Stress Overload Quotes

Learn to say no to demands, requests, invitations, and activities that leave you with no time for yourself. Until I learned to say no, and mean it, I was always overloaded by stress. You may feel guilty and selfish at first for guarding your down- time, but you’ll soon find that you are a much nicer, more present, more productive person in each instance you do choose to say yes.

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new—the proverbial shiny objects

When we learn to work with our own Inner Nature, and with the natural laws operating around us, we reach the level of Wu Wei. Then we work with the natural order of things and operate on the principle of minimal effort. Since the natural world follows that principle, it does not make mistakes. Mistakes are made–or imagined–by man, the creature with the overloaded Brain who separates himself from the supporting network of natural laws by interfering and trying too hard. When you work with Wu Wei, you put the round peg in the round hole and the square peg in the square hole. No stress, no struggle. Egotistical Desire tries to force the round peg into the square hole and the square peg into the round hole. Cleverness tries to devise craftier ways of making pegs fit where they don’t belong. Knowledge tries to figure out why round pegs fit into round holes, but not square holes. Wu Wei doesn’t try. It doesn’t think about it. It just does it. And when it does, it doesn’t appear to do much of anything. But Things Get Done. When you work with Wu Wei, you have no real accidents. Things may get a little Odd at times, but they work out. You don’t have to try very hard to make them work out; you just let them. [...] If you’re in tune with The Way Things Work, then they work the way they need to, no matter what you may think about it at the time. Later on you can look back and say, "Oh, now I understand. That had to happen so that those could happen, and those had to happen in order for this to happen…" Then you realize that even if you’d tried to make it all turn out perfectly, you couldn’t have done better, and if you’d really tried, you would have made a mess of the whole thing. Using Wu Wei, you go by circumstances and listen to your own intuition. "This isn’t the best time to do this. I’d better go that way." Like that. When you do that sort of thing, people may say you have a Sixth Sense or something. All it really is, though, is being Sensitive to Circumstances. That’s just natural. It’s only strange when you don’t listen.

Please remember that, no one is ever going to carry your overloaded emotional and mental baggage. You only have to find a way to reduce it.

Stop over-loading yourself with numberless tasks. Give time to yourself for rest and positive deliberations. You can’t think better and plan better when you are under stress!

We also know that the brain can handle only a limited amount of information at a time; at its simplest, we can think of stress as information overload, so when there's too much happening, the brain starts to triage, prioritizing, simplifying, and even plain old ignoring some things.

The overload makes users less productive and more stressed; thus, there’s a need for some solution. Passively ignoring the problem won’t work, since bits are still heavy, even if we pretend not to notice.

What makes an empath’s overload symptoms worse? Fatigue, illness, rushing, traffic, crowds, loud environments, toxic people, low blood sugar, arguing, overwork, chemical sensitivities, too much socializing, and feeling trapped in overstimulating situations such as parties and cruises. Any combination of these conditions intensifies an empath’s overload. Therefore, keep the following in mind: stress + low blood sugar = drama and exhaustion.

Something I've noticed over the years is that when people have a lot of things going wrong at once, they seem to lose the ability to make clear decisions. It's as though, faced with an overload of stress, the brain simply shuts down.

Though there is a spectrum of sensitivity that exists in human beings, empaths are emotional sponges who absorb both the stress and joy of the world. We feel everything, often to an extreme, and have little guard up between others and ourselves. As a result, we are often overwhelmed by excessive stimulation and are prone to exhaustion and sensory overload.

A major contributor to the genesis of many diseases... is an overload of stress induced by unconscious beliefs. If we would heal, it is essential to begin the painfully incremental task of reversing the biology of belief we adopted very early in life. Whatever external treatment is administered, the healing agent lies within. The internal milieu must be changed. To find health, and to know it fully, necessitates a quest, a journey to the center of our own biology of belief. That means rethinking and recognizing—re-cognizing: literally, to “know again”—our lives.

We are the only ones who can make decisions for ourselves about how we will handle the situations that arise in our lives. Life is not likely to get any easier, but our approach to life can change and that will make it easier.

a system is overloaded—worked beyond capacity—the result can be profound deterioration, disorganization, and dysfunction whether you are overworking your back muscles at the gym or your brain’s stress networks when confronted with traumatic stress.

