It’s November, so you know what that means! Besides elections, Guy Fawkes Day, and Veterans’ Day. Besides Movember, a.k.a. National Magnum P.I. Appreciation Month.
Those are all good guesses, but November means “the holidays” are officially upon us!
For a lot of us, Thanksgiving and Christmas are anything but the most wonderful time of the year. Rather, the holidays are an eight-week barrage of stress. Continue reading
You probably tune out when the flight attendants do their choreographed safety dance about exit doors and oxygen masks. I do, too. As I recently heard a man at 7-Eleven say to his lady over the phone, “Listen, you tell him if he gone kill me, come kill me. I ain’t afraid to die. I don’t want to die, but I ain’t afraid to.” You and me both, sir. You and me both. Continue reading
I rarely feel anxiety anymore, at least not to the level that it affects my day-to-day life. I stress the word “anymore,” because for much of my life, my stomach was in a knot. As a sophomore in high school, I threw up almost daily. It wasn’t because I was physically sick. It was because my stress outpaced my coping mechanisms.
Continue readingStress is the dissonance between your expectations and your reality. That’s it.
When you feel stressed, anxious, out of control of the situation, it’s almost uniformly because you want one thing but get another.
You want a smooth commute. You expected to get to work in 20 minutes. But the reality is, there’s traffic ahead and it’s going to take you 40 minutes. Your expectations and your reality don’t line up, and you feel it in the form of stress. Continue reading