Stress is good?
So today yesterday in psychology, Dr. Buskist started the chapter on Stress and Health and how most of us students should really begin thinking about how the topics during the upcoming discussions can relate to our daily lives now that midterms have passed and finals are drawing closer, the time when students most often come down with some illness due to stress that has accumulated during the semester. --whew, that was a long sentence—Anyways, at the beginning of his lecture he provides a quote of the day, as usual, and today it was:
“Only the dead are free of stress” – Hans Selye
Dr. Buskist proceeds on to lecture about the goods and bads about stress and how each is directly correlated to how we perceive a given situation and our ability to cope [adjust] with it. This as well as the quote by Hans Selye got me thinking back to some words of wisdom given from my dad about one of his good friends probably over a year ago which was:
“A hard working man will always find a way to keep himself busy; because when he’s not busy, he’s comfortable, which is in a way discomforting.”
After looking back over the past year or so, I can see how much I’ve gradually begun to live more by that. I’ve always needed something to do so I can feel like I’m getting something done and not just wasting time, something I’ve been trying to convince myself lately isn’t a bad thing every so often. If anyone of my friends is reading this and has ever noticed, whenever someone asks something of me, rarely have I ever said that I can’t do it because of something. I’ll usually first ask what it is that they need in order evaluate the difficulty of the request and then maybe ask of what importance it is to them to get an idea of how much time I have. This is the same with work. If it’s something that I can’t immediately provide a solution to, I’ll say that I’ll look into it and follow up with them later. It’s the challenge of rising to the occasion and being able to cope that seems to grab my attention. Now there are those times where I’ll take on too many tasks and end up being a bit overwhelmed, but I’m learning to minimize that. Now that I mention “learning”, it’s the process of learning new things that interests me as well. I’ve always been known as the curious one and personally feel that at least one new thing should be learned every day, not mattering of its significance value. If you’re learning, you’re progressing.
One thing though that I’m still working on while putting myself in these stress situations is how I’m able to vent and cope in more effective, healthy ways. One way is this, writing out my thoughts so that they don’t stay inside and never see the light of day. I should probably work on verbally venting as well, wouldn’t hurt. Another method that I’ve been trying to get back to is physical exercise/activity. Since most of my work requires sitting on my butt and staring at the screen or being buried in engineering textbooks for most of the day, getting up and moving around doesn’t happen much. Going jogging/running has never been something I enjoyed enough to do on a daily basis for more than a month or so. Going hiking, rock climbing, or boxing on the other hand has always been an interest of mine to take up. So maybe I’ll get into one of those sometime soon.
So that’s my thoughts for the time being. It feels good put a significant amount of “stuff” out there even though I likely veered off the topic I started with. Oh well, now back to work.
