Everyday Bliss For Women In Leadership

Below is a post I wrote in one of my women’s networking forums for a business owner who wrote in wondering about how to deal with stress. As it’s pertinent, I’m reposting here:

M— wrote:
The psychological manifestations of stress are sleeplessness, nausea and fear. Work-related stress can be responsible for numerous physical conditions, including raised blood pressure, headaches, indigestion and increased heart rate, but the emotional toll is often the thing that is most difficult for women to handle.

Thank you for surfacing the issue of constant stress, M—. Overwhelming stress is the primary thing I work on with my female executive clients, and I have some suggestions I’d like to share.

Upsetting data about women and stress caused me to write my last book: “Everyday Bliss For Busy Women” (www.everydaybliss.org). Specifically, the finding in 2006, that working women in America today for the first time in history, have rates of serious stress-related disease and fatality from those diseases (heart attack, stroke, cancer, digestive disorders and mental illness) that exceed those of working men. And not by just a little bit, but a lot. What a shocker!

The good news is that we can ameliorate these effects and disease processes by focusing on eliminating the EMOTIONS of stress…which as women we’re very good at feeling and being able to manipulate. Keep reading for how…

M— wrote:
Is dealing with stress about setting boundaries? Understanding your role between being a worker, lover or parent? Or is part of our genetic make-up to feel stressed out?

Genetically speaking it is not our make-up to constantly feel stressed out. An organism can’t survive long in such a state. However, we live in a greatly artificial world. We wake and go to bed when we please by electric light, not the natural light of the sun that does the regulating of the hormones in our bodies, in part. Without this natural regulation, stress hormones can creep up, and the happy hormones that make us feel good can be decimated. The result is a body and emotional rollercoaster that can’t ever catch up.

~*~*~*~*~ Stress-Busting Bliss Tip: Night light ~*~*~*~*~

Avoid bright lights after 9pm and keep the windows of your bedroom blacked out as much as possible while you sleep. This allows one of our “mellow out” hormones, melatonin, to rebuild in the body. If you sleep with a night light or flip the light in your bathroom on when you get up at night, the whole melatonin rebuilding cycle (along with others in the body) crashes just like a computer and you have to start from scratch when you go back to sleep again. This is assuming you sleep in near-total darkness. You need a good six to seven hours of near-total darkness (not just thin, grey twilight kind of dark you get with sheer curtains or streetlights outside on all night) to rebuild this hormone and re-establish its regular cycle. Substitute a blue or green bulb if you must have a nightlight, cover the faces of bright electric clocks and hang heavy curtains. Give it a month and see how much better you sleep and how much calmer through the day you are.

Moms who leave a night light on with baby - try this with them too. It cuts down daytime tantrums, colic and a host of other baby and toddler related unhappiness!

~*~*~*~*~ Stress-Busting Bliss Tip: Boundaries ~*~*~*~*~

Dealing with stress can be about a lot of things because it is unique in profile to the individual. If you put others needs above your own consistently, you definitely need to set better boundaries. A great book for this is “Where You End and I Begin” by Anne Katherine (Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Boundaries-Where-You-End-Begin/dp/1567312365).

A really good tip for dealing with others is to LOSE the automatic “Yes, sure I’ll do it// I’ll help/ you can count on me” that most of us have been taught is the polite response to requests for our time. It’s perfectly okay to insert a pause to think followed by “I’ll get back to you on that”. If someone won’t stop or wait for you to give your schedule a consult or wants you to make a decision RIGHT NOW…it’s never going to be a good decision, and certainly not the best for your stress levels. Being polite often gets you walked on. Re-evaluate your priorities if you feel you must say yes to everything. Choose three things to accomplish in any given day and if others requests or even other items on your own list don’t match up to those three things, they don’t get done.

Boundaries are important to protect you from yourself sometimes too.

~*~*~*~*~ Stress-Busting Bliss Tip: ETHOS ~*~*~*~*~

These are just a few things you can do to make your life a lot more sane and stress-free and I hope they help.

I also spent the last few years developing a new self-help method as a humanitarian gift to the world, that I’d like to share with you. The emphasis is on personal transformation but the “side effect” we notice is deep healing on personal issues. The technique falls into the area of energy therapy, somewhat similar to EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) but completely different, much simpler, and was created to be “culture-free”. The gist is for people all over the world to be able to use ETHOS and benefit from it. - no beliefs are required, and no terms are used that cannot easily cross international barriers. Well, only the word “yes” which we’ve found to be positive cross-culturally.

ETHOS by the way stands for “Energy Transformation and Healing Open Source” Method. So while I developed it, its ongoing development is now in the hands of a dedicated group of coaches and therapists in an open source consortium. You can download the whole thing, listen to me delivering a class on ETHOS and join in our community discussions here:

http://ethosmethod.com (click on “Learning Community”)

It’s all free, you don’t owe me a thing but to use it, get out of the stress that you feel and share it with everyone you know.

Warmly,
Maryam

Because you Just. Have. To. See. This. Anyone who ever thought office work was dull or who didn’t realize the amazing things you can do with humble office supplies, here’s some joy for ya from those wild and crazy guys at Eepy Bird, who last brought us the sordid tale of what happens when you mix Diet Coke and Mentos roll candy (don’t ask). Slinky company, watch your profit margin.  Enjoy the pretty colors!