How to Live in the City by The School Of Life

Author:The School Of Life [Macdonald, Hugo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447293323
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Dealing with Stress and Avoiding Ruts

Stress is the great epidemic of our times. We all suffer constantly from it, to varying degrees. We blame it for things we can’t easily explain. It makes us ill. It keeps us awake. It makes us unhappy. It makes us drink too much. It stops us being sociable. It stops us being nice. And in the end, we are told, it even kills us. Cities are inherently stressful because stress is contagious, from one area of our lives to another and even from person to person. Stress about work becomes stress about money, which becomes stress about home, which becomes stress about your relationship.

How do you cope? It is unrealistic to think that you can eliminate stress from your life in its entirety. Learning to live with it, to be in control of your stress levels and to channel stress into a more positive energy are easier targets. We all know about the active things we can do such as taking regular exercise, practising meditation and seeking therapy when it all becomes too much to cope with alone.

There are other ways, too. Use the city to its advantages; instead of locking yourself away in a spiralling state of anxiety, use your social networks (by which I mean real, more than virtual). Stress is a feeling of being overwhelmed, of being worried and scared, of feeling incapable, feeling alone. Facing up to things that cause you stress is the most empowering way of beating them. Push yourself out of your comfort zone. Vocalizing your fears and anxieties demystifies them and brings them out of the cavernous, irrational territory of your own head. It stops them from slipping into your subconscious, bedding down, growing and looming. Share them with people who you allow to comfort you. ‘Worries shared are worries halved,’ my parents have always said, and it’s a valuable lesson.

Share your stress with others who have less investment in your emotional well-being, too. Talk about an anxiety to someone at work, or a friend of a friend at dinner. We are better at offering each other advice and solving each other’s problems when we aren’t clouded by any emotional impact. Showing vulnerability and being able to talk openly about it is not weak; it’s strong and attractive. Use these networks to ask for advice, from how to deal with particular situations and circumstances to recommendations for an acupuncturist, personal trainer or therapist. Sharing experiences and helping others is generous and healthy. Just don’t become the moaner who constantly asks for advice and never listens to the answer; there’s a fine line between attractively vulnerable and irritatingly needy. Try to be aware of the balance in what you give and what you take. The closer the friendship, the more elastic this can be, but taking too much and not giving enough in return can still cause the closest friendships to snap.

It’s not defeatist to accept stress as part of one’s life in the city. Understanding its sources and learning how to cope with it is the key to not letting it destroy you.

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