Don't Sweat the Small Stuff ... reading stuff with Mila 19/100
📖 Book Don't Sweat the Small Stuff … and It's All Small Stuff by Richard Carlson, PhD. Synopsis: Simple ways to keep little things from taking over your life. The book consists of 100 short articles -- we'll go through them week by week. This week’s # 19: Lower Your Tolerance to Stress Here's what you need to do: 1. Read it yourself, take time to reflect on it and make notes. 2. Join the live reading on Wednesday. We'll read and listen to the article together, line by line. 3. Share your thoughts. Keep your answer under 4 minutes. Be clear, and focus on expressing your ideas about the topic to practice real English speaking. No debates, just sharing thoughts. It seems that we have it backward in our society. We tend to look up to people who are under a great deal of stress, who can handle loads of stress, and those who are under a great deal of pressure. When someone says, "I've been working really hard," or "I'm really stressed out," we are taught to admire, even emulate their behavior. In my work as a stress consultant I hear the proud words "I have a very high tolerance to stress" almost every day. It probably won't come as a surprise that when these stressed-out people first arrive at my office, more often than not, what they are hoping for are strategies to raise their tolerance to stress even higher so they can handle even more! Fortunately, there is an inviolable law in our emotional environment that goes something like this: Our current level of stress will be exactly that of our tolerance to stress. You'll notice that the people who say, "I can handle lots of stress" will always be under a great deal of it! So, if you teach people to raise their tolerance to stress, that's exactly what will happen. They will accept even more confusion and responsibility until again, their external level of stress matches that of their tolerance. Usually it takes a crisis of some kind to wake up a stressed-out person to their own craziness -- a spouse leaves, a health issue emerges, a serious addiction takes over their life something happens that jolts them into a search for a new kind of strategy.