How Stressed-Out Are YOU?Are you feeling stressed out? Too many things to do, too little time? One more thing added to
To-Do list and you feel like you’ll explode?
Whoa there, no exploding allowed! You can handle it—just listen in.
Listen? To what?
To your self-talk. Not yourself talk, but your SELF-TALK. Listen in to demands you’re making of your time, but more importantly listen in to how you’re saying them and what you’re saying.
Many of us don’t pay particular attention to what we’re saying to ourselves. We’ve never been taught importance of how damaging it can be to us nor have we been shown that we can use it to feel much better. You can literally un-stress yourself by using your own self-talk.
Listen in for –need-, -have-to-, -must-, type statements that you make to yourself.
“First I need to drop kids off, then I have-to go to grocery store, then I need to stop at bank, then I have-to get home and work on those taxes before having to go back out and pick up kids.”
You’ve just created a lot of demands on yourself. And yes, in order for your life to continue like you want, you would prefer to do all those things just like that. But you don’t NEED to, HAVE-TO or MUST.
By using demanding statements on yourself, you open up a lot of opportunities to say irrational things to yourself that create stress.
When you use demanding statements, you then create a scenario of “what-if” in your head. And when “what-if’s” back-up, then watch out stress level!
“What if I don’t get it done, what if I don’t get there in time to get kids, what if this, what if that.” This is when you really go into stress mode!
Asking such open-ended questions is origin much of your stress. You often answer with “that would be awful, that would be terrible” which compounds stressful feelings even more.
Since awful and terrible are labels way beyond bad, (actually labels that are beyond definition) you’ve created a situation in your head that ends up with you saying to yourself “…and I couldn’t stand it if that happened,” or “…I couldn’t stand feeling that way!”
