You’ve heard me say so many times that stress is a bad thing.
Stress can make you ill and it really does gives you all those really difficult, dangerous diseases like cardiovascular disease and it can be so dangerous if not managed that it might even kill you. That’s what I’ve been telling you all the time right? And that still is true.
But that depends on how you take care of your stress, because new research has found that if you can see stress as a sign that something is wrong and you do something about it, then stress can actually be of good help.
What is stress?
Stress is not all the things you do, stress is the physical signs that pops up in your body and in your mind. If you let these signs grow and accumulate then you are on track for getting the negative side of stress. Ignoring the signs is going to raise your stress hormones and long term high stress hormones are not good for you because stress really is a killer.
But, if you see the stress when it comes as a sign for that something is not OK and ask yourself:
What is stress telling me?
What are all those signs telling me about what’s going on?
What do I need to change? What can I do?
What can I do differently next time to learn how to tackle that reaction?
And now we’re talking about mindset. It’s getting up in your brain that this physical feeling has an emotional connection and that stress is your warning system. If you can learn that and you can manage to use your stress as that then it’s going to be a help to you.
I talked about this in a community in a small town in Sweden and there were about 50 leaders from the different departments in this community that were having a day for them to learn more about themselves and that kind of thing. So we talked about stress for a couple hours.
When I told them this story about how stress can be your friend, this lady stood up in her chair and she said “yes, oh yes! Holy smoke. That’s just how it is.” she continued:
“I have always wondered why all you guys say that stress is so dangerous and that you’ll get stressed out for anything and that it’s a bad thing. I’ve always used it just like you tell me right now. I use it as help, to guide me and to tell me something is wrong. It makes me ask what do I need to do differently? And when I do it differently I get content in my mind that I’m doing something good and I don’t feel stressed out.”
Of course, that lady does not have high levels of stress hormones all the time because she was using stress to her to her advantage. She was using the power in the stress reaction to her advantage to change things and to make it good. So that’s what I want to bring to you today, I want you to start looking at the signs when you get stressed out. What is it telling you? What do you need to do differently?
Because there are tons of things that you probably can do differently and sometimes if you can’t do anything about it right now you just say to yourself OK I’m going to do this right now and the next time I’m going to change it when this whatever it is, comes up again I need to change so that this doesn’t happen again.
If you need help to get started with this process then to find your mindset then feel free to click the link below and we can have a short chat for free to see what your needs are and if you have colleagues who need this kind of information and I’m really sure you do have colleagues that need this information or friends then feel free to share the link to this blog with them.
So happy mindset changing about what stress is. Good luck.
