Ep31 Eustress…huh?

Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of:

Is there such a thing as good stress?

We have all heard of distress. Distress is what we mean when we usually talk about and hear about people being stressed or stressed out. Phrases like: work has me stressed out, the kids stress me out, everything is pressure, I’m so stressed I will explode.

I am sure most everybody has experienced this to some extreme or another. So, what actually is this stress? It has to do with your autonomic nervous system. It starts with our system in a state of homeostasis. Everything is in balance. All of a sudden something that appears to be dangerous to our survival steps into our immediate proximity and our survival mechanism kicks in and our autonomic nervous system kicks in by secreting massive amounts of adrenalin and other chemicals that allow our body to escape what it perceives to be danger. Then our body looks for safety and gets us there. Whew…safe again to live and fight another day. Now we have our sympathetic nervous system jump in and bring our entire system back to balance…homeostasis.

That is the normal path of our system. The key to that story is that homeostasis or balance is our normal state of being. However, in today’s world that is not how we live. We activate and make our “survival” system turn on all the time. 24 hours a day we caffeinate, push, and strain our system to the point of where at times we can not do it any longer and the system breaks down. Then we go right back to doing it again.

Our society rewards us for more hours worked, more time spent shuffling our kids around from one organized even to another, buying more material goods with the promise of rewards points. Then you realize you have to pay for it all which means more work and time being traded for money.

This is known as the “rat race.” Stop for a second and consider this: are you a rat? Is there actually a race with anywhere to go? Did you actually sign up for this race?

I know that this sounds like I am saying stop and run away from it all. But, that is not at all where I am going with this. First, there is amazing knowledge and power in the simple awareness that one is even involved in this race. Most people do it from a subconscious place and that means they simply do it like an automaton or sleepwalker.

With the knowledge of being in the race, what can you do?

Time to be an emotional warrior. Emotions are the energy underlying all thoughts. Thoughts drive our experience but emotions determine the outcome. Think about that for a second. Emotions determine the outcome…so then do you simply emote your way to freedom? Well, actually, yes but first you have to understand and master the fact that your freedom achieved by your thoughts. Thoughts are 5% while the emotions are 95%. Together they make up our experiences.

Now, do you want your experiences to control you or do you want to create your life journey?

That is where eustress comes into play. Eustress means positive stress. The prefix “eu” comes from Greek meaning health…so, healthy stress. What, there is healthy stress? Sure, think of getting up the energy to ask someone out, giving a speech or a performance. Its all about the good feelings in your gut that let you gather the courage to do something outside of your comfort zone.

Breaking out into new experiences means entering the unknown, which of course means that there is the possibility of failure. This in turn means that a lot of noise is happening in your experience. Doubt and failure creep into everything you think about. This is where most people run back to what they think is safe. The irony is that what they think is safe is actually dangerous because it is a world filled with distress.

So how can you have more eustress and less distress?

The answer is being an emotional warrior. You set up your life, one step at a time, or