Harnessing Stress part4

  Exercise, Exercise, Exercise

“If you get into a negative stressful situation, sometimes you have to stop, step back, and start again,” says Dr. Ken Cooper, who touched off the fitness boom in 1968 with his book, Aerobics, and whose latest book is Can Stress Heal? “I use stress to make me productive, but when I’ve reached a point where I can’t be creative anymore, I take a walk or work out in the gym. Then I come back and am productive again.”

For Cooper, now sixty-seven, a typical workout includes ten minutes of stretching, a two-mile run, a seven-minute walk, and a series of strength exercises. It’s fortunate for us that what he does is less important than why he does it. Exercise breaks the routine, grabs our attention, rids us of tension, and refreshes us as we mobilize our positive stress for the next challenge. What kind of exercise is best? The country’s leading fitness activity is also its simplest: walking.

Choose Your Rewards

In her stress management seminars, Charlotte Sutton asks participants to jot down their activities of the past three days and organize them according to priority. Each activity is assigned a label: critical, important, and unimportant. Too often the activities that students categorize as “unimportant” are those that serve as rewards for a day well spent or a job well done. These “unimportant” activities reduce negative stress and replenish positive energy.

“We all need down time,” says <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />Charlotte . “Whether it’s music, a warm bath, an hour of television, or a movie with a friend, we need diversions from whatever is stressful in our life.” But weshould choose our rewards carefully because like stress, they come in two varieties—positive and negative. Rewarding ourselves with an outfit that we can’t afford or a dessert that we don’t need may provide a positive lift that dissipates into negative stress when the bills come in or the pounds go on.

“Often just getting a job done and off your ‘to-do list’ is a major reward,” says Charlotte . If a genuine reward is in order, she suggests using the occasion to make a new friend. “Invite someone to share the relief and pleasure you feel at having completed a job. Go up to the person and say, ‘I’ve just finished an important project. Will you go out and celebrate with me?’”

It is possible to make stress your ally, not your enemy. So take advantage of that adrenalin rush and be positively stressed—for a change!

—Holly G. Miller is a TCW contributing editor, adjunct professor of communication at Anderson ( Indiana ) University, and author of several books.

“Positively Stressed,” by Holly G. Miller, Today’s Christian Woman,
July/August 1998, Vol. 20, No. 4, Page 74