Stress and CC Girl

In light of the week month I'm having, I've been thinking a great deal about stress. Well, actually, I'm not choosing to think about it. It just sort of creeps in and actively thinking about it is the only way to make it go away.

I received the little ditty below via email this week. And while I'm not one to repost/resend this kind of thing, I found a few nuggets of truth in this one:

 A young lady confidently walked around the room while explaining stress management to an audience with a raised glass of water. Everyone knew she was going to ask the ultimate question, 'half empty or half full?' She fooled them all. "How heavy is this glass of water?" she inquired with a smile. Answers called out ranged from 8 oz. to 20 oz.

She replied , "The absolute weight doesn't matter. It depends on how long I hold it. If I hold it for a minute, that's not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I'll have an ache in my right arm."

"If I hold it for a day, you'll have to call an ambulance. In each case it's the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes." She continued, "And that's the way it is with stress. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, as the burden becomes increasingly heavy, we won't be able to carry on."

"As with the glass of water, you have to put it down for a while and rest before holding it again. When we're refreshed, we can carry on with the burden - holding stress longer and better each time practiced. So, as early in the evening as you can, put all your burdens down. Don't carry them through the evening and into the night. Pick them up tomorrow."

There are times when I'm not even aware of my stress level. I think I'm "handling" it OK and then all of a sudden I'm screaming in my car at no one or crying over something small and insignficant. I try to offset it by making sure I'm getting good sleep, eating well and exercising to blow off a little steam. But there are days that's just not enough.

We talked about it this morning at Girls Got Grit. I learned that stress can do crazy things to your body ... make you "hold" weight. I haven't taken time to find scientific evidence for that, but it makes sense to me on a "duh" kind of way. If you're whole self is not working properly, it makes sense to me that your weight loss/maintenance efforts would be thrown out of whack. The WHOLE of you has to be working for the whole of you to WORK, if that makes sense.

So how do you manage stress in your life? Are you carving out time to take care of you? Are you practicing setting them aside? Are you calling on your support system (here in CCland) to help?

We're here. If you need us.