Hans Selye said, “It is not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.” You, yes you, the one listening to the podcast – do you have stress in your life? Do you think of that stress as being good or bad?
In today’s episode we’re going to talk about the S word! Yup – Stress. Who can’t use a few empowering tips and stories about this constant state of the 21st century? Stay tuned for insights from a lot of great minds on this topic.
Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Power serves you best when you know how to use it.
What if stress isn’t what you’ve always thought it was? I’m going to start today’s discussion with some scientific research and then we’re going to hear from folks like the Dalai Lama and Marcus Aurelius, and when we’re done, you just might see things a little differently.
So, starting with a TED talk by Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist, where she makes her confession – that the idea she’s been teaching about stress and seeing it as the enemy has been all wrong. Listen to this research study she did and then let’s talk about this new way of seeing things:
https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend#t-43174 ([1:16] – [6:30])
So…if we view our body’s response to stress and fabulous programming that’s helping you rise to the challenge, how does it change your aversion to stress?
Dalai Lama said, “We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we obtain peace within ourselves.”
What if part of that peace is a shift of a story. The shift of the story that stress is bad, that life is overwhelming, that I can’t possibly handle this intensity of living, to the story that your body’s response to stress is healthy, helpful, and manageable? Well first off, if you change the story and you tell yourself this new truth, your body believes you and your responses internally change. That inner peace with a clearer understanding becomes a stepping stone for a more peaceful outer world. We can create a new understanding and story about the physical effects of stress.
Now, another great thinker, Marcus Aurelius shares wisdom about the psychological power we have regarding what we allow to cause us stress. He said, “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
Let me repeat that: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
Gosh that does two things – First, it means you and I have to take responsibility for our mental state, but second, that means we suddenly have control. Yay!
Let me state the obvious in a few examples – if you have a set of internal stories about how thin and lifeless your hair is, well, regardless of if that’s true, that in and of itself does not cause pain, it’s the fact that you find it unacceptable that causes you the pain. If you have a belief that reading a book is painful – it’s not that reading a book is actually painful, it’s that you chose to see it as painful. If you have issues around money and your car breaks down and you have to pull out the credit card for a new fuel line – this experience is only painful if your mindset creates pain around it.
I hear over and...
