happy st patrick's day!!

As today is supposed to be a day for relaxing, and taking a break from the stress of life, here is an excerpt from lifepotlight.com. How does stress affect you? Well, YOU determine that.

The stress response—the body’s hormonal reaction to danger, uncertainty or change—evolved to help us survive, and if we learn how to keep it from overrunning our lives, it still can. In the short term, it can energize us, “revving up our systems to handle what we have to handle,” says Judith Orloff, a psychiatrist at UCLA. In the long term, stress can motivate us to do better at jobs we care about. A little of it can prepare us for a lot later on, making us more resilient.

Herein lies a problem. A lot of us tend to flip the stress-hormone switch to “on” and leave it there. At some point, the neurons get tired of being primed, and positive effects become negative ones. The result is the same decline in health that Selye’s rats suffered. Neurons shrivel and stop communicating with each other, and brain tissue shrinks in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, which play roles in learning, memory and rational thought. “Acutely, stress helps us remember some things better,” says neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen of Rockefeller University. “Chronically, it makes us worse at remembering other things, and it impairs our mental flexibility.”

So there you have it, we thrive on short bits of stress. We work our best when under a little pressure. We are healthier when we stress our body into adapting and making it more resistant for the future. It’s our lack of control of the stress over ourselves (mostly mentally) that can cause the big danger in our lives. Times are tough, nothing is easy…but it shouldn’t have to be. Most of us are not going to move to a monastery on a mountain-top to meditate full time, so we better learn how to deal with what we have going on. You don’t have to run away from things, just learn how to handle and control it. Keep your head, realize you have full control to take action in life and then just take it one moment/action at a time. Learn to use the stressors to make you stronger, and you may just live longer because of it (while others who are not able to control them, take themselves into a negative downward spiral).

So,
go have a Guinness or two , and let today be the day that you find a way to handle your stress! One can't get rid of stress, but you can learn how to handle it BETTER!

This is my wife, overlooking the highest seaside cliffs in Europe, Slieve League, near Ardara, County Donegal, Ireland.