How To Handle Stress When life Sucks
A Victim to Victim talk
I studied agriculture. Perhaps I shouldn’t have because I hate it. I’m the type of guy who can spend the entire day on an ergonomic chair, dashing with it to pick crumpled paper after missing a free throw until the leather peels off the damn thing.
You get it; agriculture wasn’t for me; I’m probably allergic to mud anyway. But I learned a simple fact that astounds me to this day. My instructor said chickens get stressed.
Look, I’m not an uncompassionate freak; I get it; maybe someone tips them, the end game, they’ll be in someone’s pot.
However, an essential lesson I got from this is that stress is no stranger to anyone at any stage of life. We all get our fair share of it every now and then. Some more regularly than others.
With that in mind, we might need to learn how to settle well with it; stress is here to stay.
Accept and Appreciate The Moments You’re Stressed. They mean you’re alive.
Between late 1930 and early 1940, the Kennedys had a challenge with Rosemary, JFK’s (former president of the U.S.) baby sister. She’d frequently sneak out of school, suffer impulsive anger outbursts, severe depression, and mood swings.
All this wasn’t best for the pristine political image of the family. They had to do something. The only problem is no one knew what that something was.
Antidepressants or mental health medication weren’t popular; instead, these were the days of Dr. Walter Freeman and his famous transorbital lobotomy.
A lobotomy is a form of psychosurgery that involves cutting connections in the prefrontal cortex. To perform a lobotomy on a patient means drilling through their forehead to remove some brain matter.
In the case of transorbital lobotomy, eye sockets are the route to the frontal lobe instead.
Its results would be relief from stress among numerous mental ills.
Egas Moniz, the physician who invented it, believed patients suffer schizophrenia, chronic depression, and ongoing suicidal thoughts due to abnormal prefrontal lobe connections. Ultimately cutting these connections would be a terrific solution.
Moniz was awarded a Nobel prize in physiology and medicine in 1949. That came after he was nominated by Walter Freeman, who in 1941 performed a transorbital lobotomy on 23-year-old Rosemary Kennedy.
Usually, the results of lobotomy were mixed; you’d either die due to surgery complications(5% of the time), or you’d come out a cabbage that doesn’t worry about anything. Getting Lobotomy was a would you rather….or…..? sort of game.
Yes, patients were relieved from stress and the pain of life, but they’d be thoughtless cabbages. And as such was the case of Rose Kennedy. After she went through the procedure, her mental capacity became that of a two-year-old. Though her ills were gone, she could hardly say a few words.
Technically, Rose went from a stressed, vocal, and seldomly violent youth to someone who can’t walk to the bathroom when nature calls.
In several cases, lobotomy recipients would fail to make new memories; for instance, H.M. (name private) had to ask multiple times what he was doing an hour into the task. And sometimes, an entire day lasted 15 minutes for him. Shame on you if you laughed!
Rosemary was institutionalized for the rest of her life and died at 86 in 2005. That’s 63 years of being alive but not living.
Lobotomy was banned in the mid-1950s, different countries stated it was against the principles of humanity. The final nail to it in the U. S was in 1967 when Walter Freeman botched an operation, consequently losing both the patient and his practicing license.
What would you instead do, live a stressful life or surrender to being a zombie? At least your troubles would be gone. As you think of an answer, remember the opposite of living is not dying; it’s succumbing.
The first step to managing stress is not trying to live a life without it but perhaps creating a mutualistic relationship with it.
See, lobotomy and drug abuse have one thing in common. And that is trying to eliminate stress completely. In turn, the results are utterly unacceptable. To this day, we hardly appreciate the outcome of these two approaches.
Employing any of the two fails to appreciate that mental ills are a necessary part of life. It is through the things we are willing to suffer, that we find meaning in life.
You probably go to the gym, inflict pain to your muscles and cause suffering to your body. Similarly, we’re willing to take the most disgusting medications and insert 0.5 mm diameter needles under our skins to seek better health. We could use the same principles when approaching stress; what matters the most is not the pain itself but the reason for the pain.
Naturally, we can take the pain, but there is a caveat. And that caveat is “the reason for the pain”.
If you can take a finger-sized needle, hoping to get better, how about you accept mental strains while serving your purpose.
