“I AM SOOOOOO DESSERTS!” 🍰

Have you heard that “STRESSED is DESSERTS spelled backwards?”¹

What if I have been looking at stress backwards all along?

An interesting idea about stress is circulating, based on research done over the past decade, questioning if stress is really the evil monkey it’s been made out be.

Is it something that needs to be avoided and reduced at all costs in order to keep us healthy in mind and body?

What’s being discovered is that how we think about stress, our perspective, is instrumental in determining how stress effects us. If we experience stress and have the belief that it is bad for us…the more likely we are to experience detrimental effects.

Everyone feels stress and many couple that with the view that if life is stressful than we must be doing it wrong. I certainly believed so. And I hated how always “being stressed” felt. I also believed that if I didn’t get my stress “under control” I must not be able to handle life and I was dooming myself to illness which made me more stressed.

In reality, the stress response is just “normal human stuff” designed to prep me to handle whatever is coming into my experience, perhaps with even enhanced performance. Upgrading my stress mindset empowers me to see stress as simply a messenger that I care about something and it is time to take ownership of that experience in my life.

Embracing stress allows me to better handle it while practicing love and personal responsibility. I accept it, without judgement, and take time to deconstruct the stress to determine what emotional danglers I put into my “stress bucket” so I didn’t have to take a look at what in life I wasn’t experiencing the way I desired. I discovered that stress is simply chronic emotional inaptitude. So I started practicing emotional aptitude instead.

From there I take action to move myself forward improving my well-being, rather than becoming immobilized by stress.

Health psychologist and author, Kelly McGonigal, shares that, “When you choose to view stress in this way, you’re not just getting better at stress, you’re actually making a pretty profound statement,” she concludes. “You can trust yourself to handle life’s challenges. And you’re remembering you don’t have to face them alone.”²

In other words, “You’ve got this!”

I like desserts.

¹Loretta LaRoche, stress expert and humorist.

²The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good For You and How to Get Good At It By Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D.