Quiz:

It feels black and heavy when it's there, and light but sometimes empty when it's gone. What's that?

The answer is - you may have guessed - Stress. That inner pressure that makes us do things but also drains our energy.

What's Stress? Simply put, stress is our personal reaction to stressors. So now we can ask: What are stressors? Well it can be many things. But in a nutshell: life style, circumstances, and events, which are difficult and significant for us. Having to make a decision, time pressure, deadlines, having too many things to do in a short time span, being driven by guilt, difficulty balancing home and work, conflicts at home, drinking problems, divorce, moving, exams, birthday, wedding.

Our stress happens in three places: in our body, in the way we act, and in the way we feel. In our body, stress is especially important because it is usually the physical aspect of it that makes us do things. You take up more work load usually not so much because you rationalise it's good but because your guts, heart pressure or muscle tension virtally push you towards it. When stress lasts long, we may expect serious problems with our body to occur: vascular and heart diseases, sleep problems, exhaustion, loss of resistance to illness, allergies, asthma, back or stomach pains, migraines, and more. The way we act is the arena in which our stress is usually seen to others: bursts of verbal or physical anger, road rage, and more. The way we feel is part of the body stress reaction. We may feel depressed or anxious, panicky, upset or frustrated, fatigue, irritable, worrying, not being able to concentrate, tunnel-thinking. often, there is an inner experience that's common to all of those: what I call The Sourcerer's Apprentice syndrom. The brooms are keeping coming slowly but steadily, a sense of too littile control, and a feeling that something had gone wrong and it would be great if a sourcerer could come to help but he doesn't.

_{^{I am not stressed... I'm just being properly proactive!}}

Stress can affect everyone. But is stress always a serious problem? Well It may become one, but it isn't always a problem necessarily. Latest studies show that stress is the most commonly reported concern at workplace. According to one study, 43% of all adults suffer adverse health effects due to stress and 75-90% of all visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related issues. Stress has been linked to all the leading causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, lung illnesses, accidents, cirrhosis, suicide. Being constantly unhappy could be one typical result of long term exposure to stress. On the other hand, the ability to deal with stress seems to be built-in our system because otherwise how would so many of us be living such stressful lives with a reasonable amount of well-being? This suggests that stress is sometimes necessary, and in fact it is - up to a point. It fills us with a sense of urgency and pushes us to do stuff, to achieve, to resolve. Up to a point. If we get used to achieve things through stress, we may become so used to it that once it goes away we may feel empty as if something imortant has been taken away from us! This actually means that we often find ourselves motivated towards a stressfull lifestyle and we then in fact benefit from the stress.

What can you do? There is no one solution. It may become especially difficult to get rid of stress in times when we also benefit from it. To make things even more tricky, we sometimes feel the stress of somebody else as being our own's, because we emphatically sense what the other person feels. Getting rid of stress is nevertheless your right, and I strongly believe is possible. It usually requires that you work in several directions. For example:

• Changing some habits. It could be as simple as switching from one type of transportation to work to another one, or it may be as big as changing a career. Here, it could be helpful to discuss verious options with a wise friend or a professional. 
• Relaxation. This might involve an imagery technique, breathing, meditation, or something more active, such as working in the garden, going for a walk in the city, playing an instrument, golf, fishing, you got my point... 
• Trying to understand its sources, identify the benefits it gives you, and experimenting living without it. This is usually where psychotherapy or counseling might be relevant.

Goethe's The Sourcerer's Apprentice, translated by Zeydel

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