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Hi Team,

I'm writing this email a few days into the New Year, so welcome to 2022, and I pray that this year is more positive and harmonious than the last two?

To kick things off on a positive note I'll use a lovely quote from James Clear which sums up the importance of taking a break.

"Slowing down enables you to act in a high quality way.
Kind rather than curt. Polished rather than sloppy.
It's hard to be thoughtful when you're in a rush."

James used this quote in his latest blog article about his "recommendations for starting the new year with a positive mind set" where he posed the question, "what is the number one lesson you learnt this year?"

After much reflection and soul searching my answer to this question is "stress and anxiety have too big an impact in our lives" So this will be the topic I focus on for the next few weeks (A deep dive in understanding stress) 

For the last couple of weeks I have read every article on stress I could find, and my favourite online authors have not let me down. The underlying common thread in the majority of these articles is, that to successfully manage and cope with the stress in your life you must fully understand stress (i.e.; what is stress, where does it come from, why does it impact you so much, how can stress be good for you etc etc).

Over the last few years I have written about stress in three previous Weekly Emails. In email's #81 & #82 I outlined the often-misunderstood difference between stress and anxiety (Anxiety is the emotion that comes from your need to control everything in your life, and stress is your body's mental and physiological response to challenges, pressure, and change). My main message in those two emails was that stress is often a good thing in your life because it gives you energy and motivates you to take action. Stress is what it feels like to be outside your comfort zone, it is a vital part of achieving your goals and success in general. The big takeaway was that your attitude to stress greatly determines how well you cope with the stress in your life and how harmful it is to your body and mental health in the long run.

"The positive side of stress is that it is your body’s natural way of you rising to a challenge and if you truly believe this your body will also respond in a positive way and the physical symptoms of the stress will reduce."???? Email # 81

So where does stress come from and what purpose does it serve?

In his blog article titled "Stressed Out" Robert Glazer succinctly answered this question as follows,

"Stress emanates from pre-historic times. By boosting our adrenaline and fuelling short-term improvements in attention and memory, it’s a biological purpose is to temporarily trigger our flight or fight response. The operative word being “temporary.” The problem is that most of us are functioning in stress mode far longer than our bodies are designed for, and its making us increasingly sick and unhealthy."

Our bodies have a specific stress hormone called cortisol that is produce whenever we feel danger, the more serious the danger the more cortisol the body produces and the stronger the fight of flight response it produces. So, stress is our bodies innate safety mechanism. This stress hormone (or safety hormone) has played an important role in human evolution and has enabled us to stay at the top of the evolutionary food chain. Our bodies naturally produce more cortisol in the morning (when we should be out hunting) and less cortisol in the afternoon and evening (when we should be resting and sleeping). Physical exercise naturally reduces our cortisol level which makes us feel tired.

The biggest problem with stress in today's society is that our brains and hormones have not evolved in line with our lifestyles and that most people don't understand what is stressing them out so much. For brevity, I have oversimplified this fascinating and multilayered topic, but if you would like to find out more I would recommend that you read the following fantastic article called "The Evolution of Anxiety" by James Clear.
 
https://jamesclear.com/evolution-of-anxiety

Next week I will look into the positive side of stress.

Thanks for reading,
Stay safe and consider what you have learnt from 2021?
David.