Many families amass more objects than their houses can hold. The result is garages given over to old furniture and unused sports equipment, home offices cluttered with boxes of stuff that haven’t yet been taken to the garage. Three out of four Americans report their garages are too full to put a car into them. Women’s cortisol levels (the stress hormone) spike when confronted with such clutter (men’s, not so much). Elevated cortisol levels can lead to chronic cognitive impairment, fatigue, and suppression of the body’s immune system.

When the HPA stress axis is overloaded in childhood or the teenage years, it leads to long-lasting side effects—not just because of the impact stress has on us at that time in our lives, but also because early chronic stress biologically reprograms how we will react to stressful events for our entire lives. That

Like a sponge, we absorb, not liquid, but energy. Each morning we wake up as a fresh, dry sponge, ready to take in the world around us. Throughout the day, we interact with people, various energies, and a range of vibration. Each time, we absorb energy – either a small amount or a great deal – depending on whether the contact is direct or residual. And when we are filled to the point that we can absorb no more, we sometimes feel like we might explode. We know this bursting point – it reveals itself in our over-stimulated, over-stressed, near-crazy minds. Sleep often releases the energetic buildup, yet meditation works just as well. Meditation throughout the day “wrings out” our soggy, spongy selves. Deliberate mindfulness in the present moment can keep us from absorbing things we don’t resonate with, so that we no longer reach the point of mental breakdowns or emotional overloads.

most of our stress today comes from mental processes: from worrying about things. And the HPA axis isn’t designed to handle that kind of stress. We “activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies,” Sapolsky writes, “but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.” And over the past fifty years, scientists have discovered that this phenomenon is not merely inefficient but also highly destructive. Overloading the HPA axis, especially in infancy and childhood, produces all kinds of serious and long-lasting negative effects—physical, psychological, and neurological.

Get started with the new, happy life you deserve by reading Be Happy! How to Stop Negative Thinking, Start Focusing on the Positive, and Create Your Happiness Mindset today by clicking here! The Stress-Free You: How to Live Stress-Free and Feel Great Every Day, Starting Today – Elizabeth O’Brien Stressors are everywhere. Each and every day, we run into situations that constantly test us, rob us of our patience, strip us of our sanity, impact our focus, and cause us to lose control of our days. Inside The Stres- Free You: How to Live Stress-Free and Feel Great Every Day, Starting Today is an easy-to-implement system which you can use today to knock out the stressors in your life one by one. You’ll also discover why a little stress is good for you and why your body becomes “overloaded” with chronic stress, how to assess your stress level and take definite action steps to tame the wild beast of stress, stress

Then there are the metabolic costs of switching itself that I wrote about earlier. Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We’ve literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance. Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviors. By contrast, staying on task is controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum, and once we engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain’s need for glucose.

Shaya crossed one leg over the other. “How do you feel about Derren?” “Look, I’m a very self-aware person. I know I have plenty of flaws. I know I’m not very forthcoming when it comes to feelings or my past. I have constant nightmares and prefer sleeping outside in my hammock. I cook when I’m stressed—even if I’m not hungry or it’s three o’clock in the morning. Being a Seer, feeling people’s emotions all the time, means I sometimes get struck by a sensory overload, and so I’ll have my days when I need space, time, and privacy. “Derren is a very dominant, forceful, intrusive male who thinks my business is his and who is determined to have his own way all the time. But even though he pushes me to tell him things, he never pushes too hard—he shares with me so that I’ll share with him. Even though he doesn’t like any distance between us, he lets me have my space and privacy when I need it. And even though he very rarely gets a peaceful night’s sleep because of me, he never complains or sleeps anywhere but beside me. How can I not care about the fucker?

