Written by: Emily Brook, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
You can’t hear it… ‘it’ has no noise of its own.
You can’t see it… ‘it’ has no shape or colour of its own.
You can’t smell it… ‘it’ has no smell of its own.
You can’t touch it… ‘it’ has no physical form of its own.
You can’t taste it… ‘it’ has no taste of its own.
Stress. The silent killer.
The thing that can take the life out of someone in what seems like a second.
They’re here, and then they’re gone.
But what is ‘stress’ really?
Is it true that it creeps up on someone seemingly out of nowhere?
Is it really a silent killer?
As a society, we have accepted that life is stressful and that’s just how it is. The combination of a job, children, relationships, family commitments, multitasking, darting here and there, and taking on more responsibilities; really is stressful. One day roles into the next and it feels like a race of survival ‒ “just keep going.” The busyness of our life blinds us from hearing the subtleties of our own bodies trying to speak to us about their dis-ease.
Stress is really just a word. An umbrella term for numerous feelings that show up in the body as a physical manifestation of its presence. Some kind of unsettledness within. Activation within the body keeps the body in a dysregulated state. A continual cycle of ‘doing’ the same things over and over again, creating the same feelings in the body, over and over again. Not all stress is unhelpful. However, we must be able to discern short-term stress from long-term stress and its implications in order to make wise choices about our life.
Stress has many faces and really is not so silent when you start to explore how it shows up –
The pain you feel in your chest from time to time
The anxiety you feel within your body, the unsettledness, the fast-paced heart
The uncomfortable feeling in the pit of your stomach when you wake up in the morning
The craving you have for food, or the lack of appetite you have
The constant thoughts of worry
The ache in your back or shoulder that keeps coming back
The constant need to be busy and doing something feeling that everything will collapse if you stop
The poor night’s sleep, night after night
These are just a few.
Stress has many entry points into the body and takes on many different forms in varying degrees. The length of time it’s allowed to fester will affect how many facets of the body are affected. Sometimes multiple signs and symptoms start to show up over time as if stress has a voice and its voice is getting louder.
‘Stress’ hold so much power. Allow yourself to really contemplate this.
Ask yourself what happens if you keep living the life you’re currently living. How will you be in a month, a year, or five years?
Then ask yourself what you can do about it and listen. Is your mind playing victim, or is it open to hearing something new?
The Inquiry
We are all unique, despite being mostly the same in physiological make-up, and we all have a unique way of reacting to life experiences and challenges based on our own human blueprint. This blueprint houses our perceptions of life based on the beliefs we have inherited or adopted about ourselves and the world. The blueprint acts like our internal operating system from which our thoughts, emotions and actions are born. This is our ‘human-hood’ – it’s what makes us human.
Childhood is a crucial time for forming and developing this blueprint ‒ how much we think we can achieve, how smart we are, how much opportunity is available to us, how to deal with challenges, how much resilience we have, and what we believe about health, money, work, relationships, family etcetera – are all a part of our blueprint.
As we grow up, our perception of life starts to shape the life that we experience, as the choices we make are based upon how we feel about ourselves, and how we feel about ourselves comes from our blueprint. It’s getting complex now, right? We’re not taught all of this. This is the wisdom we gain through living this human experience in real-time and tuning into who we really are and how we feel. Everything is dependent on how we feel about ourselves, and the amount of stress we take on is entirely dependent on our relationship with ourselves and the choices we make as a result.
Unfortunately, the opportunity to go on this deeper inquiry into ourselves and life doesn’t present itself until catastrophe hits. Only then can we hear the call. Only then can we see how the body has been trying to communicate with us. Only then are we ready to listen?
Sometimes it takes a great shock to make us stop and wake up. That is a tragedy in and of itself, and yet it’s a reality of being human. We don’t know who we are until we know who we are. We’re so caught up in the matrix of our own minds that we can’t recognise the way that we’ve been choosing to live.
Stress isn’t such a silent killer after all when we tune in to its very nature and really start to look at all the ways that it can show up. It’s actually pretty loud; we just don’t see the signs as a serious problem. We accept them, dismiss them or think that one day it will all be easier, and it will go away. Only it won’t go away unless we do something about it, something aside from taking a form of medication to alleviate or ‘hide’ the symptoms.
*Now* is the time to take radical responsibility for your life because *now* is the only time we ever really have. Tune into how you really feel. Speak it into your conscious awareness. Ask bigger questions about yourself. Get curious. Realise that life is finite, and it can all be over in the blink of an eye.
Let’s never need to say the words “I didn’t see it coming” because we chose to tune in, notice how we feel, and take courageous steps towards re-creating our life from the inside out for the good of our health, our children, our relationships, and the quality of this human experience we have been given.
Life is precious. There is nothing more important than how you feel inside. You have the power to change how you feel, and only you have the power to change YOUR life. Choose you. Choose to create a different life. Choose to believe that a different life is available to you. Choose to walk in faith towards freedom. It starts on the inside.
Emily Brook, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Emily is a multi-passionate health and life coach and mentor, with a special interest in what it means to be human and activating human potential by facilitating people to move from a state of stress, struggle and despair into a space of thriving, finding inner freedom, and activating the power within to curate a life of fulfilment.
Emily previously worked as a physiotherapist for ten years working with many different patient groups with many different health issues and gained a broad understanding of the different ways people suffer and helping them, through rehabilitation, to achieve their goals.
It wasn’t until Emily found herself in a state of emotional pain in 2019, with the sudden ending of her marriage, that her understanding of suffering opened up to a much deeper level. She embarked on a journey with mindfulness as a way of coping and found it an instrumental part of her own personal transformation that she went on to study for a diploma in mindfulness-based approaches at Bangor University. She also dove deep into the world of self-reflection and personal development.
Emily’s coaching approach fuses neuroscience and philosophy at the intersection of science and spirituality and includes core pillars of subconscious programming, emotional health and regulation, brain science, the law of attraction, and meditation and mindfulness.
Emily guides you on a journey of introspection, going within to uncover the real you, expanding self-awareness, peeling back the layers of conditioning, and activating the power and potential within. She believes the key to moving from suffering to thriving is in our ability to understand the brain and mind, process emotions, heal, learn lessons, find deeper meaning and connection, and become the architect of our own minds and life. You can find Emily on Facebook and Instagram.
