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Have you heard the story about the frog that died in a pot of boiling water? He was alive when someone put him into a nice cool pot of water. That person then put the pot on the stove, reassuring the frog that everything was going to be okay. The frog trusted the person and didn’t think much of what was going on. When the person turned on the stove, the frog didn’t notice much difference in the water’s temperature until it was too late and he had boiled to death.
What had happened? Apparently with small adjustments in temperature, as the water got hotter and hotter, it got so hot it began boiling. Because of the frog’s ability to adapt, it did not realize that the water go to such a hot temperature that the water’s temperature became unsurvivable. The frog died from the heat even though it could have jumped out of the pot at any time and saved itself.
You’re the frog and the water represents the stress in your life. Much like the frog, as humans, we are good at adapting to our changing environment. What inevitably happens though as we get older and have more responsibilities, is that the pot of water we are in called “life”, can become increasingly pressured, and hot like the water. Since it can happen gradually over a period of months and years, we simply take on more and more, thinking we can and are handling everything okay. Until one day we wake up dead at the ripe young age of 50 because of a heart attack from all of the stress we put our bodies through. Does this sound like you?
Today I want to talk to you about how to figure out if you’re under so much pressure in your life that you’re headed down a path of self-destruction, whether you realize it or not. Today I want you to start examining your life as a pot of water and my goal is for you to pay attention to whether or not the water in your life is close to a boiling point without you even realizing it. If you’re alive, which you are if you’re listening/reading to this, it is not too late to make changes to save yourself from yourself. I still opine that stress is the number one killer of humans here in the western hemisphere and I believe being vigilant over our stress levels is even more important than being vigilant over our diet.
Without further ado, let’s see how hot the water is in your life before it’s too late.
PHYSICAL CHANGES
Your body is always trying to speak to you. If you’re not attuned to your body you will miss the subtle, and then later, not so subtle cues your body is giving you. The more stressed you are the more you will find your body changing until the effects are irreversible or have manifested in illnesses you can’t cure.
Skin and Hair
While you may not think you’re overly stressed, you may in fact be overly stressed if you find your body giving you subtle hints. Subtle hints include things like your skin condition. Do you find yourself getting pimples or other forms of acne even though you’re way out of your adolescent years? Don’t ignore this. Stress can trigger the right chemicals in your body which can cause acne regardless of your age. If you think they are just temporary hormonal changes that will go away, while that may be true in certain instances, don’t overlook them by assuming it is that. In fact, take a look at what is going on in your life or what started to go on before the acne flared up. If you can identify something that triggered it, that thing is probably something stress related and you need to get rid of it!
I had a friend who had acne as a kid (join the club)! It went away when he was about 19 years ago. Fast forward twenty years later, at the ripe age of 39, he started getting acne again! He was exercising regularly and also kept a very healthy diet free of fried foods and sugar. Yet, there it was – big pimples popping up on his face. He, like me, was an attorney, so appearances mattered given that he had to go to Court as well as meet clients etc. He couldn’t figure out what was going on. People told him “well, you’re turning 40 soon so it is just hormonal changes”. Personally I thought that was BS as your body doesn’t know when you’re turning 40 years ago. Everyone’s body ages differently. The body doesn’t know what 40 is. Your biological age is different from your calendar age.
Anyway, the poor guy tried everything from changing his diet to different topical treatments. Eventually, after about six months, the pimples subsided. Occasionally one would pop-up, but not like before. I took a step back with him to analyze it. He had assumed it was just a temporary hormonal change. I suspected otherwise.
Let’s examine his situation in a bit of depth: when we reviewed his timeline, it seemed obvious what was really going on. He was gradually getting stressed out of his mind and didn’t even realize it. Immediately before the acne started, two major life events occurred: first, he had his first child. Second, his in-laws had moved in with him and his wife to help with the baby. On top of this, add sleepless nights, as well as managing a law practice. This poor guy had been getting overloaded with stress and didn’t even realize it. I remember him talking about the pressure of having people live at his place and how he felt responsible for all of the people under his roof.
About six months after the baby was born, the wife returned to work, the baby went to daycare, and the in-laws left. Around this time, the acne disappeared. Coincidence? Not in my opinion! He had gone from having a fairly quiet life to having a number of pressures, major ones. Maybe because of the kind of work we do as attorneys, he didn’t notice the extra pressure and stress he was under. He was like the frog who didn’t really notice how hot the water was getting with all of these things that had landed in his life.