Unfortunately, sitting rests the parts of the body that don’t need much of it while working the parts that desperately do. Specifically, it disengages the lower extremities while utilizing the spine. (This is in sharp contrast to squatting, which disengages the spine while utilizing the lower extremities.) Because sitting positions the spine vertically, it provides no rest or relief from the gravitational forces that compress it. Without a periodic therapeutic reprieve through the day, the relentless load overwhelms the entire structure, joints and muscles alike. To maintain an erect seated posture, some muscle groups in the back have to continually contract. Since this requires a great deal of energy, the muscles quickly become fatigued. (That is why slumping is more comfortable: It takes less energy to maintain.) When the muscles tire, you rely on the backrest more and your muscles less. The less you rely on your muscles, the weaker and more dysfunctional they become. The weaker and more dysfunctional they become, the more you rely on the backrest. The more you rely on the backrest, the more you tend to slump. The more you slump, the more pronounced the debilitating C-shaped curvature becomes. This weakens the muscles in your back even further, which causes them to overload the joints they serve. Sitting in chairs affects even the areas seemingly at rest (particularly the hips and knees). Because sitting keeps the joints static for long periods, the muscles that serve them become fixed in a short, tight position. When at last you do get up and move, the muscles impose more stress on these joints, thereby increasing their susceptibility to wear and tear. The prolonged stasis also prevents the joints from being lubricated with nourishing synovial fluid. Once depleted, the hips and knees, like the spine, deteriorate and erode. Is it any wonder that the areas most traumatized by sitting, namely, the lower back, hips, and knees, are also the most arthritic and disabled areas of the body in the world today? The real mystery is why so few people have made the connection between prolonged sitting and the epidemic of chronic pain. In fact, they need only look to their own bodies for an abundance of evidence.

Define Your Options When people are spinning their rumination wheels about a particular problem, they often don’t concretely define what their options are for moving forward. To shift out of rumination and into problem-solving mode, concretely and realistically define what your best three to six options are. For example, imagine you’ve recently hired a new employee but that person is not working out. Instead of mentally slapping yourself around about why you made the hire, it would be more useful to define what your options are at this point: --Giving the employee more time --Shifting the employee’s responsibilities to simpler jobs --Giving the employee checklists of the steps needed to complete each task --Having another employee work with the individual --Firing the employee Defining your options relieves some of the stress of rumination and helps you shift to effective problem solving. Keeping your list of options short will prevent you from running into choice-overload problems. Research shows that if you consider more than three to six choices, you’re less likely to end up making a choice. Experiment: Practice concretely defining your best three to six options for moving forward with a problem you’re currently ruminating or worrying about. Write brief bullet points, like in the example just given. You can use this method for all sorts of problems. For example, a friend just used it to come up with ideas for how to have more social contact in her life. Note: If the word best is causing you to jump into perfectionism/frozen mode, write any three to six options.

SENSORY AVOIDERS – SENSORY DEFENSIVENESS “And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?” -Edgar Allen Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) Imagine a day inside Jenny’s skin. The morning alarm goes off and she startles, her heart races, her body tightens, her breathing quickens.  Her husband turns to get out of bed, grazing her foot, and she cringes, her bodily rhythms speed up another notch and her body tightens further. He sees that she seems annoyed about something and affectionately strokes her cheek. She bristles and, when he turns around, rubs where he touched her. She slowly arises to get out of bed, as she feels a bit dizzy, and quickly puts on her soft cotton house slippers, as the feel of the carpet makes her recoil, and walks into the bathroom. The bright lights her husband has left turned on assault her. Her eyes squint painfully. She quickly turns off the lights and turns on a small lamp on the sink counter. Her already overloaded system gets further destabilized. She starts to brush her teeth but the toothbrush is new and the bristles tickle her uncomfortably. She leans over to spit out the toothpaste and feels a sudden loss of balance and a surge of panic engulfs her. She steadies herself and turns on the shower. The soft spray of water from the showerhead feels like pelts of hail hitting her body. Her already stressed system is accelerating fast into overload. And her morning has only just begun!  She still has to figure out what clothes to put on, as most textures annoy her and feel uncomfortable on her body. She has to figure out what to eat for breakfast, as anything soft, mushy, or creamy repulses her. Worst of all, she has to figure out how to face the world outside that, for her, is like maneuvering through a sensory minefield. Jenny is an avoider or what is commonly known as sensory defensive (SD), a common mimicker of anxiety and panic. The sensory defensive feel too much, too soon and for too long, and experience the world as too loud, too bright, too fast and too tight, becoming easily distressed by everyday sensation

people who have the genes for unipolar major depression cannot turn off their stress response. When they experience stress from jobs, deadlines, family trouble, medical illness, or extreme excitement, large quantities of steroid stress hormones and norepinephrine come pouring into their brains and cannot be stopped. Every day, this stress overload is fatiguing and killing cells in their brains, bringing on unipolar major depression.

