Stress fighter tip #1: don’t worry.
Duh, Karen what a novel idea!
How often we have heard, “Well, don’t worry about it”.
For some reason we believe it’s our solemn sacred duty to worry about things. We think it will accomplish more and satisfy our restlessness inside. We worry, as if it’s some kind of problem solver.
After all if we don’t worry then it shows we don’t care, right? Wrong! Worrying never accomplishes anything but giving us a heart attack, ulcers, or depression.
When I had stress seizures I learned how it didn’t take much to get me to have a stress seizure. It didn’t matter if I was worried a little or a lot, the end result was the same, a stress seizure.
Looking back I think giving up worrying was one of the hardest things I had to do.
I was one of those people who thought if you didn’t worry about something then you didn’t care.
Where that lie came from I have no idea. Instead of trusting God for the things around me I was standing up to life in a weak way by sitting around worrying about things and going no further.
Truly it’s one thing to worry about your child in the hospital, grandma who has cancer, and so forth.
But it’s a totally different thing to waste your time worrying about tomorrow’s weather, what to fix for dinner, does your hair look good, does something make you look too fat and such.
Yes, those petty little things do cause stress seizures.
They do because it’s something that we allow to pre-occupy our mind that stirs up emotions inside of us no matter how little. The worry itself can be little but the stress seizure it caused, for me anyway, was much bigger.
Same today as yesterday, I don’t have seizures anymore but the end result of worrying always seems to cause a bigger issue than what I’m worried about.
There is a balance to be found between worrying too much and not worrying at all. I don’t think it’s in our nature to be worry free. It would be a wonderful thing but in all reality it just doesn’t seem to happen. We need to get our worrying down and our trust up.
Not long after I was diagnosed with cancer I was informed that stress could make it worse. What do you mean? I was just told I had cancer. You can’t get much more stressful than that!
You probably can but that doesn’t matter. When I asked my doctor about it she told me it could be true. After all worrying leaves our bodies and minds vulnerable to too many things.
Cancer, family issues, unemployment, teenagers, elderly parents, car accidents, disabilities, it doesn’t matter.
What makes me worry might not make the person next to me worry. The important issue is not what the worrying is all about but how we handle the situation deep inside.
Are we going to trust the Lord, let whatever it is eat away at us or are we going to do something about it?
We need to control our worries and not allow them to control us.
Read more posts by Karen Gillett here. Karen is a JenningsWire blogger.
