by Cassandra Tribe

Created on: December 07, 2008   Last Updated: June 29, 2009

Our lives are full of demands: to keep up, to get done, to maintain and to handle emergencies. The older we get the more our lifestyle takes over our lives and all this keeping up and doing takes the majority of our time and energy. We lose our energy. We lose our enjoyment in life. Changing that, bringing back energy, purpose, passion and joy to your life requires that you begin to understand what causes stress and how what you may be doing in your life to relieve it - may actually be adding more.

Stress comes from the loss of control over the details in your life.
With no control you are placed into a position of constantly reacting rather than being able to respond, resolve and move forward.
If you are constantly reacting you are living in a highly charged emotional state.
It may not seem like you are moving through your day at the office being a 'highly charge emotional' person, but if you pay attention to how you respond to new responsibilities and new demands throughout the day you will notice a pattern of very emotional reactions. Feelings of resentment, disappointment, being overwhelmed - these are all emotions. What is the difference between responding and reacting?

We are driven by emotions. If someone sustains damage to their right brain, they lose the capacity to do anything of their own volition. The emotions of the right brain are where we make our connections between events and can generate motivational energy that is expressed through the organized and logical actions of our left-brain dominated life.

Your emotional reaction comes first. Babies, with no language and or even focus, will respond, even if they are hungry, to an expression of love and comfort over food. You may not even be aware of the emotions that come first because emotions trigger thoughts and it happens faster than we can process in our waking state. You are not capable of efficiency if you are reacting out of fear.

Even faster than our emotional reactions can trigger a thought that we then act on, the thought itself becomes an event that can then trigger another emotion.
We take a small amount of stress and we make it larger.
When you are reacting to new responsibilities and demands and 'getting them done' you are actually destroying your sense of control over your own life. Without evaluating each thing for its needs and then placing it into your schedule where you can best deal with it you lose control over your time and begin to feel overwhelmed. The expectation you then create

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