Enjoying life begins with enjoying yourself. You’re the one person you’re never going to get away from, so you’d better learn to like yourself. It’s impossible to love your life if you don’t love yourself.

Before you can achieve any of that, though, you’ll need to get in the habit of keeping nothing on your mind. And the way to do that, as we’ve seen, is not by managing time, managing information, or managing priorities. After all: you don’t manage five minutes and wind up with six; you don’t manage information overload—otherwise you’d walk into a library and die, or the first time you connected to the Web, you’d blow up; and you don’t manage priorities—you have them. Instead, the key to managing all of your stuff is managing your actions.

Do you ever say to yourself, "I'm stressed...I'm overloaded...I'm going to have a breakdown"? We all feel like that occasionally, in small moments of our life, but if you are feeling that way consistently, regularly, from the moment you get up in the morning until the moment you go to bed, you're clearly not on your path, and you're most likely not doing what you were meant to do. Those three words - "stress", "overloaded", "breakdown" - were not originally meant to describe humans.

What drives muscle growth, then? The answer is known as progressive tension overload, which means progressively increasing tension levels in the muscle fibers over time. That is, lifting progressively heavier and heavier weights. You see, muscles must be given a powerful reason to grow, and nothing is more convincing than subjecting them to more and more mechanical stress and tension.2

One of the biggest causes of stress is focusing on the negative things that are happening around us.

The justification for progressive overload can easily be derived from a consideration of the GAS.  We overload an organism by asking it to perform a demanding task – that is, we apply a stress to the organism, and the organism adapts in a way that accommodates the demands of that stress.  In particular, there is an increase in the performance capability associated with the task.

Here is what I fear even more than her health: I am concerned that she will not know when too much is too much. She won’t recognize the clues that her body or her mental state are giving her. When she gets gradually more agitated at her kids and husband, she will pass it off as hormonal rather than work overload. When she develops irritable bowel problems, migraines, or elevated blood pressure, she will blame herself for not being able to “handle stress” as easily as she used to. The truth is, she may even ignore cues from loved ones that she is burning out because she will be so used to pushing herself that she will be too afraid to listen to them. She will feel that they are wrong in encouraging her to slow down, because the idea will be overwhelming and foreign to her.

How you react to things you can’t control will many times determine your stress level. People who regularly get upset over small things are easily frustrated and highly stressed. People who shrug those things off are much happier.

The best approach when things are beyond your control is to shrug it off and trust God to work things out for your good (see Romans 8:28).

I cannot state strongly enough the need for regular exercise. Many people think they don’t have time to exercise, but the truth is if you don’t take the time now, you may lose more time visiting doctors and having to be inactive and unproductive because you feel bad. Exercise is one of the best sources of energy you can find!

Job pressure: Coworker tension, bosses, work overload Money: Loss of a job, reduced retirement, medical expenses Health: Health crisis or terminal or chronic illness Relationships: Divorce, death of spouse, arguments with friends, loneliness Poor nutrition: Inadequate nutrition, caffeine, processed foods, refined sugars Media overload: Television, radio, Internet, e-mail, social networking Sleep deprivation: Inability to release the stress hormones (adrenaline, norepinephrine, cortisol) interfering with the ability to sleep (APA 2013)

