Deal with it

Jana Mathia, Gazette Editor | Jul 02, 20200

Are you stressed?

Well, deal with it.

No, seriously, deal with it. For the sake of yourself, your family and your community, people need to acknowledge if they are stressed and find healthy ways to cope and manage that stress.

There are some life events that are considered major stressors, no matter how zen you are. They include: a birth or death in the family, new job/major change at work, moving and dealing with serious illness.

In the past four months, I've managed to tick off all of those if moving from your ancestral office home to a new location counts as moving and living in the COVID pandemic world counts as sickness, although neither I nor anyone in my immediate family have been infected. Add in four more kids at home, a large garden that needs weeded, scaling Mount Never-rest of the Himy-laundry and the incessant question of "what's for dinner," and, yes, I would say there is a significant amount of stress in my life.

Acknowledging the problem is the first step. The second is to make a plan on how to deal with it and then follow through. The worst thing you can do is ignore the fact and try to just shove it down. The second worst thing you can do is deal with the stress by becoming angry and violent. Not to say you can't yell, hit the pillow and cry–crying is therapeutic as tears carry with them excess stress hormones such as cortisol; that's why you feel better after a good cry because there is physically less stress hormone inside you, it's leaked out. But, if you are so stressed you are turning violent and prone to rage, that's not healthy for anyone.

Beyond that, there's no wrong way to deal with stress–again, so long as no one is being hurt. Some people take a quiet walk, others play heavy metal and kick box a punching bag. Some people take herbal supplements–ashwaganda works well for me–other are on medication or excessive doses of chocolate - I prefer dark.

Talk to a friend, talk to a pastor, talk to a doctor, talk to the dog; just find a way to deal with the stress in your life in a healthy way to bring peace to your own heart and mind. As we cultivate that peace within ourselves–no matter how crazy the world around us gets–we reflect that peace onto other. The peace within us can spread to our family. With enough people peacefully dealing with their stress, we can have a peacefully community, county and, eventually, country.

There are enough stressed out, angry people in the world. Let's start to change that by acknowledging and dealing with the stress within ourselves and see what the ripple effect is.

-Jana Mathia

Gazette Editor