August 15, 2020
How To Overcome Stress Addiction
How to overcome stress addiction is a subject many of us never even think about because…well why would we?
Most of us don’t consider the time we spend on the non-stop speedy treadmill stressful let alone addictive. We justify it as our way of achieving success, being productive, showing up constantly no matter what, and being reliable.
It’s not until something drastic happens to us when we are shaken to the core that we realize perhaps we need to reconsider the definition of stress and stress addiction.
Then we wonder how to overcome stress addiction.
I came to understand that I too was addicted to stress years after I stopped working in television news. Having worked inconsistent ungodly hours sometimes 18 hour days for almost 22 years, it was hard to sit still.
It turns out I was addicted to stress something I didn’t even understand until I had a conversation with Gillen, a member at BNI (Business Networking International) in Miami Beach, Flordia.
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She is French and she talked about the French philosopher René Descartes who said “I think therefore I am.”
She challenged his thinking by explaining that we are not only what we think.
We are also what we feel, we are our bodies and our intuition. But we don’t pay enough attention to ourselves as a whole being.
Gillen was a CEO that led a 500 person company. But when she left her position and decided to take some time off — she realized taking time off came very hard.
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She felt restless and like a fish out of water. She felt unproductive but had a breakthrough. She needed to figure out how to overcome stress addiction.
“If I’m not stressed I have this false belief that I’m useless,” she remembers thinking.
Once she realized she was addicted to stress — she began to focus more on who she was rather than what we did.
She says, focus on being rather than doing.
We are a mixture of what we do and who we are when we do it.
She recommends meditating, connecting with nature, and sitting with the discomfort. She says, it takes time but the body and the brain do adjust to the new healthier pace of life.