51% of adults who felt stressed reported feeling depressed, and 61% reported feeling anxious.
Why start with statistics?
Stress is a part of our everyday life. And emotional stress is right there on the top.
We all experience it.
There are more and more concerning facts, not only about stress in the workplace but also about the younger generations, all the way down to kindergartners.
I’ve decided to look closer at this modern epidemic and its impact on our lives.
Is there also good stress?
I came across the podcast The Diary of the CEO where Steve Bartlet is hosting Mo Gawdat and was fascinated with it.
You can see the full episode here.
The first thing I learned was that there are 4 types of stress:
- Mental Stress: This involves cognitive overload, excessive worrying, and racing thoughts.
- Emotional Stress: This type pertains to feelings of anxiety, sadness, anger, or emotional instability.
- Physical Stress: This is related to physical strain on the body, such as fatigue, muscle tension, or physical illness.
- Spiritual Stress: This type encompasses a sense of disconnection, lack of purpose, or existential anxiety
There is no coincidence I dove into the topic of stress.
Looking back I can firmly say that I experienced two of the four types of stress:
- Emotional stress and
- Physical stress
I thought they were the same because it’s hard to distinguish between the two (or at all).
To fully grasp the differences between at least these two, I decided to tell you my story.
This week you’ll read my story of the emotional stress and the actions I took to get out of its grip.
Emotional stress doesn’t age-discriminate
I’ve been battling with stress for most of my adult life.
Of course, when I was young, nobody was talking about it.
It was a foreign concept. To be in your teens and be stressed.
That privilege should be reserved for the CEOs and stock brokers, right?
Wrong.
Now we all know that high school is one of the most stressful times growing up.
In my teens the stress I experienced was due to my obesity, a couple of failed relationships, and school in general.
This is nothing surprising. Most girls go through this.
But I don’t recall ever being made fun of because of it.
In truth, we were all friends.
But my last boyfriend told me I should lose weight at the beginning of my twenties.
To add insult to injury, I was at my lowest weight ever, proud of what I’ve achieved, successfully having gone through my first long-term fast.
So the statement came as a shock.
The relationship didn’t last long after that.
With being single also came a realization.
I was determined I wouldn’t settle for anything less than real love, and respect from my future partner, my weight be damned.
After five years alone, my now husband found me.
And he turned out to be everything I wanted and more.
My best friend, who I could talk to for hours, and still we didn’t run out of things to say.
So, the next logical step to do was to build a home. This took us the next 5 years. And even though there was an occasional misunderstanding, we loved the process.
In those years, the stress we experienced was a good thing.
We had each other, a work-in-progress house.
What else could we wish for?
Maybe a family?
My introduction to emotional stress
It took us six months to realize that something was wrong.
The doctor’s examination confirmed it.
I was the problem.
I was diagnosed with endometriosis.
If I thought finding a soulmate and building our dream house was stressful I was in for a surprise.
This is where stress became my life companion.
For four years, I was a guinea pig for the new medical procedures trying to conceive, just to end up disappointed every month.
And it took its toll.
I was edgy and anxious. I snapped at everyone who had an opinion and when I was on artificial hormone therapy it was even worse.
Any woman who went through this can attest.
It is a mind battle.
Building up the expectations of a new life at the beginning of your menstrual cycle, reaching your peak when they surgically remove your eggs just to be disappointed to have your period at the end of it.
And the cycle repeats every month.
In my case, for four years.
It’s torture.
We never fought my husband and I. We always talked through our differences and came to a compromise that both were satisfied with.
But that changed in those months and years.
I was a different person.
Happy one minute, yelling the next, crying a minute after.
When I received the date for the next procedure, still in the middle of the previous procedure hoping to be pregnant, I lost it.
Thinking; even the system lost faith in me becoming a mother.
I was crying for a day. At least that’s what it felt like.
My husband was seriously concerned for my health by that time.
When I finally calmed down we talked.
We haven’t talked for four years.
Not like we used to.
We told each other what was on our minds and our fears.
And my husband was adamant.
‘This needs to stop. We were happy. Just the two of us. If this isn’t meant to be, we will find other things to fulfill our life.’
It might sound strange and cruel, but I finally saw the light at the end of the dark tunnel I was in for so long.
Don’t get me wrong.
Any woman who chooses to go into the procedure of IVF wants to have children.
No exception.
But the constant disappointment month after month for years, gets to the best of us.
So I went to the hospital and told them I needed a break.
A break from the artificial hormones, from the procedures, and most of all from the constant disappointment.
