I am Stress (And So Can You!)

In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant... One motto on the show is, "Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth."
Stephen Colbert

America is under attack, people, and I don’t mean from terrorists, reality TV shows or bears. I’m talking about stress. We have become one nation under stress and it’s time to take the bull by the horns. Or, at the very least, recognize the fact that there is a bull loose in the china shop called the psyche and it’s about to knock over what you have spent your life stacking neatly on the shelves.

It’s time to look stress straight in the eye and, in the words of the president, "not blink." "What about the dangers?" you ask. "Stress kills and I have grown found of continuing my existence, so of course I want to run away from stress" you say, even before I can respond to the first question. Take a breath and let it out. Feel better? Don’t answer, it was rhetorical. Stress doesn’t kill, your reaction to stress kills you. More to the point, it is the constant flood of cortisol and other stress hormones that gradually begin to shrink the brain, eat away at a healthy heart and close off the otherwise open pathways for blood flow. Feel better?

The way out of this stress trap is not the fight or flight method. Save those reactions for the constant barrage of news stories about the stock market. The way out is to go through, to feel that stress is not separate and outside of yourself. To overcome stress one needs to come to terms with one’s stressiness™, a term I have trademarked. Know that you and stress are intimately connected. Without you there is no stress.

What I am proposing is no less than a stress revolution. It is time to throw off the chains of the Western mechanistic model of stress that sees stress as an invading force from the outside, and adopt the silky ropes of an Eastern model that sees stress as an organic process. We are going to have to admit that we grow stress inside of ourselves, some of us with the care of a master gardener, and then watch as the fruits of our labor spread across the landscape we call our lives. It’s time to wake up and realize tension is the stuff that life is made of. From the battleground that is your cellular system to the farthest reaches of the solar system where stars collide like an episode of Entertainment Tonight, the push and pull, rise and fall and yin and yang of existence are complimentary movements not contradictory ones.

You have stress in the same way that you have a temperature. It is only when this temperature moves away from its set point that we call it a fever. When body temperature rises too high, we suffer. So, too, with stress. So let’s drop the silly notion that we can be stress free. Let’s stop looking for "the secret" that will remove all tension from our lives. You can become a manifesting machine and use the law of attraction to bring all of the new cars, boats, and houses you want into your life, you will still have stress (in most cases even more as you try to figure out how to pay for all of these things). Let’s take an oath to move head-on into our stress and come to know it as ourselves. I know that when I am stressed, I am stress, and so can you. Join me, Nation, on this great adventure in search of the ultimate truth.