Get Off The Merry Go Round

One of the first lessons I had to learn along my healing journey was how to cope with stress.

Stress is any reaction to a physical, emotional or mental stimulus that upsets the body’s natural balance.  It can be a positive or a negative change but, we still feel it as stress.  Positive changes like getting a new job or buying a house feels different from personal crisis or loss, but they all elicit a stress response in the body.  Learning skills to cope or not cope with change happens at a young age.

Most of us learned from our parents and/or environment and we continued to repeat the same patterns as a response to change.  I used to think that I loved change.  One day I realized that I loved to change my hairstyle, my make-up, my clothes and maybe my interest in movies but that was it!  When it came down to coping with real life changes, I was an over-reactor and did not see any of life’s twists and turns as a challenge or opportunity for personal growth.  I did what my parents did and yelled, cried, blamed, made excuses and justified reality, as a result, I kept the rose-colored glasses on.

As you look at your own life now, how do you assess your stress management style?  Are you an over-reactor, do you blame others for you circumstances…maybe always a victim of circumstances?  Do you feel that others are running your life and that you have little or no control?  Or, maybe you learned good coping skills and when stressful events occur, you are able to take a deep breath, respond with a healthy attitude and make a plan of action.

It took me years to get to a place of accepting reality and taking responsibility for life changing events.  I walked baby steps towards becoming empowered and seeing new choices.  I think the source of many people’s “problems” is that they do not have the courage (facing fear) to make the tough choices, even though they know it would be the right action to move their life in a positive direction.  How can you build the ability to make healthy choices?  I believe you take it one step at a time.  Although the healing journey is not linear  ( there are side roads, detours, obstacles and loop backs!), there are also steps that lead to the next.

A first step for me was what I called, “Getting Off the Merry Go Round” or becoming conscious of the role you play in the drama of your life.  That means you stop spinning around and around in the comfort zone of old behavioral patterns and jump off… accept where you are and start from there.  But, when you first land you’re feeling pretty dizzy and the only way to get steady is to breathe and calm yourself.  There is a lot of information about how important deep breathing, progressive relaxation and meditation is to your well-being.  It’s a necessary step to waking up and it takes practice and you have to start somewhere!

My suggestion is to begin wherever you are, in the car, at work, in the bathroom, walking or in bed, it doesn’t matter.  Take 3 deep breaths (push your belly out while breathing in) to the count of four on the inhale and exhale.  At the same time say, “I am relaxed” while releasing tension in your muscles from head to toe.  Do this a few times throughout the day and before sleep.  The benefits are not just for  stress management, but also to build self-esteem (liking yourself) which many people are lacking.

How does this work?  When you do something you say you are going to do and commit to making a change, you put money in your self-esteem bank account and it feels great when you see it grow.  The goal is to build the account to a level of LOVING yourself which gives you the power to really rock your world!   But.. more on that later, after all this was just a first step!