In reality, it was likely his was body being poisoned by stress, and the stress was manifesting in pimples. Sometimes I wonder if we get pimples on our face so that we can see them and react sooner, since our face is the first thing we see in the mirror.
Other physical changes include other skin issues such as rashes or hives you don’t normally get, or the exacerbation of pre-existing skin issues. Perhaps you have mild exzema but now it suddenly is way worse – it could be you’re under too much stress. I really think the skin is one of the biggest mirrors of stress.
Next look at your hair. The biggest one is the color and quality. Did you go from having a nice jet-black head of hair to having grays pop-up at an alarming rate? For those that know me, yes, I am talking about myself! I went from having about 10 gray hairs at the end law school to having them pop-up like mushrooms in the first year of being an attorney. I took them for granted, not realizing the pressure and stress of being a lawyer and dealing with knuckleheads was injuring me physically. Look to see if grays are showing up. The more stressed you are, the more the hormones produced from the stress can deplete the melanocyte stem cells that determine hair color.
The other big one is if you notice hair-shedding at an alarming rate. When I lived in Toronto, I went through a big hair-shed. I thought something really bad was going on. I went to a number of doctors, and none of them could figure it out – they all just said it was probably male-pattern baldness, and since I had such a thick head of hair, to be honest I don’t think they even believed me. I had to use some logic, which was that no one in my family was bald, nor do people who a pre-disposed to baldness lose so much hair so quickly as was happening with me. After a hundred hours of self-research I realized I was going through something called telogen effluvium wherein when you go through extreme stress, many of your hair follicles go into a resting phase and your hair sheds significantly. Fortunately, there is much more data and science available on this phenomena now versus twenty years ago when it first happened. It gave me pause, and taught me to be more relaxed about things and avoid stressful situations otherwise it would happen again. And guess what? It has happened again several times since then, always triggered by stressful events.
I have a friend who recently quit practicing law after she had an entire clump of hair come out in the shower, leaving a bald patch on her head. Medically this is referred to as alopecia where stress can cause a bald spot on your head. Stresses that cause this are usually from significant surgery, but the emotional stress can be so high that it triggers it as well. Imagine that for a minute: you can stress yourself out so much that it has the same impact on your body as major surgery.
Fortunately for my friend, Instead of ignoring it, she realized what was going on and decided to get the hell out of law to save herself. She did the right thing. You have to listen to your body instead of persevering forward. Not surprisingly, after she quit, the hair grew back and she’s never looked better!
Take it to heart – even if you think you are going to go bald from a genetic predisposition, don’t help accelerate it by stressing yourself out.
Colds
If you went from getting a cold once a year to suddenly getting cold symptoms every few weeks, then you’re experiencing too much stress. I’ve heard that stressing yourself for five minutes can knock your immune system down for up to FOUR hours. Think about that. Five minutes of stress. For those of us living in LA, you just need to be driving for five minutes to experience five minutes of stress. What we don’t realize is that our body is always fighting off viruses floating around in our bloodstream. When you get stressed, those viruses can take over.
I didn’t put two and two together for quite some time. When I first started working at a big bankruptcy law firm, I was seeing upwards of 20 new clients a day. This was during the financial meltdown in 2009 and I would get to the office at 9:30am, and not leave until around 5:00pm. While the hours didn’t sound bad, consider, I didn’t even get a break to eat lunch since there was a constant stream of new clients coming in. Not realizing I was an empath at the time, I would go home exhausted, but not just from having talked non-stop for eight or nine hours. When they put me in charge of my own office in Glendale, I remember getting very sick after my first day with the flu. I hadn’t had a flu in over 12 years at that point! There was no coincidence.
Even after I returned from the flu, I gradually found my neck incredibly sore, more and more each day to the point that I couldn’t turn my head. In addition to this, I started developing a phlegm issue. Out of nowhere, phlegm was building in my throat to the extent that I couldn’t even speak for more than 30 seconds without having to go to the bathroom to horck out a giant load of phlegm. When I quit, all of these bizarre physical conditions more or less vanished. Unfortunately, as my own practice got busier, I started getting more mild colds. One occasion sticks out in my mind – I was doing a favor for another attorney who was out of town. I was doing what was called a “special appearance” for this attorney, wherein I show up to Court on his behalf to ask for an extension of time, or “continuance” as we call it. Usually a fairly straightforward process that takes a few seconds. For some reason, that day, everyone before me was also asking for a continuance. The Judge was steadily getting more and more pissed off. By the time it was my turn to ask for a continuance, she decided to take out her pent-up wrath on me, and berated me for asking for a continuance (even though about 20 people before me had just done the same thing). It literally made me want to quit being a lawyer then and there.
