The Roots of Stress: How Do You Dig In So You Can Stop Stressing Out?

anxiety awareness depression emotional awareness inner game stress

Stress.

It seems all of us are under it, overwhelmed with it, or just plain in it. It's one of the most common words we use nowadays.

I'm old enough to remember when the word stress started making its way into our everyday vocabulary. I believe part of this is due to our society as a whole getting more comfortable with acknowledging weakness and the need for help—a necessary step towards being more honest with ourselves and others.

It was a good shift to make in our collective consciousness; however, I think we're ready to take it to the next level. "Stress" is often a complex mixture of our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions concerning a situation or event, and the (semi/subconscious) connection to our back story.

Even when we are dealing with a stressor involving our physical self, it's how we deal with the rest of that mix that determines how we handle it.

Or don't.

Think about a physical goal that involves weight lifting or physical training. Any pain or discomfort you experience along the way is bearable because of how you feel about achieving the result. Adjusting our mindset on any physical ailment or pain to focus on the reward can drastically reduce our stress load, even when the ailment sticks around for a while, or involves something we wish to avoid at all costs.

The power to move forward with more peace and clarity lies in mastering your mindset, emotions, and perspective.

Mastery of mindset, emotion, and perspective benefits every aspect of your life.

Whether it's physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, social, home, work, with people, by ourselves, on a bus, or in a restaurant, similar to green eggs and ham, these adjustments go absolutely anywhere! (Sorry, the cadence was just too much for me to resist.)

Regardless of the details, stress occurs when we don't take the time to honestly and thoroughly process a situation.

As a Certified Emotional Health and High-Performance coach, I see the following list as being the most common origins of stress. Some of them will even work together as a team to really get you wound up and spinning.

The Roots of Stress

Unprocessed emotions
Unprocessed thoughts
Not making a decision
Using energy to avoid looking at the issue (distraction, denial, justifying, addiction)
Control (feeling controlled, trying to control)
Constraints (time, ability, resource)
Unresolved situation (limbo or pattern repeat)
A belief that is unrecognized, unacknowledged, and/or unexamined
Loss (of self-care, nutrition, health, job, awareness/dealing with illness, accident, death, divorce)

Notice that "people" are not on the list.

Of course, any interaction has the potential to add stress to our lives; however, people are not the root of our stress. How we interpret the interaction is our real ground zero. It's astounding how, once we address and then learn to coach ourselves through a collaborative conversation, thriving during stressful events is totally possible.

Some of these sources (time, resource, ability) can look unchangeable to us, but by asking ourselves what we believe, we can shift our perspective even on these aspects that wear us down and stress us out.

Are you ready to improve your internal dialogue and see positive changes throughout your life?