If your life is constantly fuelled by adrenaline, you’re putting your health at serious risk. It’s time to get out of the emergency lane. By Lynne Gidish
Living in a high-stress society means not only are we always moving faster, but we’re expected to respond to everything immediately, says life coach Judy Klipin. “We tend to get into a state of what American psychologist Charles Whitfield calls ‘crisis-orientated living’.” In addition, being constantly plugged into the news and social media makes the ongoing drama around the world seem a part of our daily existence. “We often end up in sensory overload, living in a state of heightened anxiety. That, in turn, results in us catastrophising things that come our way, even just the minor hiccups in the grand scale of things,” says Klipin.
If you live under this kind of stress for a prolonged period of time, the part of your brain that governs the freeze/fight/flight response loses its ability to distinguish between a real emergency and an imagined one, she explains. Which is why when any daily mishap occurs such as missed work deadline, our bodies respond as if it really is the end of the world. “One of the biggest causes driving you into this ‘life-is-an-emergency’ frame of mind is a disconnection between yourself and your spirit (in a ‘who am I and what’s important to me?’ sense),” says Klipin. “You’re so busy meeting the demands of one thing after another that you overlook what’s most important of all: you!”
ARE YOU ON HIGH ALERT?
Clinical psychologist Dr Colinda Linde offers these guidelines for coping with crises and avoiding that downward spiral:
- Stop what you’re doing and breathe. “Close your eyes for a minute and focus on your breath. Inhale, pause, exhale: it really does centre and focus you.”
- If you find yourself lurching from crisis to crisis, there’s a strong likelihood that you’re in reactive, rather than proactive, mode. Plan a week at a time and make it concrete: use a whiteboard or calendar and put it up where you can see what the next seven days hold. This will help you allocate time and space for those “unexpected”.
- Respond rather than react. Ask yourself: “A month from now, how will I feel about this situation? In five years’ time, will it still matter enough to make me feel anxious?” Evaluate what you can control (i.e. your reaction right now) and what you can’t (i.e. other people’s behaviour or an accident that’s already happened). Now attend to what you can control: get your child to the doctor, call a plumber to fix the geyser, tell your boss that you’ll get through as much work as you can, as fast as you can, but properly and with focus, rather than rushing madly to meet unreasonable deadlines.
- Take a deep breath and remind yourself that “this, too, shall pass”. Nothing lasts forever.