Do you feel pressured, stressed? Or is pressure something you feel you have no choice but to live with it daily? Between work and home do you feel there’s no escape from these feelings? But how is pressure taking its toll on you? Do you find your temper gets easily lost? Frustrated? Granted that pressures exist and we live with them daily, are you controlling them or are they controlling you? Many times the problem that arises is that you don’t see any way to decrease the pressure or resolve them.
Pressure isn’t necessarily all bad – it can be an impetus for movement. The issue is the amount of pressure or our impression of the amount. Too much is debilitating because it can cause us to make incorrect assessments and then ‘wrong’ decisions. Since pressure is a given what’s important is how we react with it. And just as obvious, we all have different ways of coping with and handling stress.
So how do you cope with stress? How do you release the pressure value when it seemingly increases? Remember when you gave your child a ‘time out’ as a way of helping the child come to terms with their behavior, typically bad? Maybe that’s not such a bad way of responding. Perhaps what we need to do when we reach that point is to give ourselves a time out before we behave badly. While that may sound infantile since the situation still exists that we have to work with, it really is that pressure cooker valve.
If the situation is as bad as you think it is, a moment’s reprieve may be just what’s needed to see your way clear and possibly find a new way of meeting the problem. It may seem obvious but in the heat of the moment we often miss the obvious and stepping away may give you the clarity you need. Stress and pressure exist, it’s part and parcel of life but you can choose to control your response to it.
