Wearing Your Stress as a Badge of Honour

I was speaking with a client this week about her work ethic and how this affected her stress levels. She told me that she wears her stress ‘like a badge of honour’. She is proud of how much stress she can take. She is rewarded for taking on more projects than one person can reasonably handle, and her friends admire her for being able to handle her stress.

Sounds great, right? There is only one minor problem – she hates the pressure and it is making her ill. Ah. Suddenly it’s not so great being superwoman – the expectations people have of her (including her own) are too high, and too demanding. Fortunately she is coming to realise that this is not the way it has to be. I know she’s not alone in this. I did something similar in a previous life – taking on too much and feeling important because I had so much ‘on’.

Do you ever feel the same? It’s a sad situation when people are rewarded for how quickly they can grind themselves into the ground, how busy they are, and how little they are enjoying their life. In these days of being able to ‘have it all’ it seems that we prefer the fiction that an overfull life is great over the fact that an overfull life makes you ill.

In case you’re unsure, let me make my position on this perfectly clear – stress is not something to be proud of. I do not admire stressed people. I admire happy, balanced, successful people. Success is not (to me) working an 80 hour week, and being available by mobile phone at 4am on your holiday. Success is not running from social engagement to social engagement being unable to enjoy any of them because you are too tired and too busy thinking about everything you have to do.

I would much rather say ‘I am loving life’ this year than ‘I had a nervous breakdown’. Wearing your stress like a badge of honour is dangerous to your health. Because of the harmful effects of stress, companies are required by law to provide reasonable stress management measures for their staff. Personally, I think individuals need to provide reasonable de-stressing measures for themselves. And the first one to adopt is to treat stress appropriately.

Think about your relationship with stress – is it healthy? Do you use your stress to get you out of the way of a speeding bullet or as a signal that something needs to change. Or do you wear your stress like a badge of honour? How about a different badge of honour – be proud of how relaxed you are! Or is that too radical for the noughties?

– Something to Play With –

Treat stress as a warning sign that your life needs to change. Ask yourself (if you’re stressed) how you can simplify, what you can do to take extremely good care of yourself (make sure you have my free ebook for self care ideas), what you can do to relax and ENJOY your life to the full rather than fill your life to the brim and miss out on any fun! Want to share your thoughts on this article? Please leave a comment.