Being Stess Resilient

By Karen Best Wright

The other day I was listening to a CD about stress management. Except the speaker was much like I am. She does not like the term stress management. I don't like the term because when I am majorly stressed, the last thing I want is one more thing to manage.

This speaker preferred to use the words becoming stress resilient. I liked those words. She talked about a lot of different things, but she did stress the importance of the basics. Taking care of ourselves physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. She talked about the different types of stress. Physical stress, mental stress, and emotional stress. If our bodies are unhealthy or our emotions are all over the chart, it will be hard to become resilient to stress.

As I thought about the word resiliency, I thought of a trampoline. When we jump, we go down and bounce back up. That is certainly better than landing hard on cement. So as we go through our daily lives, are we preparing our physical and emotional bodies to be prepared to be resilient to stress. I know when I am under tons of stress, I tend to not eat. Then I lose weight, become weak, bruise easily, get sick easily and am not very resilient to stress. Some people tend to over eat with confronted with stress, I tend to under eat. Neither will help us become stress resilient.

The time to prepare for stressful events is before they happen if al all possible. That obviously may not be possible when stressful events are unexpected. But when you know that something stressful is coming up, now is the time to prepare yourself physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally if at all possible.

Recently when I was going through an enormous amount of stress that was wrecking havoc on my body, I thought about a woman on the news whose son was a prisoner in Iraq. I realized that her experience was worse than mine. Mine was severe, but I was grateful it was not that severe.

Anyway, I liked the term "stress resilient" rather than stress management. I usually use the term "releasing stress," but "stress resilient" was a nice term as well.

Karen Wright, B.S. Community Health Education

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Comments

[Susan Adcox]

As a former English teacher, I'm a firm believer that what we call things makes a difference. I like "stress resilient" too!