Why is this disengagement epidemic becoming the new norm? A few reasons I have witnessed in speaking with companies across the country include . . . • Information overload • Distractions • Stress/overwhelmed • Apathy/detachment • Short attention span • Fear, worry, anxiety • Rapidly changing technology • Entitlement • Poor leadership • Preoccupation • Social media • Interruptions • Multitasking • Budget cuts • Exhaustion • Boredom • Conflict • Social insecurity • Lack of longevity These challenges not only create separation and work dysfunction, but we are seeing it happen in relationships and personal interactions.

the stress created by information overload, physical clutter, and the endless choices required from these things can trigger an array of mental health issues like generalized anxiety, panic attacks, and depression. Couple this stress with the legitimate worries and concerns in your life, and you may find yourself with sleep problems, muscle pain, headaches, chest pain, frequent infections, and stomach and intestinal disorders, according to the American Psychological Association (not to mention dozens of studies supporting the connection between stress and physical problems).

After any highly stressful event, such as an automobile accident, it is normal for memories, emotions, and sensations associated with the trauma to flood involuntarily into consciousness. In most cases, people replay these memories over and over again, and this "replay" mechanism actually helps defuse their emotional content and allows people to put the experience behind them. This kind of mental processing is healthy and does not lead to long-term problems. But events that are extremely traumatic—being caught in a hurricane, attacked in a war, being the victim of an assault or a rape, or having suffered severe abuse as a child—are not effectively processed by some people. When images or memories of the event return, they are not able to think about them analytically or dispassionately, but instead they reexperience the terror all over again. These intrusive thoughts do not fade with time but are persistent, and each time they occur they are newly traumatizing. Such people are haunted by nightmares, flashbacks, and feelings of anxiety, fear, and foreboding that make them experience the trauma not as a painful event of the past but as a real, in-the-present, on-going threat. As a result, their entire stress-response system, in body and mind, becomes stuck in a state of constant alert, but the state tends to be unstable. Their emotions tend to swing from one extreme to its opposite. To cope with such emotional overload, these people organize their lives around avoiding any reminder of the trauma and the feelings it invokes. It is ultimately a futile struggle, however—like fighting an invisible enemy. The battle for control sets off a vicious cycle of intrusive thoughts that produce fear and anxiety followed by desperate attempts to achieve psychological numbing to reduce the anxiety. They progressively lose the ability to control or modulate their physiological response to any kind of stressor, and stimuli completely unrelated to the trauma may trigger intrusive memories. Lit up like a pinball machine, all their internal bells and whistles blaring, they cannot articulate how they feel because they cannot decipher the messages that their nervous system is sending them. Eventually, just having a feeling, any feeling, can seem enormously threatening.

down all the current stressors in your life and one step you could take to alleviate each one. Accepting that a difficult situation is real and clearly identifying the root problem is an important step. Proper diagnosis is half the cure. • Simplify your life. Eliminate and concentrate. Focus on the vital few things that contribute the most to your overall life satisfaction. Taking on too much or spreading yourself too thin inevitably leads to a sense of overload. 4. Combine aerobic, strength, and flexibility exercises. If you want maximum levels of energy, take responsibility for becoming a mini-expert on exercise and fitness. Subscribe to the most credible health and exercise magazines, add informative fitness sites to your Web favorites, and build your own library with the latest books, DVDs, and other resources related to energy and wellness. Aerobic exercise The most important component of effective exercise is aerobic exercise. Aerobics, or cardiovascular endurance, refers to the sustained ability of the heart, lungs, and blood to perform optimally. Through consistent aerobic conditioning, your body improves the way it takes in, transports, and uses oxygen. This means your heart and lungs will be stronger and more efficient at performing their functions. Proper aerobic exercise causes your body to burn fat, while anaerobic exercise causes the body to burn glycogen and store fat. Many people unknowingly exercise anaerobically when they intend to exercise aerobically. This results in, among other things, a frustrating retention of fat. The intensity of your exercise is what makes it anaerobic or aerobic. Consistent and proper aerobic exercise has the following benefits: • improves quality of sleep • relieves stress and anxiety • burns excess fat • suppresses appetite • enhances attitude and mood • stabilizes chemical balance • heightens self-esteem Each of the above benefits either directly or indirectly leads to high levels of both mental and physical energy. Here are some tips for maximizing the

extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus. The way to get the most out of your work and your life is to go as small as possible. Most people think just the opposite. They think big success is time consuming and complicated. As a result, their calendars and to-do lists become overloaded and overwhelming. Success starts to feel out of reach, so they settle for less. Unaware that big success comes when we do a few things well, they get lost trying to do too much and in the end accomplish too little. Over time they lower their expectations, abandon their dreams, and allow their life to get small. This is the wrong thing to make small. You have only so much time and energy, so when you spread yourself out, you end up spread thin. You want your achievements to add up, but that actually takes subtraction, not addition. You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects. The problem with trying to do too much is that even if it works, adding more to your work and your life without cutting anything brings a lot of bad with it: missed deadlines, disappointing results, high stress, long hours, lost sleep, poor diet, no exercise, and missed moments with family and friends—all in the name of going after something that is easier to get than you might imagine. Going small is a simple approach to extraordinary results, and it works. It works all the time, anywhere and on anything. Why? Because it has only one purpose—to ultimately get you to the point. When you go as small as possible, you’ll be staring at one thing. And that’s the point. 2 THE DOMINO EFFECT “Every great change starts like falling dominoes.” —BJ Thornton In Leeuwarden, The Netherlands, on Domino Day, November 13, 2009, Weijers Domino Productions coordinated the world record domino fall by lining up more than 4,491,863 dominoes in a dazzling display.

For example, if you need a job, you can go look for one. That is something that you can do, and if you do it, then God will help you get the right job. You cannot make a company hire you, but God can change the heart of the king (those in charge) even as He changes the course of the water flowing in rivers (Proverbs 21:1).

2.3 On the same wavelength: how our emotional brain is shaped by human relationships. Excerpts from the interview with Daniela F. Sieff (2012) In the beginning of this conversation Schore and Sieff discussed the now accepted proposition that our earliest relationships structure our emotional brain in ways that have long-lasting consequences for our emotional well-being. If we are nurtured by our caregivers, our right brain develops in such a way as to allow us to become comfortable with own emotions and to respond to our social environment healthily. We can deeply experience joy and its associated sensations as well as access coping mechanisms (regulatory strategies) that help us through the stressful moments of life. This implicit self-knowledge is at the root of the feeling of security. However, if we grow up in an environment that does not nurture our burgeoning emotional self, then the development of the emotional brain can be compromised. As a consequence, we might not to be able to learn how to regulate our emotions in a healthy fashion, and could too frequently be easily overwhelmed by them. Being emotionally overloaded for extensive periods of time can cause not only long-enduring states of stress, but also chronic dissociation from our true emotions and needs in order to prevent overwhelming emotions from reaching consciousness. If we have to revert to dissociation often enough, what initially began as a defense mechanism that has become engrained in our neurological circuits becomes part of our character.

We talk a lot about stress these days. Everyone seems to be stressed out about something. Stress seems to be a buzzword and we use it to the point where I think it’s a copout. “I’m so stressed,” or “This is so stressful,” or “All this stress, stress, stress.” Stress, to me, is a fearful reaction to life’s constant changes. It is an excuse we use for not taking responsibility for our feelings. If we can equate the word “stress” with the word “fear” then we can begin to eliminate the need for fear in our lives. The next time you think about how stressed you are, ask yourself what is scaring you. Ask: “How am I overloading or burdening myself? Why am I giving my power away?” Find out what you are doing to yourself that is creating this fear within you that keeps you from achieving inner harmony and peace.

(for example, Romans 15:13, Philippians 4:4, Romans 14:17, Psalm 16:9, Proverbs 10:28, 1 Thessalonians 5:16). If

If Your Presence does not go with me, do not carry us up from here!

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman says that this overload produces in us a low information-to-action ratio.10 In other words, we become LIARs. We know everything about that which we can do nothing about and almost nothing about that which we can do everything about. We have opinions about politics and doctrine and sports teams and the lives of celebrities, yet we often fail to notice the tension in our spouse’s eyes, learn our neighbors’ names, or see the stress of our coworkers. We know everything but do nothing.

Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength. —Charles Spurgeon

Big stress or little stress—your body reacts the same way. The human body doesn’t differentiate between a major or minor stress. Regardless of the catalyst, a typical stress reaction floods the body with a wave of 1,400 biochemical events. If this happens too frequently, we age prematurely, our cognitive function is affected, and we are drained of energy and clarity.8

And let the peace (soul harmony which comes) from Christ rule (act as umpire continually) in your hearts [deciding and settling with finality all questions that arise in your minds, in that peaceful state].” In other words… let peace make the call!

Oil of anise, basil, bay, chamomile, eucalyptus, lavender, peppermint, rose, and thyme are all soothing scents that can help decrease stress levels.1

Anytime we don’t keep God first, life gets messy and we get stressed out.

Calmness is the cradle of power. —J. G. Holland

Ralph Waldo Emerson said it this way: “Nothing external to you has any power over you.”1

Good words are worth much, and cost little. —George Herbert

Then spend some time thinking about Scriptures that are joy-filled (for example, Romans 15:13, Philippians 4:4, Romans 14:17, Psalm 16:9, Proverbs 10:28, 1 Thessalonians 5:16). If you change

Back in 1971, Herbert Simon, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978, warned that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” This is much worse today, in particular for decision-makers who tend to be overloaded with too much “stuff” – overwhelmed and on overdrive, in a state of constant stress.

And the information overload we experience when we multitask can make it difficult for us to prioritize and make decisions, which can also diminish our overall happiness.

Overloaded with stress, we often make expedient decisions that may not be in our long-term best interest.

Wellbeing is all about balance. Unfortunately, the normal modern lifestyle (which actually isn’t normal at all) often pushes us away from what’s healthy and manageable, and prompts us to make decisions that overload our bodies and minds. As a society, we are just too busy, too stressed, too consumed with so-called success, too worried about our looks and our image, and not plugged in at all to our spiritual and emotional roots.

When you are depressed, you have a chemical imbalance in your brain. Thoughts trigger emotions, which dump an overload of stress chemicals into the brain. There is a chemical consequence in the brain for every thought we think. Depression can be short-circuited temporarily by the brain-switching process. It’s a way of restoring the chemical balance. The thoughts that create depression connect with one’s memory banks, which have emotional associations. In

When you are depressed, you have a chemical imbalance in your brain. Thoughts trigger emotions, which dump an overload of stress chemicals into the brain. There is a chemical consequence in the brain for every thought we think. Depression can be short-circuited temporarily by the brain-switching process. It’s a way of restoring the chemical balance. The thoughts that create depression connect with one’s memory banks, which have emotional associations. In The Depression Cure, Ilardi writes: There’s evidence that depression can leave a toxic imprint on the brain. It can etch its way into our neural circuitry—including the brain’s stress response system—and make it much easier for the brain to fall back into another episode of depression down the road. This helps explain a puzzling fact: It normally takes a high level of life stress to trigger someone’s first episode of depression, but later relapse episodes sometimes come totally out of the blue. It seems that once the brain has learned how to operate in depression mode, it can find its way back there with much less prompting. Fortunately, though, we can heal from the damage of depression. All it takes is several months of complete recovery for much of the toxic imprint on the brain to be erased [or overridden].[88] In brainswitching, you choose a new thought that’s neutral or nonsense. This thought doesn’t

Sorrow overload. Pastors especially suffer with this as they deal daily with some of the most excruciating problems of life. At times, these can overwhelm us, especially when Facebook brings the sorrows of innumerable others we hardly know into our lives, exhausting our compassion reserves. “I can develop a sort of emotional hypochondria,” one pastor told me, “taking on too much personal stress from the problems of others.

A major contributor to the genesis of many diseases—all the examples we have looked at—is an overload of stress induced by unconscious beliefs. If we would heal, it is essential to begin the painfully incremental task of reversing the biology of belief we adopted very early in life. Whatatever external treatment is administered, the healing agent lies within. The internal milieu must be changed. To find health, and to know it fully, necessitates a quest, a journey to the centre of our own biology of belief. That means rethinking and recognizing—re-cognizing: literally, to “know again”—our lives.