Life Tensions

Some tension is necessary for good mental health. Good tension represents the gap between what one has achieved and what he has yet to achieve. It is the difference between where one is and where she is aiming to be. Allowing the challenge to “be all that you can be” stimulates one from latent potential to actual meaning.

In architecture, to strengthen an arch, more weight is put on top to force the parts to join together into a stronger, cohesive whole. Positive stress creates healthy tension that re-orientates one toward the “will to meaning”, thus giving equilibrium to life. Too much tension is harmful to one’s body and mental health.

Reset a faulty stress monitor. All human beings are equipped with biological machinery for handling stress. Stress is endemic based on the “fight or flight” concept. Everyone has a built-in gauge that self-regulates. To panic when one encounters a bear in his path is one thing; to go to pieces when there is no milk is quite another. Like a set-point in an over-charged battery, when stress is activated unnecessarily, the body’s reactive system stays revved up and life becomes a continual crises. The response system reserved for a life-threatening event is unleashed to the boiling point over trivial matters.

Like begets like. We are creatures of learned behavior. The inability to handle stressful situations results in the inability to handle minor annoyances. This unstable environment sensitizes impressionable children to follow reactionary patterns. Losing control of yourself may have occurred before you were old enough to prevent it yourself. But you are not a child anymore. The window of change is yours through information.

It’s Never Too Late. Although the way you handle stress today may have been influenced by a non-nurturing environment, it is never too late to make a conscious decision to change. In order to function one may suppresses the activating event but the emotional outworking continues until the issue is consciously resolved. We have to be connected to the emotion in order to change it.

Start with a deep breath, hold for three seconds and slowly force the air out through your lips. Repeat, saying to yourself: “I breathe in peace and release anxiety.” In the calmness open your mental data-base where the source of the trauma exists.

As you review the emotion in a detached state, you are in position to make a life changing conscious shift; to truly allow bygones to be bygones. You become equipped to live in the now and grow into whom you were created to be.

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