Words to Ponder

So, here we are wondering what to do with the ever-present obstacle of stress. It’s like a gnawing, vague feeling in the back of our minds. It darkens and dims our dreams at night and fuels insomnia. Suddenly our back and shoulders get stiff and prone to injury. Time off from work increases the already financially burdened home and may even lead to losing a job. Divorce occurs, as dearly held relations slowly erode.

How do we put a stop to this degradation of our lives? As your Newtrition consultant, I would ask, What has been your first response to any stressors? Have you been avoiding that conversation with your significant other, your child, your employer or employee? If you are having financial debt issues, has your bank been alerted?

If you have directly addressed these or similar situations and doing so has not eased your problems, then I would direct your attention to looking at your day-to-day and moment-to-moment behaviors. Are you eating well, and what does this mean for you? I ask clients and they often say their diet is good, or that they are eating clean. I prefer to know the details.

So many of us think that eating everything organic is a good thing. That is understandable, and it lays a good foundation for all foods that we consume. However, eating that bag of chips or box of crackers along with the occasional cookies and cakes need to be looked at more thoroughly. What nutrition is being obtained, if anything at all? I would bet there is no nutrition. Perhaps looking at the diets of our grandparents and those before them would provide a basis for comparison.

Mentioning our grandparents and moving further back and calling it our “ancestry” or lineage, we might find ra very different nutritional basis, a different food consumption profile. I think it would then be important to look at all the constituents of our ancestors’ lifestyles.

So, I invite you to look into the reaches of your family’s past and learn how they lived. What spiritual or religious models did they follow? How did they get their exercise? What was work for them? How many hours a day and days of the week did they work? Were their families large or small? Did they feel safe and secure in their homes? Any other considerations might be helpful to everyone here. We can take steps toward knowing what we need in order to be more whole and complete Newtrition followers.

Any engineer knows that without stress you cannot build a bridge. That is what you and I are going to learn in these pages.

So, stress, right? It’s something that all of us can relate to. What is stress, and how does it impact our lives? Most people see stress as a negative in their lives involving worry, fear, arguments, job loss, divorce, even leaving the everyday world behind. But without it we would not be motivated to awaken each morning and go through our daily routines before we head off to work, wherever that is, and do something that helps pay the bills. Maybe we wouldn’t care about all this routine behavior, and just let it all go to h…l.

Maybe not making the bed sets off another argument with someone we love, yet, why bother caring? So, no arguments in a stress-free life, right? Yet, living like this would elicit a flattened response to our environment. There would be no connection to anything. That is what bridges are built for, to connect, to cross over a major obstruction facilitating our journey forward. Without the engineer’s understanding of stress, that bridge would easily collapse. There would be a considerable delay in journeying forward, if at all.

In our relationships we can see how we respond to and create stress. Using the bridge metaphor, problems can become worse if we don’t take steps to connect with each other. We need to learn to build bridges so that connecting becomes easier and there is greater flow in our relationships, whether they are social, familial, romantic, or business related.

Stress can provide impetus to be imaginative, creative and productive. It can elevate us given the right intention. Or we can run away from it and keep hitting a wall. There is an option, a choice to be made. What to do?

In the following weeks I will present more thoughtful considerations regarding stress. Maybe together we can come up with some solutions. You won’t have to raise your hands to get attention to ask questions. Remember this: The only dumb question is the question that does not get asked.