So, is my friend smarter than say Country Girl or Colleen? Maybe, maybe not.
It turns out from our exchange of posts that CountryGirl had a lot of things going on in her life. Among other things, she was teaching and coaching, raising two kids, working on a book, and engaged in a bitter custody battle. Then her moods flared up, and now she was faced with the additional stress of being asked to resign.
Would things have turned out differently had CountryGirl been able to head off all these stresses at the pass? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes, life gang-tackles us. Then we're left with no choice but to say hello to the ground rising up to meet our face.
We are an extremely vulnerable population, after all. Taking deep breaths and counting to ten is not going to work for us the way it is for a more resilient population.
Life is also capable of leveling us with bean balls to the back of the head. Colleen in her post talks about her "hair-line stress trigger." A few days ago, she posted, "because of similarities between my immediate environment and the specific environment of childhood pain," suddenly, "I felt utter hopelessness and defeat."
Hard to see that coming. Here she was, on the couch, settling in for an enjoyable evening with her partner, when - pow! - out of the blue: "My mood dropped like a rock."
Let's face it, there are times when life is going to reduce us to nothing. We do everything right - and something goes wrong. So maybe the first rule about managing stress is this:
Managing stress doesn't always work.
Perfectly well-meaning people sometimes have ways of making us feel guilty when we predictably cave into our vulnerabilities. They think all we have to do is follow the manual. But life isn't always that simple. We fall down a lot. We go to pieces. It happens.
Second rule of managing stress:
Managing stress works a lot of the time.
The ancients knew the value of stopping and smelling the roses. Enlightened mental health treatment in the US was founded on the principle of placing individuals in restful country environments. A major chunk of the economy is based on creating for us little pockets of rest and leisure and tranquility. Nearly all the drug companies have new-generation stress meds in development. Modern talk therapy is all about negotiating our way through a stress-filled world.
