Image courtesy of Pixabay
The only pressure I’m under is the pressure I’ve put on myself.
~Mark Messier~
I find it hard lately to drive anywhere without finding another car ten feet behind me, desperately seeking a way to pass me. Television commercials shout at prospective buyers or bombard them with frenetic claims overlapping one another. Newspaper and magazine articles blame stress for physical and emotional ailments. Lately, I have noticed more reports of murder and suicide in cases where people apparently find life intolerable.
Sigmund Freud wrote a book called Civilization and Its Discontents. Without belaboring Freud’s comments, two statements from the introduction struck me. One is his observation that people would rather suffer than change. The other is a summary of the book’s theme that as long as there is culture, people will be unhappy.
I didn’t like reading either statement. I prefer to think that people can change in a way which makes their lives more satisfying or at least more tolerable. I also don’t like the idea that culture makes people unhappy. Would we be any happier in an uncivilized world?
Certainly civilization means that our world is more complex. Our lives in a civilized society consist of more than hunting, eating, procreating and dying. I think it would be fair to say that founders of the world’s great civilizations sought to make the world a better place in which to live at least for their own citizens.
So where did stress come from? At one time people were so focused on survival that they had no extra time or energy to consider how they felt about their lives. Vacations, weekends and time for relaxation just didn’t exist. Now they do. We have come to rely on our leisure and even expect it as our birthright. Maybe unexpected inconvenience leads to stress. We tell ourselves we have a right to life on our own terms. We have forgotten that life is a combination of joy, learning and discovery accompanied by sorrow, loss and grief.
How can we deal with stress? First we should consider how much stress we create through our expectations. If we are convinced that life should involve no disappointments or inconvenience, we are bound to feel off kilter. Our frantic efforts to tailor the world to our convenience can’t lead to anything but stress. We can avoid much of our stress by accepting the world as we find it rather than trying to force it into the mold we would like.
I remember Eckhard Tolle saying that we have three choices when faced with a situation we don’t like. We can accept the situation as it is. We can do what is possible to change the situation and then move on. We can also become upset about it. What’s your choice?
Action Steps
- How do you deal with uncomfortable situations?
- Are you satisfied with your approach
- How else can you react?
- Ask yourself whether your expectations of life are realistic.
If not, how can you adjust your expectations?
- Selection from my book, Navigating Life: Commonsense Reflections for the Voyage, available from Amazon