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Your Emotional Immune System
Personal and Social Antibodies for Stress
You might not think you would choose to have stress, but many people do, for good reasons and bad. For many, very many, stress is an acceptable price they pay for values they hold dear.
I’ve known people who are so dead set against having stress that they don’t try anything new because it’ll make them nervous, they don’t go anywhere because people might look at them funny; they continue smoking cigarettes because they’ll feel like crap if they quit; or they don’t get attached to anything because, when they lose it, they’ll grieve. For a while, sometimes a long while, they are gloriously stress-free. It looks as though they’re doing well. They don’t give their families any trouble. They are not spending their days in misery.
The problem is that their lives are getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller. The day will come when they see the price they paid to be stress-free and, guess what? They’ll fall into despair. They will have dug themselves a bunker so deep, they can’t get out of it.
Contrast that to the person who works so hard at his job that he drives himself into the ground, not eating, not sleeping, not even caring how he feels as long as he meets his objectives. He doesn’t want to destroy his health, but he accepts it because he’s doing…