Getting stressed overwork means you care about your work. So work things out and build an excellent relationship with your job. Is your wife on your nerves? If it hurts, it means you care, and you must get stressed over it. It’d be better to funnel the emotion into finding a solution than trying not to worry.
If we don’t stress over life, we will be reckless screwballs roaming over the earth. Instead, we care enough about our future to protest over global warming and the high carbon footprint left by our industries. These matters will affect our great-grandsons, not us, but we still care. And that’s important.
Stressing over things made our species survive volcanoes, horrific earthquakes, and floods.
Stress is not a vice. It is a natural defense mechanism that keeps us safe from threats.
What you should strive to do is to choose what to stress over. Otherwise, stressing over things that you find meaning in is essential. It’s like enduring the horrible taste of medicine, knowing well that you’ll feel better later on.
I’m not encouraging stressing over the tiniest things in life. Instead, the point is efforts to completely do away with stress are often fruitless. It’d be better to know it’s okay to be stressed rather than demonizing it.
Do Something, Whatever The Something is.
When most of us get hit by highly demanding situations, we quickly get desperate. All we do is hold our jaws in anticipation that time will sort things out.
No doubt time is the greatest healer, but it works in its own time. And that can be anything from a century to forever. If you don’t take action, problems that need six months tops can be prolonged for decades.
The truth is stress thrives in idleness.
If you want to feel at ease with a challenge, let yourself know you’re doing something about it. There is nothing your mind hates than knowing you’re frail, helpless, and bald of solutions. A bit of action will solicit hope in your mind even when the action is deemed ineffective. Just do something.
Before you rule out a solution as useless, try it blindly. It is through the not-so-good solutions that we find the terrific ones. If you don’t do anything, you’re guaranteed to suffer.
What taking action does is give you a sense of control of the situation. Stress hits the hardest when we feel things are happening to us and we have no say as to what can and cannot happen to us.
Taking action itself is a game-changer in this case. At this point, you take charge and restore confidence in self. The aftermath is that stress goes pale.
If you can’t fly, then run; if you can’t run, then walk; if you can’t walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
Whenever I read this quote, my imagination takes me to someone whose butt is a second away from being devoured by a german shepherd. And their knees are weak with fear; of course, they can’t run anymore. It’s a high-stress situation by now; they would’ve peed themself.
Will crawling save them?
Probably not, but at least their butt will heal knowing its host tried their best.
That might’ve sounded cringe, but don’t resolve to folding hands and watching things sort themselves out when stressed. Instead, take action, roll your sleeves back, and just do something no matter how trifle the step is.
Types Of Actions
I’m sure you felt the idea of “doing something” felt too abstract to be practical. And that is because they weren’t examples to clarify.
But see, they’re never blanket actions that’ll solve everyone’s troubles. Besides, I hate writing listicles. There is nothing wrong with them, but I prefer we dig out solutions together as we telepath through your screen and mine.
Actions can be anything. It can be taking a jog if it is an argument with your wife. Pick up a side hustle if you’re in dire need of a PS5 or your finances are just hail wire.
Maybe your gut is growing out of proportions; you haven’t seen your toes ever since the pandemic. And it’s killing you. Before you bum on the couch all day, blame poor genes; how about you get some resistance bands and skipping ropes and work on your gut.
Each of the actions is suited for different stressing situations. An argument with your partner might get you stressed but not forever; a stroll in the park might do. But if you’re broke, that calls for a paradigm shift.
Some are lifestyle changes that mean a lifetime commitment, while others are quick diversions to contain situations. Both are actions that are effective solutions to their problems.
Go to the bar and get wasted if your 8-year-old tells you she hates you after a bedtime squabble. Of course, I’m kidding; drug abuse is never a solution. Perhaps you should be warry of regressive actions too.
However, not taking action is more common than taking an utterly regressive action among victims of stress.
Look, I’m not a psychologist, but stress frequently freaks me out. Like you, I’m a victim too. Therefore, my solutions are entirely based on my experiences, which are not universal. It’d be helpful if you added a little spin to my approach to suit your problems.
I have a gut issue; my skipping rope is waiting for me by the door; If you may excuse me, mmmm I've got to take action
Sources
https://www.ranker.com/list/lobotomies-before-and-after/jacob-shelton
adopted from youthvisionoverload.com and derbymatoma.com
