Storms are something we all have to deal with in our lives. They come and they go – sometimes destroying things and sometimes inspiring us with the renewal that they bring. The old adage “April showers bring May flowers” fits as a description of our lives as well as weather.
As of late I have found myself “on a stormy sea of moving emotion, tossed about I’m like a ship on the ocean.” (Ten bonus points to anyone who can name the source of that quote without using some type of search engine.) Time and time again when things appear to be improving with no big waves on the horizon I wonder, “When will the next big wave come crashing down on us.” And, inevitably, it always does.
For the last six months or so we have had some pretty big stressors in our lives. Dr. Rajita Sinha, head of Yale’s Stress Center, was recently quoted as saying, “It’s stress that is sustained, uncontrollable and overwhelming, where people can’t figure out options to solve their problems, that is damaging.”
Sustained.
Uncontrollable.
Overwhelming.
Imagine if you will a triangle where each side has a label associated with it – sustained, uncontrollable, overwhelming. If you remove but one side the triangle will fall apart. For me the side to remove that makes all the others collapse is “uncontrollable”. Control is everything. I hate the feeling of not knowing. Once an event occurs, you can at least gain a little bit of control through how you react. Once you have control, the stress triangle collapses.
Bilbo Baggins described how I feel best in the movie The Fellowship of the Ring when he told Gandalf the following, “I’m old, Gandalf. I know I don’t look it, but I’m beginning to feel it in my heart. I feel… thin – sort of stretched – like… butter, scraped over too much bread.”
I was on www.lifehacker.com a couple of days ago and came across the following article about stress:
Hopefully this helps others who, like me, are dealing with excessive stress in their lives. Hopefully you can make some changes before you start to feel like I do right now and don’t have to deal with sustained, uncontrollable and overwhelming stress – hoping and praying that the storm will quickly pass.
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