The stress, I realized later was caused by the dissapointement.
How I broke the cycle of emotional stress
A few days after the decision we had a new plan.
We decided to get married.
Funny I know.
We never talked about it.
We certainly didn’t see the need for it before.
We knew we belonged to each other and we didn’t need a ring to prove it.
But this would be a step toward forgetting about our current troubles.
For a while at least.
We decided on a date and organized everything ourselves, I even baked the wedding cakes.
Yes, cakes. Plural. There were three.
And in those 5 months, I changed.
My mind cleared. I became myself again.
Different kind of stress
I’m not saying the days weren’t stressful.
On the morning of the wedding, instead of going to the salon to get my hair done, I went to the emergency room with my then-fiance.
He fell the previous night and I spent the whole night cooling his ankle, just to double in size the morning.
I begged the doctor to patch him up until noon, for our wedding, leaving him there, rushing to get my hair done.
I think they still talk about us in that hospital.
He came to the salon hopping on one foot, grinning.
When we came home, my sister told me there was an accident on the highway and there would be delays.
Half of the wedding party was stuck on the road.
With my wedding bouquet and all of the flower arrangements.
To this day I can still remember the look on my maid of honor’s face. She was white as snow. A bride without a wedding bouquet.
But me?
I grinned.
Worst-case scenario there were daisies in my hair and there were daisies in my now delayed bouquet.
The fields next to my house were filled with them.
We had time. I’ll just go pick them.
Long story short.
The wedding was a success.
We made it a success.
The guests arrived, and so did the flowers.
My husband even managed our wedding dance – a choreography of 15 songs we loved, choreographed and learned the steps to, and practiced every night for a month., not telling a sole about it.
When decisions are made without the pressure of stress
After the honeymoon, we discussed it and decided we would have another try.
One.
My headspace was completely different.
I did everything to help the process, so I went on a long-term fast for 6 weeks before the procedure.
I declined all the medication. The only medical procedure was my egg extraction.
At the end of my monthly cycle, the two bars on the pregnancy test were clearly visible.
I was pregnant with my first son.
The second followed two years later.
This is my story.
To some, this is kids’ play. There are so many people with problems bigger than mine.
But to me, it was my world.
The agony I put myself through was entirely my fault.
True, the artificial hormones helped with the mood swings but mostly it was in my head.
If any of you are going through what I went through, I sympathize.
I wish I could tell you it will get better on its own, but I can’t.
The medicine can only take us so far, we have to do the rest ourselves.
My story had a happy ending.
I hope, so can yours.
What helped me in the battle against emotional stress
Having gone through the emotional stress for 4 years, I can confidently say that there are some steps that you can take to ease the process:
Here is what helped me:
- Know the reason why you are stressed – this was my first step toward recovery and I think the most important one. If you don’t know what’s causing it, you won’t be able to fix it.
- Think about what you want and how far you are willing to go to get it. You as well as the people around you. Take as much time as you need; an hour, a day, a month; it doesn’t matter. Just get clear.
- Be brutally honest with yourself. What do you need? And can you live without it?
- Decide. Once the decision is made you will feel the relief, weight lifting from your shoulders and you will be able to breathe easier.
- Now it’s time to help repair the damage you have done to your body (at least that was true for me).
- calm down your mind with walks in nature, meditation, and journaling
- have a long-term fast to reboot your body (you can read about it here, and about the method I used)
- change your eating habits to whole foods (learn about the different diets here) and avoid processed stuff (learn about the negative effects of processed food here)
- include daily exercise in your schedule
- When you feel like you are yourself again, not feeling weighed down by the emotional stress, you have a choice. Maybe the reasons that you were stressed aren’t there anymore. And maybe, you are strong enough to try again. Either way, another decision is in front of you.
The conclusion – emotional stress is changing you
I hope my story gave you a little push in the direction you need toward a less stressful life.
In the end, it all comes down to our priorities.
In the podcast, Mo Gawdat asks a wonderful question:
Would anything change in my daily actions if I put my mental well-being first?
How often do we ask ourselves that question?
In my case not often enough.
But we should. With the pace our lives have in this day and age, it’s essential to think about our well-being. If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for the people you love. The benefit they would have if you weren’t stressed.
In my case, it saved my relationship… and caused our marriage.
But if the stress continued I am confident that me my husband wouldn’t be together anymore and I definitely wouldn’t be a mother.
Until next time, listen to your body and hear what it’s trying to tell you,
Ann