I proceeded to go home, shell-shocked, and had an immediate illness something between the likes of a cold and a flu for the next four days. Coincidence? Nope. The stress had made me sick.
My point is simple – if you find yourself getting constantly sick, it means your immune system is getting suppressed on a regular basis. This means whether you realize it or not, your living in constant stress. Time to re-examine what’s going on and figure out how to get rid of that stress.
Tired
Do you feel tired all of the time? You’re probably stressed out. You are juggling so many things that you don’t realize the stress is wearing you thin and causing you to be tired.
You hear about chronic fatigue syndrome. Everything is a “syndrome” these days. My favorite syndrome is restless leg syndrome. They label things syndromes so they can conveniently create a pill to sell to you for a small fortune. If you’re finding yourself always tired or exhausted despite sleeping for enough hours every night, then your mind and body may be under stress whether you realize it or not. You don’t feel tired for no reason barring some other ailment, you may be shouldering stress from some sort of source whether it is family or work-related.
Neck Pain & Headaches
One thing I noticed when I was stressed was that I started getting neck pains. Basically, I started having trouble turning my head because of neck stiffness. While I had never been rear-ended or had whiplash before, I can imagine that what I was experiencing was what whiplash felt like. In reality, it was muscle stiffness from the stress.
This was of course, back when I was working at that big bankruptcy firm, and seeing countless clients every day. I didn’t think much of it at the beginning as at first I figured that perhaps I had slept in an awkward position. When the inability to rotate my head only decreased over time, I started realizing something was wrong. As it was the first time it had ever happened, I was clueless that it was stress related. I had seen movies before where people would get massages and the masseuse would tell the client that the client felt really tense and had knots in their neck and shoulders. I never really understood what that was until the stress had caused this tension in my neck and shoulders as well.
When I finally quit – you can imagine, the neck stiffness went away. It was amazing how bad it was getting. Can you imagine that stress can affect you so much that you can’t even turn your head? It’s all of that negative energy getting stored in your body. Not surprisingly, it happened in my neck, right at the base of my brain stem.
For others, if you’re experiencing headaches you may also be under stress, especially if you’re not the type of person to get headaches. The mild or extreme headaches you’re experiencing are just another symptom of your daily routine and the stress manifesting itself into your physical reality.
EMOTIONAL CHANGES
If your stress is building but you don’t realize it, just take a look at your behavior. Do you find yourself getting short-tempered with your loved ones? Perhaps you don’t enjoy the things you used to enjoy? Or maybe, you’re like Shawn Michaels back in the 90’s when he left the WWF for awhile because he “lost his smile”. If your personality is changing, it could be stress related.
Snappy
The easiest way to know this is that people are finding you really short-tempered. Little things that you used to be able to tolerate, now get under your skin very quickly, causing you to get angered. Instead of things rolling off of you like water off a duck’s back, that same water drowns you in emotion. The driver that cuts you off makes you want to kill someone instead of just giving him a like honk on the horn. When the cashier at El Pollo Loco gives you the wrong order for the tenth time in as many visits, it makes you go loco and berate them for screwing it up instead of just asking for them to fix it. If you’re not normally like this, then you’re likely stressed as hell and don’t even realize it. Like I said, these things can build bit by bit until it’s too late.
As an empath, I’ve been on the receiving end of this throughout my life, especially from those with narcissistic personalities. When someone would have a bad day, even though I had nothing to do with their “bad day” and in fact I was their friend or sympathetic ear, they would occasionally lash out at me because I was their easy target to release their negative energy. That stress energy has to go somewhere so why not give it to an empath who is a sponge? Regardless, I’ll use this as an aside to let you know that when you recognize someone is in a bad mood and you’re an empath, stay the hell away from that person otherwise you’re asking for trouble.
