Harmonious Living - Managing Your Life: Stress

Managing Your Life: Stress

Georgina Guedes
Wednesday, 13 August 2008
At Harmonious Living, we’ve entered into a relationship with life coach and author George Beshara, who has become one of our resident experts and will be answering readers’ questions on life management issues. We’ll also be making his e-courses available through our site at a discount, but because we didn’t want to endorse something we hadn’t tried out, I was given the opportunity to go through the Managing My Life: Stress e-course. Stress is definitely something that’s around in my life. A good indicator of this was how difficult it was for me to find the time to actually do the Stress e-course. But I did find the time, and I learnt a lot along the way. Once I was registered for the e-course, I had to download a reader to allow me to see it. The download took a matter of seconds, and I was ready to start. The course is an e-book – it appeared on my screen, and I could turn the pages and read through it. It’s not very long, at 51 easy-to-read pages. The course might be easy to read, but it’s not simplistic. I often think that self-help or life-management courses or books just tell you what you already know, and if you just took the time to sit down and think through your problems, you’d come up with the solutions on your own anyway. The sad truth is that most of us don’t make the time to think through our problems, so we need someone else to guide us to the solution. The Stress e-course does this, but that’s not all it does. It also provided me with some very valuable insights into the mechanics of stress and how to deal with it. The first part of the book provides a very compelling explanation of what stress is and why it’s important to get it under control. For instance, I always knew that it’s essential to exercise, but from the course, I now know exactly why. Humans react to stressful situations by producing adrenaline which boosts sugar production to increase strength and speed. Millions of years ago, when we produced adrenaline, it was because a saber-toothed tiger was drooling over us, and we needed to wrestle it, or run away quickly. Nowadays, our stresses are mostly psychological, but we still get an adrenalin surge coursing through our system, which we then have to suppress in order to keep functioning (because we certainly can’t run away from or wrestle our bosses). So it’s very important to find an outlet for all that pent-up adrenalin, or our blood sugar levels start getting messed up and we get diabetes. According to the book, up to 80% of modern illnesses are caused by stress, which alone is a very good reason to get it under control. There are exercises in the book that helped me to identify my own personal stress triggers and my strengths and weaknesses. When a customer is properly enrolled in the course, I know that this forms the basis of a feedback session with a dedicated coach, but even just as standalone exercises in the review version, I found it really interesting to have my characteristics laid out in black and white for me. The last part of the book provides the solutions. Obviously, different people are stressed by different things, so not all of the solutions apply to everyone. But it’s worth reading through all of them, because if you’re anything like me, as soon as you break one bad habit, you might find another sneaking in to take its place. The solution that really hit home with me was the one that covered turning goals into action plans. We may have a clear list of goals that we want to achieve in life, but the only way to achieve them is by breaking them down into their component parts, and starting working on the bits, right now, right away, today. All-in-all, I found the Stress e-Course to be informative and inspiring, easy to do, easy to use and a great insight into my personal strengths and weaknesses. Georgina Guedes is the editor of Harmonious Living.

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