Stressing

 Stress is a big part of life. There is not one person who will go through life without having something to stress about. Stress is normal and expected. However, some people in our world do not believe that stress is a part of life. They tend to think that if they are stressing over something, they think something is wrong with them. When thinking about your life it is easy to see where you have experienced different levels of stress. The ABC’s of stress are A, actual events. These are events in your life that have or will happen that will make you stressed. This could be any type of event. B, is both resources and responses. This is another one that everyone will experience. The last one is C, cognition, which means the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought and the senses. These are all experiences that each of us will come across at some point in our lives, more than likely we will experience it more than once.

Stress can cause depression or anxiety. One way you can deal with this is by evaluating yourself each time you feel those emotions. Take a step back and ask yourself what is making you stressed, sad, depressed, or anxious. Write them down and then ask yourself how that experience is making you feel that emotion. Then start going through the distortions. Each thing you are telling yourself is negative. When you go through the distortions you will learn that you can change your point of view. Now, what are the distortions? First is “all or nothing”, this is also known as black and white. This is when you think one way and one way only. The second is “discounting positive qualities”, which is when you think negatively of yourself. More than likely you are being unfair to yourself, and you should step back and see how amazing of a person you are. The third is “overvaluation”, this one you need to be careful of. Then there is “mental filter” as number five. This one is similar to “discounting positive qualities”. “Jumping to conclusions” is next followed by “magnification or minimization”. Then you have “emotional reasoning” and “should statements”. After that, you have “labeling” and “self-blame”. Each of these can bring you to a state of depression or anxiety if you are not careful. They are the distortions that make you feel like you are a terrible person; however, this is not true. The reason why we think this way is because of how our brain is set up. Our brains are programmed to keep us alive and safe, however, since humans have evolved, we do not use that part of our brain how we originally would have. It is this reason why we think this way about ourselves. Our brains are telling us that we need to change and evolve or die. However, this is not true, and we need to find the truth. We need to know for ourselves that the truth is different than the things that we tend to think sometimes.