How Does Stress Make You Feel?

We all experience stress, some a little, some a lot. Sometimes we handle it and sometimes we don't. Sometimes it makes us more determined to push through and sometimes it crushes us! And we feel there is no solution.

It's hard to understand our own stress and impossible to understand the stress of another. Imagine a group of friends spending a day at an amusement park. At some point one of the group will suggest a ride on the roller coaster.

This will immediately evoke one of three reactions. One group will be excited and they will get a huge buzz from the ride, experiencing positive stress. Another group will feign excitement but will feel some degree of discomfort and avoid a second ride and the third group will have found a plausible reason to not go on the ride.

As this third group walks away they will feel a sense of relief overlaid with annoyance with themselves for not joining the others. When the ride was suggested it was the same ride for everyone but each experienced a different kind of stress.

Why we feel differently is about different beliefs and different decisions we have made about rollercoasters-and perhaps risk taking activities in general. Also the different experiences we have had. Put it all together and the one event will be as if, it is many events for the people involved.

Public speaking is considered the number one fear for most people, even greater than death itself. In my 10th grade at school I felt foolish for performing badly when given a topic about which I had to speak without preparation, especially when a class favourite came next and did an entertaining presentation on the same topic.

Yet just a decade latter I was running seminars and workshops and loving every minute of it. I have no idea when I made the transition from fear to pleasure, it just seemed to happen.

Not all stresses are so easily overcome.

I began my working life as a carpenter. I was never comfortable walking the narrow edges of the building frame or moving over the roof when there was only framing timber. I was always emotionally exhausted when I would return to the ground. I decided to take action to solve this so I enrolled in a parachuting class.

I discovered that stress can be very specific. Whilst I was uncomfortable walking a narrow plank at 20 feet above the ground it didn't particularly trouble me to step out of the door of a small plane at 2000 ft. I did however develop a new fear of cowboy pilots. This exercise did nothing about my fear of heights on building sites.

So what causes your stress?

Is it specific fears, or is it fear of the unknown or what might happen, is it places heights, spiders etc etc.

Do you need to be in control, exactly on time, perfect in all things you do. Do you stress over being judged or rejected by others.

Ask yourself this. How would I live my life if I really didn't care what others thought about me. How would I dress, what would I say. Most of our stress we create is in order to present a version of ourselves to the world. So others will see us as beautiful, handsome, happy, successful, organized, efficient etc.

Eventually we become disappointed, resentful, anxious, depressed, angry, unhappy or and miserable.

Stress can be significantly reduced when we start to see the problems in our lives from a different perspective. Tasks can be easy or hard depending on how we feel about them. Washing a car or mowing a lawn is either a boring job or free exercise. The weather is either too hot, too cold or just weather.

We give positive or negative meaning to everything in our lives, so maybe you can't easily change the big problems in your life, but you can remove the stress from the small stuff, which gives you more emotional power to cope with the big stuff.