Stress - continued ......

Stress  cont'd....

I was recently reminded of a story I heard about stress, and I wanted to share it here as I have personally found the analogy very thought provoking and useful, particularly if you are the sort of person who just keeps absorbing stress and expecting to be able to deal with it. 

I also use it when with clients who see there inability to cope as a weakness rather than just a sign that enough is enough!

A psychotherapist was visiting a big corporate organisation to give a seminar on stress management, at the beginning of the session she took a half full pint glass of water in her hand and showed it to the room. As you can imagine the delegates all started to prepare themselves for the glass half full glass half empty speech and so where quite surprised when she asked them to guess how much the glass of water weighed.

Various guesses were received from around the room as the delegates tried to work out how much the glass weighed , after a few minutes the psychotherapist said... of course it doesn't really matter what is weighs you know, but what I want you to think about is if I asked you to hold this glass with your arm outstretched for 2 minutes you all could quite easily, but what about 2 hours, or 20 hours or 2 days! The weight of the water would not have changed but it would have got a whole lot more painful to carry! It's the same with stress, if we can find a way to let is go it doesn't have to be painful but the longer we hold it the more likely it is to hurt!

I love this idea, it really does help to enable people to stop thinking of not being able to cope as being weak, when really it's just the you have held onto things for far to long !

So please find a way to let it go, it will be different for everyone as to how you do it , it could be massage, reflexology, counselling, exercise, being with friends, a long hot bath, it doesn't matter what you do, what's important is that you do it !