it can make us stronger.
There is very good research that points to chronic stress being a contributing factor in everything from wrinkles to cancer. This information should be taken into account in our discussion, but I recently became aware of another study recently published in the journal Cell which has some surprising results.
Researchers injected lab mice beforehand with melanoma and allowed some skin tumors to grow. They then put some of the mice in a large cage and filled it with lots of toys, plenty of space and many more mice than usual, while leaving the other mice in ordinary lab cages. I noted that the “enriched” cage was not always a friendly environment! It was very exciting and stressful for the mice, and they would fight sometimes. After some time they measured the progress of the tumors and found that they had actually shrunk sometimes by 50% on the mice under increased stress!
So the point is not to eliminate stress completely, just like we don’t eliminate gravity completely. We find ways to make distinctions between what is important to carry and what we can set aside. Then shift our perspective to re-align with our core values so the pressure we experience as stress can have a positive, strengthening effect on our lives.
-Michael Sanders
