Amira Shalaby
Illustration by Gary Waters
It all started with a migraine. Two days later, another migraine. Four days later, another one. Five, six days later, you guessed it right! Another and another.
The recurring cascade of uninvited migraines this past month alarmed me. It was amplified by a fatigued, a rather low-energy, and a slow-paced body, which all added to my existing worry.
At first, I thought it was due to some sort of physical strain, or lack of sleep, but that wasn’t the case. On the contrary, I slept my full hours, and had more or less a moderate level of physical activity. So what was this happening to me?!
After analyzing my habits, what was going on in my mind, adding to my recurring symptoms, and coupling them with some thorough research, there was no doubt in the fact that it was an emotional state,
specifically,
Stress…
See, while little stress is actually beneficial in helping you accomplish tasks more efficiently (like writing this article; ironically, if it wasn’t for some sort of stress, it wasn’t going to find its way here), and while it can actually give you a leap forward in life, constant long term or too much stress can and WILL actually wear you off, both emotionally and physically.
In short, long term effects of stress include headaches, muscle tension, sleeping problems, and poor concentration. Frequent negative thoughts, social withdrawal as well as anxiety and depression find their way on the never-ending list of the negative side effects of stress.
And let’s not forget that stress also happens to contribute to various health problems such as high blood pressure, heart diseases, obesity and diabetes - it literally takes over your life!
The thing is, in our modern-day life, stress comes with the package of life. You can’t escape stress, nor can stress release you from its grip. Nowadays, the pressure put on our thriving generations, impose so much stress in our lives -it makes it nearly impossible to escape it.
From a large load, to constantly comparing yourself to others, to always living in a fast pace to accomplish your goals and meet your deadlines and never actually living in the moment, you end up living in an all-time state of stress. From how I see it, it’s literally the biggest, most challenging chronic problem at this moment in time!
Back to where this all started, the moment it was revealed to me that stress was what controlled my life, I realized that only at the age of twenty I didn’t want to have to carry around with me stress-relievers and sleeping pills.
I didn’t want to start off my adult life on the wrong foot, and wreck a future full of possibilities. It wasn’t the migraines that shifted my mind -though with great pertinence to my discovery- they were only mild symptoms to a much bigger problem. It was the behind the scenes that made a halt at this crashing habit.
Hear me out, the fallacious thought of having everything under control, is what leads you here in the first place. You can’t control the outcome, but you can control your direction towards the outcome and your attitude towards it, all the same.
And for that reason, I say, leave things where they ought to be. Leave a bad mark where it should stay -in the exam room. Leave a bad fight where it should reside, in the fighting field. Leave a bad day where it should go -leave it on that day. Leave things. Leave things be. Let go. Let go once again. And then let go once and for all.
Don’t overwork yourself. Don’t overload yourself. Don’t haphazardly fill up your planner/to do list. And don’t wait for the perfect outcome, for there’s no perfect.
And remember, that the wrong type of stress, the one that we see everyday, is costing you yourself. Stress is the thief of the moment, and if not the moment, then it’s the thief of your life. I believe you don’t want anything to steal your life, neither do I, isn’t that why we both ended up here?
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