Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.
Old Chinese proverb
We all deal with stress on a daily basis, small stress, good stress, bad stress…
We live in a stress driven world and we have also positioned stress as big and negative. Yet when you can learn to understand stress, and its target, we can also learn to develop key skills to cope with stresses and focus on the more desired state: calm focus.
When you learn to understand the benefits of healthy stress, and recognise the unhealthy stress, you now have a skillset that will support you.
Stress is a burst of energy. In small doses, stress can help motivate you to achieve goals and accomplish tasks more efficiently. This is adrenaline drive stress and can also assist you to boost productivity.
Stress is also part of the defence mechanism of the body and mind. When the brain perceives some kind of stress, it fills the body with chemicals such as cortisol. This can also help us to instantly focus our fight or flight responses such as lifting a car off an injured person! Small levels of healthy stress help elite athletes to drive high performance and others to endure challenging periods. In this context it can even fortify the immune system. But even too much “good” stress can have a negative impact on our organic body and mind.
When there are prolonged periods of unhelpful stress, we live in a cortisol state. That will simply put… lead to burnout, illness and unhelpful behavioural outcomes.
That is why I apply my psychological and coaching training alongside MBSR and Eriksonian hypnotherapy to guide you to understand your stress, but more importantly to learn scientifically proven ways to deal with stresses in your daily life.