Stress - A Tale of Two Undies

I often talked with my clients about their stress - both in terms of their resilience to as well as their load. Their load is critical as you need to understand what stress you are facing/carrying to better able to respond.

I often see that stress is the underlying or triggering cause of many gut issues. Therefore, actively managing your stress levels is critical for gut health.

People often can easily identify the common external stressors - such as family, relationships, job, money, etc. I love to challenge people to look at internal stressors such as quality of sleep, food, movement, and mindset.

An often overlooked source of stress is the small things -I know we are not supposed to sweat the small stuff. But I have found that these small things, especially when you encounter them daily accumulate in nature to become the big stuff.

An example? An easy one for you - every morning for about 6 months, I would look through my undie drawer for the good undies. They were my bamboo ones that always fit well and stayed put. Others in this same drawer were pretty good but they did not fit nor feel as well. As these lesser undies were still perfectly usable, I was hesitant to replace them with the good ones, as I considered this to be wasteful. But I was searching for them every day, spending my days less comfortable than I would like. One day I donated the lesser ones to charity and bought a whole new replacement set of bamboo undies that I like. Now I can reach every morning to a good pair and spend my days a bit more comfortably.

Undies are not one of my major sources of stress - but when I have not slept as well as I would like or facing an issue at work, then my undies are adding to my stress load. And an easy one to fix - which leaves me with more resources to tackle the other “big” stressors.

These incidental inconsequential stressors are usually faced regularly, evoke an irrational level of frustration, and often don’t register as stress. They are not going to save the world but what they do is add to your stress load. And some of you are carrying a massive load - many of which you can’t or won’t change. So another way to lessen your load is to look at these incidental stressors and fix those - every little bit helps.