Beating the Stress Cookie Monster

Remember Cookie Monster from Sesame Street? Do you ever feel like attacking some chocolate chip cookies with the tenacity that he does? Most of us have probably felt that way on a very stressful day-- just let me at 'em! Last week, I blogged about how stress leads to weight gain. Now, we'll take a look at how to handle that stress differently.

The first key is hidden in the last sentence of the previous paragraph. It's the recognition that you will have to deal with the stress. It's an active proposition; stress can't handle you-- you have to handle stress. For some of us, we feel utterly helpless, and the stress of life can be as terrible as the poor cookies must feel as the Cookie Monster is ripping through the package. This feeling of helplessness causes us to hope for some period where our lives will be stress-free and go according to our perfect plan, but generally speaking, this never happens. Stress can ebb and flow, but it seems to always be there. Understanding that you can deal with it effectively is the first step to being effective in dealing with stress. As many others have said in the past, if you don't think you can, you probably won't.

The other equally critical component that people fail to consider in dealing with stress is the perception of stress. Do you realize that you actually create stress for yourself! Things happen to you all the time...what you do with that information and how you process those events leads to the feeling of stress and thus your emotional, physical, and behavioral response.

There is no denying that your perception is your reality, so you should work on shaping your perception so that your reality results in less stress in your life. It's really the classic glass half full or half empty issue. Some of us look at the upside of everything while others of us look at the downside. If you feel stressed and out of control, take a minute to see how you interpret the things that are happening around you. Contemplate the things that you can control and for those things that you can't control, let them go. When everything in your world seems out of control, food is one of those things that you can exert some control over. So you decide to "reward" yourself by making the choice that you want no matter what anyone says. You have the power to do that with so many other areas of your life! Why exert that control to only hurt yourself more? Don't be afraid to exert that power to do something good for yourself.  You'll find that the Cookie Monster can be tamed, and that he likes other things besides cookies.

In your journal this week, identify things that caused you to feel stressed. Try to figure out why you perceived it as stressful, how much control you had in that situation, and what types of choices you made as a result of the control you had. I'll be interested to hear what you find.