Combatting Stress: Under Pressure
In my little mini-series about stress I have discussed how wasting mental energy worrying about things out of your control fuels stress unnecessarily. The worrying about things in the past that cannot be changed or in the future that might not ever happen isn’t worth the anxiety it creates.
Another thing that generates unneeded stress is pressure. I’m not talking about situations where the pressure is warranted like facing danger or encountering a medical challenge. What I am talking about is the pressure of unreasonable expectations.
We may take a situation and make the stakes higher than it really is. In our mind we might make a situation one of “life or death” when it really isn’t anywhere near that. In most cases the worst case scenario is something that can be lived with, so there is no reason to raise the stakes unnecessarily and increase the anxiety.
We also tend to put pressure on our selves to be perfect in our thoughts and actions. In reality none of us is perfect and we will fail at things. Other people know this and accept that. But we are our own worst critic and that self criticism leads to the stress of feeling unworthy.
I am guilty of creating unrealistic expectations on myself. I place pressure on myself to be more successful at work or make more money rather than be satisfied with where I was. When I was exercising I could control to run further or faster but placing unreasonable goals based on what I was capable of did nothing but create stress and remove the enjoyment that I was really running for.
Creating goals and having expectations for ourself does have good components. But if those goals are not reasonable or expectations are not met does no good. It leads to feelings of self unworthiness. And those feelings lead to stress-stress we don’t need.
If you missed the other posts in the stress miniseries here are the links to check them out (Although I can’t image why you’d ever want to back in this blog).
