Dealing with Extremely High Stress

Whether you are in Manhattan dealing with a high stress corporate job, or you are an overwhelmed, single parent dealing with four screaming kids, high stress can wipe you out quickly and cleanly. Rather than reverting to Obsessive-Compulsive behavior or running yourself straight into the ground, follow these time-honored steps to dealing with high stress:

Take off one day a week...completely. Judaic and Biblical teachings tout the benefits of taking a "Sabbath rest." Your body absolutely needs enough time to reproduce cells and actually relax your muscles. Your mind needs quiet time to reflect, refocus and evaluate all of your priorities on a very regular basis. Rather than going to church and then mowing the lawn, cleaning the house and catching up on lost work, take the entire day off from work, sleep in, and quietly reflect on the beauty around you. If you need a time set up for you, it is traditional to take a rest from Friday at sundown to Saturday at sundown.

Reflect on every single priority in your life. This is a healing process. Your body is designed to handle a lot of stress, but not on a continual basis. You absolutely must think about reorganizing your life and focusing on the things you would like to focus on, leaving everything else aside. High stress can suck you in and hold you in positions you would, if thinking clearly, not allow yourself to be placed. This is robbing you of your control over your own life. Do not sit quietly while this is taken away from you! Sit down for a stress-free afternoon by yourself, sip some coffee or hot tea, and think about what is important to you. Think about what comes first, and whether you still want those things to come first.

Reconnect with your roots. This is not a platitude. Losing part or all of your identity can leave you floating in a sea of turbulence, surrounded by people and places you don't know or fully understand. Remember your ancestry and reconnect with a family member, even if you never knew them. You don't have to mend fences with current family members, necessarily. However, you would gain a lot from understanding your lineage, where you came from, and something about your family. This leaves a foundation upon which to build your life. Remember who you really are, and don't hold back in looking for every positive aspect of your lineage.

Understand good and bad stress. There is such a thing as good stress. Good stress is driving for four hours in the rain to pick up a friend who is in trouble, or comforting a loved one who just lost their spouse. Good stress has an end product that is greater than all of the parts which came before. Bad stress is taking another insult from someone you don't even like, who is visiting at your house. Guests, be they family members or not, are required to act with respect and a certain amount of decorum, and this is a boundary which you should set. Examine the stresses in your life, determine which type they are, and ruthlessly cut out any bad stress.

Dealing with extremely high stress is not a small undertaking. You will need to cut things out of your life which you normally would never think to cut out. You will need to set priorities and stick to them, no matter what, for that is the way you control your own life. Invest in good stress which has a greater end product. Enjoy being alive, rather than being alive to sacrifice to something you don't enjoy.