For me, I use a cat as my metric. Not my kittens at my parent’s place because they’re amazing, but this other cat that lives at my place. It never ceases to test me. From the moment I wake up, it is harassing me, trying to trip me, scratch my cupboards, chairs, you name it. The cat is relentless, trying to get my attention. Normally, I can put up with it. But when I start reacting with hostility because the cat refuses to learn or adapt to my demands to stop scratching things, I know that I must be stressed and it prompts me to re-evaluate what is really making me mad – is it the cat or something else gnawing away at me. The cat has become my mirror. When I identify that something else is causing me to be this way, I can self-counsel myself to chill out and meditate or do whatever I need to do. Think about the things, and people around you that are suddenly receiving your ire. It could be you’re overstressed and don’t even realize it.
More Alone Time
When you’re stressed you will require more alone time, or decompression time. When you’re stressed your body is being damaged and accordingly needs more time to heal. Being around people doesn’t help you heal usually so you end up wanting to spend more time alone. Be careful though – if you’re spending so much time alone that you’ve become isolated, cutting off friends and family. Do this long enough and you can become anti-social which over the long-run isn’t the most healthy thing for you.
If you went from being the life of the party to being a loaner in a short period of time, something is wrong! Take a step back to find what’s grinding you down. I see some of these lawyers – they’ve aged beyond their years. You can’t crack jokes with them as their minds are always somewhere else. It’s like their joie de vie has gone. If you were to look at their histories, they’ve gone through multiple divorces and have a hard time holding down relationships. I refuse to believe they were always like this. I myself having dealt with the stress of this profession can tell you that years of this can really change you, and not for the better. Catch yourself before it’s too late!
Depression
This is an easier one to diagnose. Unless you’ve always suffered from depression, if you have chronic stress, you’ll find yourself feeling depressed. Instead of looking forward to the great things in life everyday, instead, you’ll have a woe-is-me attitude worried about what bad shit is going to happen during the day today, and again tomorrow. It’s like you don’t see any positive future anymore.
If I’m not mistaken, I once heard the definition of depression was the “inability to see the future”. I’m assuming they meant the inability to see a “positive” future.
Think back to when you were younger and were excited for summer break, then the next grade, or going to university, or that summer abroad program where in real life you were probably going to spend your days and nights drinking and hoping to hook-up. What happened to all of those exciting things you had to look forward to in life? Well they are still there! They’re all around you. There’s always so much positive stuff to look forward to in life and if you can’t see it, then you may be depressed, your vision clouded by the anxiety of the stress you’re secretly enduring. Depression is a serious topic. I won’t even venture into the different levels or types of depression on this podcast. Aside from not being qualified to do so, it is a very serious subject considering how many people commit suicide every year. If you think you may be depressed and it seems to be getting worse, seek help from friends, family, and professionals. Many people worry about the stigma of seeing a psychiatrist or psychologist but whether you realize it or not, it has become fairly commonplace for people to have a counselor.
Depression, unless due to something situational like a death in the family or relationship break-up, can be caused by the crappy lifestyle you’re living from the stress every day. If you have to wake up to a day full of deadlines at work, or shitty relationships that bring you down, then these things are distracting you from the reality of a bright future that is probably right in front of your eyes. If you’ve become depressed without anything significant happening in your life, it could be caused by stress creeping up on you.
Anxiety
Anxiety comes in many forms. A couple of definitions including, a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. Or, a nervous disorder characterized by a state of excessive uneasiness and apprehension, typically with compulsive behavior or panic attacks. I’ll let you Google it yourself if you’re not sure what anxiety is.
I remember when I had a couple of psycho ex-clients try to terrorize me last year. It caused me some sleeplessness for sure, but it also caused something else I had never identified before: anxiety. My body was feeling strange things that it had never felt before. I would find my fingers trembling a bit when I would think of the terrorism from these losers, and I would be very edgy. I can’t say I ever had a panic attack, but I did feel something in my chest, like a tightness or heavy weight on my chest. I’m pretty sure I was having anxiety. I was definitely excessively worrying.
