On a Personal Note

We have a phrase in English, "when it rains it pours." This means when something bad happens (like rain) a bunch of bad things happen (like it pouring, pouring means raining really heavily). Or like that bad things always happen together at the same time so as to maximize your emotional distress. Anyway, two pretty major traumatic things just recently happened in my family at basically the same time, and also something very personally trying also happened at the same time. So three pretty big things have happened within the past like... 2 or 3 weeks. Three isn't a very big number in and of itself, but when considering the magnitude of each three, it becomes actually quite a large number. Then, you could add the fact that I'm planning a wedding in another country. This is not meant to be me having my own pity party; I just wanted to paint the picture for you.


So needless to say, I've been kind of stressed lately. I think that normally I'm kind of a stressed person anyway actually. I'm not sure if I give that impression, but I do tend to keep things kind of bottled up. So I want to say two things about this time of stress.


First, I've actually been pretty active in trying to release my stress. In my special class on Thursday I've recently talked about both laughing and crying. They were really interesting topics for me. We learned that laughing actually creates chemicals that fight against and reduce stress chemicals, and that crying just pushes them straight out of your body through your tears. So what have I been doing? I've been trying to laugh more by watching a funny TV show I like. I've also recently read about laughter yoga. It's based on the idea that laughter is majorly beneficial to your body and also that your body doesn't know the difference between real laughter and fake laughter. (Fake laughter still produces those good stress fighting chemicals). This morning in particular was a really rough morning for me. So before I came to work I tried this laughter yoga out for the first time. I felt pretty ridiculous, but my head did seem to feel a little better afterward. And then I've also been much less restraintive about crying if the feeling comes. There are studies that show that people who are less open about crying can have a higher risk heart disease, high blood pressure, the occurrence of ulcers, and so on. I guess I should also mention that I've tried talking about these things with others instead of keeping them bottled up as I normally do.


Second, this time of difficulty for my family has actually brought us a lot closer. It's opened up some communication (not that we were particularly bad at communicating before), and I think us trying to be there for each other really reaffirms the love we share. So while this time has sucked pretty bad, it's also been kind of heartwarming.


You're all really seeing the feminine side of me today... all this talk about crying and heartwarming stuff... I'm making myself gag. So yes, why am I talking about these rather personal things?


Well, I guess I just wanted to share these two things I've been learning. Or three things. First, there are natural ways to reduce stress (alcohol not being one of them, alcohol can actually add to stress chemically). Second, being open about stuff is better than not. I've actually read that the reason male suicide rates are so much higher than female rates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate) is that women are more open about issues which leads to resolution and lower stress, whereas men have difficulty communicating personal things and never find resolution and their stress only increases. Third, family is really important. More important than work or status or money. I actually don't have a lot of money or status, and I've never put my work above practically anything personal, but I don't think it's something Japan understands.


Basically, everyone experiences times of stress, and if my stress fighting methods can be helpful to anyone then they're worth sharing. Especially the parts about being open and family being important, those are not things I've personally seen a lot of in Japan. Though family being important isn't really a stress fighting method... Of course there are many other ways of dealing with stress, like exercising or meditating, I just thought these might be some of the overlooked ones :)

▼▽▼▼【講師】Amberly先生のバックナンバー━━━━━━━━
・【the things we say.】2010.03.10 (Wed)