Why Am I So Stressed Out?

"No matter what we've already achieved, there will be times when we come up against roadblocks to personal and professional progress. The question is not whether you're going to have problems, but how you're going to deal with them when they come up." Tony Robbins

Here is a story for you to think about.

Two young boys were raised by an alcoholic father. As they grew older, they moved away from that broken home, each going his own way in the world. Several years later, they happened to be interviewed separately by a psychologist who was analysing the effects of drunkenness on children in broken homes. His research revealed that the two men were strikingly different from each other. One was a clean-living teetotaler; the other, a hopeless drunk like his father. The psychologist asked each of them why he developed the way he did, and each gave an identical answer, "What else would you expect when you have a father like mine?"

That story was revealed by Dr. Hans Selye, internationally renowned Canadian physician and scientist known as the father of stress. A medical pioneer, he devoted the majority of his years to the exploration of biological stress. And he related the story of the two sons of the drunken father in an article for New Realities.

Stress theory and Dr. Selye's work is a critical part of nutritional balancing. Stress has a very predictable and reliable response in the human body and the minerals on a hair tissue analysis tell that story. More and more we are seeing people in the exhausted stage of stress and having to rebuild from the ground up. Why?

The story illustrates a deeper and cardinal rule implicit in stress, health, and human behaviour. Picture your stress as a spider. If you are scared of spiders you will have a stress response in your body and if the spider never goes away you will eventually reach the burnout/exhausted stage. If you are not scared of spiders then you will not have any stress response at all, and no negative health consequences. The drunk son perceived his stress in a negative fashion and acted according to his belief. The successful son interpreted his stress and roadblocks in an entirely different manner. The key is how you perceive and interpret the stress.

So when you hit your next roadblock in life (because it is coming) how are you going to perceive it and act? Are you going to curl up in a ball and cry woe is me, or are you going to accept facts and get on with the business of best dealing with it. It is truly dependent on how we perceive it. Armed with this kind of information, it would seem that we can greatly improve our reactions to stressful situations. What seems to be a cruel world to one person might be filled with challenge and opportunity to another. It is our reaction that makes the difference.

Dr. Todd Lizon B.P.H.E., D.C.