Stress management is absolutely necessary for leading a happy and healthy life, but many stress management guides take a rather lackluster approach. Yes, you must relax and get away from your problems to reduce your stress level. However, many people are overly stressed, not because they cannot effectively manage stress, but because they have too many stress-causing factors in their life.
In the modern world, the quest for money and possessions has taken precedent over being happy. Our consumer culture and its endless ad campaigns have brainwashed us into believing that having money and nice things is happiness. This is obviously a ploy to push a population into buying status symbols to keep up with the Joneses, an imaginary super-cool family that exists in our collective consciousness. This mindset has caused people to place image on a pedestal and replace substance with style. This ultra-consumer mindset we have taken on is causing many people to work high-stress jobs in hopes of making tons of money and buying tons of stuff that will make them seem cool. However, many of the highest wage earners are not happy and complain constantly about being broke despite have huge salaries and tons of ‘cool stuff.’
In order to truly manage stress, people need to look inside themselves and figure out what would make them happy, and what is causing stress in their life. If a person would be happy living in the country and driving an old pickup truck, why should they continue to work a high-stress job they don’t enjoy just to pay for a forty thousand dollar SUV? How much can you enjoy your money if you are always stressed out and are barely around the people you would like to share it with? How many pointless arguments must you get in with your significant other before enough is enough? If you unsatisfied with some aspect of your life, you may want to develop a plan to improve or change the situation. If you hate your job, there are thousands of other jobs available; you have to be qualified for at least one of them.
Applying a band-aid to an issue doesn’t eliminate the root problem, and unless treated, that same problem will just linger and continue to cause tension. While managing stress and finding ways to relax or get away from it all is important, eliminating stressful issues from our lives is even more so. You’ll have to take a good look at yourself and your world, including the things going on in your life, and decide what stressors need to be dealt with to eliminate them once and for all.
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