This post is as much of a reminder to me, as it is a warning for others... enduring high levels of ongoing stress is just not worth the cost to your general wellbeing... The quickest ways to kill someone of natural causes is to put them in a pressure-centric situation for a prolonged period. The most terrifying part of this proposal is that it's not a proposal, we have a society that is built around these situations - we commonly call them 9-5 careers.
First I got a cold, then I got a really bad sinus infection, then they both cleared up and now I have a chest infection - all within the space of 3 weeks!
The irony is that I am a ridiculously health conscious freak and I have no underlying health conditions.
So why have I suffered so many ailments in such a short period of time?
Stress.
For over 5 weeks now, I have been working myself way too hard.
I have been doing a lot of overtime for my (usually part-time) t-shirt folding job and I have effectively been working full-time for the past 5 weeks in order to bring in a little extra cash (I have hated every second of it).
I have been quite uncompromising because even though I have temporarily been working full-time, I have not wanted to fall behind with my studying and creative project - the focuses that actually matter and will get me somewhere - so I have been using every waking second to work.
It has been very stressful.
It has literally been a pattern of working a shift, studying, exercising, sleeping, working a shift, studying, exercising, sleeping, working a shift, studying, exercising, sleep and absolutely zero downtime for the past 5 weeks!
Except for my birthday, when I went to London to see Interstellar in IMAX - ABSOLUTELY ASTOUNDING - it was also a set of three days when my cold and sinuses cleared up and I felt fine, odd that.
A chest infection is the final straw, I am cutting way back so that this infection will clear up without any complications and when I am back to normal, which will probably coincide with the New Year, I am going to be instigating quite a few radical lifestyle changes, more on these later...
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I only have a minor chest infection, but I'm still ill and I hate being ill, it just slows you down and makes you feel rotten.
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A chest infection is the final straw, I am cutting way back so that this infection will clear up without any complications and when I am back to normal, which will probably coincide with the New Year, I am going to be instigating quite a few radical lifestyle changes, more on these later...
The truth about stress and why you should do your absolute best to avoid it
Stress, which is almost always associated with someone's job, is one of the primary reasons I am very anti-traditional-work-patterns and by that I mean the jobs that make you work 9-5, five days a week with constant stress and pressure - absolutely ridiculous!
And the last 5 weeks only go to show just how right I am.
Do not compromise until you are earning a living doing something you feel absolutely passionate about, because if you are working a stress-filled job that you absolutely despise, that stress-filled, 5-9, 5 days a week job will take over your life and will damage your wellbeing according.
Put a very high value on your time and an even higher one on your wellbeing.
There are no excuses when it comes to maintaining a high level of wellbeing, nothing is more important, not even money.
Although, you would be pretty stupid to think that was the case and yet so many people do!
I hear it all the time - "It's a really stressful job, but it's worth it and I handle stress really well."
Bullshit.
It is not physiologically possible to endured long and persistent bouts of stress.
Human beings evolved to handle stress in very short doses, when our ancestors were out hunting and gathering, if they encountered a predator then their continued survival would depend on their ability to act fast in the best possible way in order to successfully navigate such a life endangering situation.
Therefore, in such situations, an endangered human body would get a superfast hit of a hormone called cortisol a.k.a. the stress hormone, which, as this article on stress and cortisol states, gives the endangered human:
- A quick burst of energy for survival reasons
- Heightened memory functions
- A burst of increased immunity
- Lower sensitivity to pain
- Helps maintain homeostasis in the body
And we still possess this hormonal response today, it's what you feel when someone sneaks up on you and you jump out of your skin.
but our bodies can only handle these cortisol induced hyper-states in short bursts, because the cortisol hormone response demands an awful lot from the human body and after a while, if you are finding yourself in continual stressful situations, the cortisol hormone will just wear down your body.
You can never fully eliminate stress from you life, but you can put it in its place.
The quickest ways to kill someone of natural causes is to put them in a pressure-centric situation for a prolonged period. The most terrifying part of this proposal is that it's not a proposal, we have a society that is built around these situations - we commonly call it the 9-5 career.
I have no data to back this up but if you were to go back through history and looked at all of the physical and mental health problems that have plagued human kind you would see a definite correlation between the exercise of the idiotic 9-5 work pattern and general human suffering.
Yeah, my chest infection has put me into a bit of a festering mood!
I have no data to back this up but if you were to go back through history and looked at all of the physical and mental health problems that have plagued human kind you would see a definite correlation between the exercise of the idiotic 9-5 work pattern and general human suffering.
Yeah, my chest infection has put me into a bit of a festering mood!
Stress is one of the biggest killers on this planet.
The cortisol hormone is deviously good at severely weakening your immune system when produced in large quantities over a prolonged period of time - hence why I now have an agonising chest infection!
A warning and a reminder
For many years I have known of the health problems that stress can cause mainly because I have suffered so many in the past; in fact every single health problem I have had in the past has always started from an over-worked and overstressed state of not-very-wellbeing.
I have really let myself down here and I should have known better, because I do know better!
I have really let myself down here and I should have known better, because I do know better!
So now I have killed all of the dreaded overtime and will be focusing back more towards my studies, which are rarely ever too stressful, because I am in control of my studies and, therefore, I am in control of how much stress those studies induce.
Ultimately, this post is as much of a reminder to me, as it is a warning for others.
Heed my warning.
Heed my warning.
Enduring high levels of ongoing stress is just not worth the cost to your general wellbeing.
If you are overworked, then something has got to give, because at the end of the day, If you're dead, it's game over.
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