Seamus Fox, The Mindset Junkie: Are you stressed?

Well yes and no as there are two forms of stress. We have eustress and distress. Eustress is wellness promoting and comes from doing things that we are inspired by, going through challenges that inspire us and living along with our higher values.

This type of stress is good. The prefix 'Eu' actually comes from Greek where it has the meaning 'good', 'well' but is that how the vast majority of our population live? Doing something they really love and feel inspired by?

Distress is the other form of stress and is illness promoting. Illness = I; wellness = We. When we are distressed we are usually facing challenges that don’t inspire us. We create time in our minds and we feel challenged in the wrong way.

Our brain and body fires off a completely different set of chemical reactions that are not wellness promoting but over time illness promoting. This can have a big impact on all areas of your life, psychologically and physiologically. They both go hand in hand. So how can you change one form of stress into another?

There are a lot of different ways but the fastest way is to have a shift in your perception and how you are viewing what you find stressful by changing how you view what you are doing and finding the benefits in it and then also being able to link it to your highest value and what is truly important.

You can get a quick shift in energy and can quickly go from distress to eustress - all by changing how you look at something? Yes, as simply as changing how we look at something!

We have control over three things: 1, Perceptions; 2, Decisions; 3, Actions. If you change your perception you will find that what you once found stressful or uninspiring has meaning, and when you find meaning in anything you do you change your response to it.

Let me give you an example. A mother who is working 12 hour shifts, five days a week doesn’t get to see her kids as much as she would like. She has to get them watched and pay for that service each day. She is doing a job she doesn’t really like and hates the fact she can’t see her kids as often as she likes. She feels stressed and distressed. She can’t see the benefits.

However, what if she learns to see the downsides if she wasn’t doing what she is doing? Her kids might go hungry, homeless even. She can’t clothe them how she might want. She would be struggling financially and in all other areas of life socially, vocationally and more. How would that impact her and her kids?

If she links enough pain to the downside she will find meaning in what she is doing and she can see the benefits to working long hours, not seeing her kids as often as she would like to. If she can also see and link her job and the sacrifices she is making to her higher value, her family and kids, she can feel inspired by what she is doing.

Maybe she can now plan and put some cash aside and invest it so she can leave that job soon or do something that really inspires her. Create a side hustle alongside it from her earnings? If she can see that her kids also get taught some valuable life lessons from their mother and her attitude to work and to provide, how does that impact how she can see what she is doing?

When she can see that the mother can get energy and inspiration from it. She can find even more meaning in what she is doing and that is eustress and not distress which means she has gone from illness-promoting to wellness-promoting having simply changed how she looked at what she was doing.

As the late great Wayne Dyer said: "Once you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

Once we change our perception on anything that we feel is causing us distress and we can find the benefit and meaning, we change from distress to eustress!

Your coach,

Seamus Fox.