How are you sleeping?

Stress.  Not many people realize it's happening, and that it thrives on a restless mind.  They don't think about how your body is controlled by your mind and emotions; how your body longs for relaxation of the brain; how your body needs you to just stop thinking for a minute.

Stress kills people!  That's how powerful the mind is.  It can physically deplete you and destroy you.

It causes insomnia, gray hair, hair loss, cardiac arrest, cancer.

Sure we need stress to grow.  That is a fact.  If you're stressed at work, you either live with it until it destroys you, or you take a step toward the door.  If you're stressed in your marriage, same scenario, except you can also try to fix the marriage by putting your spouse first and actively loving him or her.  But that's advice for a different post.

The way I see it, there are a handful of reasons for stress:  sucky job, sucky relationship, sucky teenagers, sucky siblings/immediate family, sucky finances.

I'm not stressed these days.  Work is tricky and pushes me to the limit sometimes, but I'm not losing sleep over it.  Other than that, the factors noted above are not affecting my well-being.

But I see it happening all around me. People are so stuck in their own muck of things that accidents, overdoses, and murders are happening.

Some time ago, when I was first going through the divorce, I went to see a therapist and I was lamenting and angry and stressed beyond belief, and she listened for a while, waited for me to pause and said, "you're causing all of this pain yourself!"  She went on to say that the only things that I could truly control are what I put in my mouth, what I say to others, and how I treat my body and my mind.

Fear is the bitch here.  It's always the bitch that causes stress.  But what is there to be afraid of?  You lose your job?  Okay.  You lose your money? Your marriage? Your friendships?  Okay, okay, okay.  All these losses suck, but sometimes what you focus on causes the problems; and sometimes what you fail to focus on causes the problems.

Example:  You take your teenagers out to dinner and look at your phone - - - work emails, facebook, texts from friends - - - then complain that the kids don't want to hang out with you.  Focus on them, then they will focus on you.

I'm not perfect at all.  I wallow in my losses sometimes, grab on to the melancholy and ride it around for a while, look in the mirror and see nothing good.  It's sucky when I do that, and I find myself beating myself up for feeling the way I'm feeling.  Then I think about how I might be entirely different if I didn't fall into those moods sometimes.  The moods make us grow, I think.

Yet long periods of those moods?  Not good.

When you find yourself focused on just one thing, or waking several times a night, maybe it's time to give your body a rest from your mind.

Less accidents, overdoses and murders. . .