I have noticed that talking about stress might be a similar phenomenon. We talk about or busy lives, our work, relationship and family stresses. Stress is sometimes almost seen as a virtue - the more stressed you are, the more important or virtuous you must be. A lot of people talk about stress but few people do anything about it. While talking about stress undoubtedly helps to relieve some stress and support, validation and acknowledgment can go a long way, it doesn't really get at root causes. Like a passing storm, other people simply cling to the hope that the stress will soon pass and blue skies will be on the horizon again soon, however temporarily. More worrisome however, are those people that don't even notice their stress, or have become addicted or habituated to it. They are neither talking about the weather (stress) nor doing anything about it, but are likely being the most impacted by it.
Even a cursory glance at the research on the impact of stress on the body is enough to generate a stress response! With a stressful situation, our flight and fight systems gets activated so that we can effectively deal with real or imagined threats. However, if we don't calm ourselves down relatively quickly, our health can be impacted significantly. Many of us have heard the rather cruel anecdote about a frog's natural response to being put in a pot of boiling water (stress) is to jump to safety. However, if the frog is put in a pot of water that is gradually heated up, the frog will fail to jump out of the hot water, and die. This points to a more insidious type of stress -not those real but dramatic life events such as a relationship breakup, job loss, or the death of a significant person in our lives-but the everyday stresses that we sometimes get more or less accustomed to.
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Stress - Talking About it and Finding Solutions
