Stress

Hello All

Hope you are all doing great. I attended a conference this past weekend and the key note speaker had a very interesting topic. Her talk was titled ” Make Stress Work for You” I must say it was rather insightful. I am glad it was the first talk of the whole day because I was dealing with my own personal stress. Self imposed of course but I dealt better after listening to her talk and I actually learned something about myself. Let me put things into perspective.

I decided to incorporate family time with this conference… it was a 2 day conference and both days were early starts so I figured it would be great to get a nearby hotel and have the kids and hubby come along as well. Having the great friends that I have I was offered to be picked up from my hotel to be driven to the conference meaning that the hubby had the opportunity to sleep in with the kids. Long story short I left my phone in my friends car and didnt have it with me for the whole first day of the conference.

I realised straight away as soon as I sat down at the conference that I didn’t have my phone, the first thing I did was look for the phone in my purse and it wasnt there. You can imagine my panic and stress. I tried to think about where I could have left the phone. I borrowed my friends phone and called the hotel to find out if I had left it by their coffee bar. I knew I left the hotel room with it…when they told me that the phone hadn’t been handed in and that it wasnt at the coffee bar I was hoping it would be in my friends car but I had no way of knowing. Needless to say my stress levels were on the high side. I decided to make the most of it…how would I cope without my phone with me the whole day.

The stress talk definitely did help. I decided to make the most of it…not having my phone with me meant that I could be truly engaged and participate fully, and guess what I actually survived and nothing bad happened. What a realization…the world did not stand still…my heart kept beating…the world kept going. I leaned that a bit of a break from the phone is actually a good thing and I was stressing myself over nothing. Have you become a slave to your phone and does the lack of quick access cause you to have stress? Try taking a break from your phone and see that the world continues. Although I have gone a bit off tangent I just wanted to share that brief experience now onto the Stress talk.

I learned that stress can actually be used to work for us this is shared fully in this Ted talk by Kelly McGonigal who was the keynote speaker who can be seen in this you tube video https://youtu.be/RcGyVTAoXEU

Listening to her talk taught me that there are different ways to cope with stress.

1. Rise to the challenge

2.Reach out to others

3. Learn and grow

I used all 3 coping mechanisms…I rose to the challenge by asking myself what’s the worst that could happen? , and the answer to that was nothing. I reached out to others by sharing the fact that I had lost my phone and I benefited from the social support, and lastly I learned and grew. I learned that lousing my phone albeit temporarily was not the end of the world and there are worse things that could happen. I was surprisingly calm and collected throughout the day and I will be honest I was still excited when I found my phone in my friends car exactly where I had unintentionally dropped it 7 hours earlier.

How are you embracing your stress? Stress when handled a certain way can actually show you that you have a meaningful life.

With Love and Gratitude

Dr Fatsani Dogani