A friend of mine is an accountant, otherwise known as a CPA here in the United States. She goes through tax season every year, and contrary to popular belief, that’s not just a few weeks a year. Tax season for a CPA in a public accounting job means that tax season is something like seven months per year. Anyway, for three months in a row, she’ll work long hours. And by long hours, I mean she’ll work until about 8:30am to 9:00pm, including Saturdays and sometimes Sundays. She won’t even leave her desk for a break or a walk around the block for endless hours. Compounding that is the fact that millions of dollars of clients money and their taxes have to be accounted for with perfection otherwise mistakes can cost the clients lots of money, and possibly her, her very job if she screws something up. The pressure is intense and goes on for months. Sometimes she would have to have some drinks before bed to sleep. Recently she ended up having severe stomach pains and headaches, unsure of where they came from. On top of that she was getting significant pressure on her chest and was constantly worrying. Not surprisingly, her health woes manifested into a uterine issue that required surgery.
She’s a great example of how your job can take a physical toll on you. Her body was self-destructing, and she had tremendous anxiety. She didn’t even realize it was being caused by the rigors of her job, even though every year she was going through this same song an dance. The timing of her health woes though were always occurring like clockwork during tax season. This was no coincidence. Her job was literally killing her. My larger point though is that she was experiencing anxiety but didn’t realize it was due to the pressure from the job she had. Because it was stress that was aggregating over the years and getting worse every season, she didn’t realize the pressure or toll the stress had taken on her body until it was almost too late.
Anger & Frustration
For me, I notice that when I get stressed, I get angry and frustrated very easily. The first time it happened to me was when I was working my first law job after graduating, at what was at the time, the biggest bankruptcy law firm in the country. They had offices all over the country, and this was during the financial meltdown back in 2009. The business model was set-up more like a sales business than it was a law practice. There were days where I would see 23 people in one day. I never realized it at the time, but I was gradually becoming really frustrated and pissed off with little things outside of the office.
Examples? The terrible LA drivers became even worse in my eyes and gave me some serious silent road rage. Dealing with customer service people at companies was more of a nightmare than usual. People walking slowly in front of me in a store would really get under my skin. My favorite is when in a crowded store, someone walks super-slowly to the entrance, then completely stops dead in their tracks to either make a cell phone call, or contemplate life, completely ignoring of the ten people behind them trying to get into the store. Yeah…welcome to LA.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had been absorbing all of this despair and negative energy from the bankruptcy clients coming to my office. They were all spilling their energy onto me about their dire financial problems. While at the office I was calm and collected, I would be a bundle of negative energy ready to explode outside of work. Especially as an empath who hadn’t realized it at the time, I had been literally absorbing the negative energy surrounding these people’s lives and my body was desperate to unleash it somewhere. Because it was happening so incrementally, I didn’t realize my anger and frustration was from the clients at my job. For months me and my parents seriously couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I even thought of doing hypnotherapy to figure out if something traumatic had happened to me as a child that I was suppressing. It took me years after I had quit that job to realize that my anger and frustration was as a result of absorbing bad energy and also from the stress that comes from life.
Now I monitor myself and when I notice myself frustrated or easily angered, to take a step back and chill out, take a vacation, or reduce my workload.
CONCLUSION
So there you have it. While you’re too busy trying to earn a living to actually live, then you especially should pay special attention to your body both physically and mentally. It’s so easy to get caught up in the daily routine. As you get older, you know how time passes faster and faster. In this passage of time, it’s easy to overlook the warning signs. It’s easy to think these little things that we’re experiencing are just temporary.
We feel neck pain and dismiss it as having slept awkwardly. We keep getting colds, and we figure it must be cold and flu season (even though it’s the middle of summer). We don’t want to get out of bed in the morning and are easily irritable and we just assume it’s because we’re tired. Little do we know, if they remain unaddressed, these symptoms often get worse and worse until one day you find yourself in a medical predicament that is potentially irreversible. We figure that heart attack or cancer is just as a result of genetics, meanwhile perhaps the daily stress you’ve put yourself through over the course of years and years has finally manifested itself. The problem is while the pot of water we’re living in keeps getting hotter and hotter, we continue to treat the symptoms instead of realizing that the water is getting so hot that it’s burning us to death.
Don’t wait until it’s too late. Take time out of your day at least once a week to really listen to your body. Ideally listen to it every day to feel anomalies. Talk to your loved ones and friends to see if they think you’re acting differently or appear downtrodden. Stress in my opinion is the number one killer in this world as it causes people to turn to other toxic vices to deal with it. Remember, if you keep waiting and shrugging off your stress, you’ll end up like the frog in the pot of boiling water.