Stress is said to be the major cause of disease in our society, yet do you know what it is, or where the problem lies?
When asked to define stress, people are usually at a loss, or they mention tension, fatigue, pressure, noise, hectic city life, and so on. What is needed is a clear sense of where the problem lies, and effective ways of coping with whatever it is.
Hans Selye defined stress as the effect of change on the
organism. He distinguished good and bad stress, namely eu-stress
and dis-(s)tress. A new job, getting fired, a raise, loss of a
loved one, winning the lottery, in Selye's terms, all these
events cause stress, some good, some bad. Therefore should one
spend a lifetime seeking one and avoiding the other? Not very
practical.
We live surrounded by stress: it is just another name for the
forces that keep us alive and moving. It is interesting to
examine the technical definition of the term. To the engineer,
such as myself, stress is simply a pressure acting upon an object
to displace or deform it. The object resists with internal forces
called tensions and thus maintains its integrity. Translate this
to the human context and we have a much clearer picture: the
cause, stress, the effect, tension. In these terms, change itself
is a stress. Hunger, a good joke, a car honking, are all
stresses. The tensions they cause in us put us into action, and
we eat, laugh, jump out of the way, in other words, survive.
The problem then becomes manageable, it is how we respond: how we
act, or don't act, that determines how well we survive, how we
manage the stress.
Stress is part of life and as necessary to it as water is
to a ship.
If you fall overboard, the problem is not the water, but whether
or not you know how to swim!
Problems occur when we are no longer able to respond
appropriately to a situation. We stop! The tension stays because
it does not develop into effective action. This leads to the
usual symptoms associated with stress: head aches, back aches,
anxiety, depression, etc...
The Feldenkrais Method literally gets you moving. You develop the
instinct to seek new responses in any situation.
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