Coming To Grips With Stress
Grip!
Coming to grips. Get a grip!!
I've got my fair share of gripes with grabbing and gripping, grubby digits galore!
I feel like getting and maintaining a "grip" on one's life implies a tautness or tension; a rope metaphor which, when followed through to its entirety of represented meaning, defines two extremes of personality: the "uptight" and the "slacker."
"Come on, cut me some slack."
"I swear, if she says one more word, I'll just fucking snap!"
Our musculature is like wire, taut with traveling electro-chemical charge. Tension manifests as the tightening of our muscles, a simultaneous holding and firing of energy within them. Action Potential! Anxiety and its tension is, at its core, a resistance to change, an in-tention to maintain which prevents release and free flow along the wire, or fiber of our muscles. The tense person holds onto everything, in an attempt to conserve. Fear keeps him tight, ready, and safe. It is a state tied to his mental state, his intelligence; alert and vigilant, the bright-eyed human prey had taut leg muscles like wound springs, ready to burst in a leap from danger (before his lax and insensitive companion.) This was the evolutionary benefit of stress, of heightened levels of adrenalin and cortisol.
Yet, today, the secretion of these stress hormones rarely serves that defensive purpose intended by evolution. Between lunch hour and the evening news, we rarely have occasion to fight or flee. Yet, in the long bumper-to-bumper commute, that cortisol is still secreted and, like a systemic marinade, the caustic stress hormone readies us for an attack that never happens. Blood pressure rises, sweat glands open, breathing rate increases, as we grip the wheel with whitened knuckles and grit teeth. It is tension without purpose, like an engine constantly racing in neutral, wearing the car down years before its time.
Coming to grips. Get a grip!!
I've got my fair share of gripes with grabbing and gripping, grubby digits galore!
I feel like getting and maintaining a "grip" on one's life implies a tautness or tension; a rope metaphor which, when followed through to its entirety of represented meaning, defines two extremes of personality: the "uptight" and the "slacker."
"Come on, cut me some slack."
"I swear, if she says one more word, I'll just fucking snap!"
Our musculature is like wire, taut with traveling electro-chemical charge. Tension manifests as the tightening of our muscles, a simultaneous holding and firing of energy within them. Action Potential! Anxiety and its tension is, at its core, a resistance to change, an in-tention to maintain which prevents release and free flow along the wire, or fiber of our muscles. The tense person holds onto everything, in an attempt to conserve. Fear keeps him tight, ready, and safe. It is a state tied to his mental state, his intelligence; alert and vigilant, the bright-eyed human prey had taut leg muscles like wound springs, ready to burst in a leap from danger (before his lax and insensitive companion.) This was the evolutionary benefit of stress, of heightened levels of adrenalin and cortisol.
Yet, today, the secretion of these stress hormones rarely serves that defensive purpose intended by evolution. Between lunch hour and the evening news, we rarely have occasion to fight or flee. Yet, in the long bumper-to-bumper commute, that cortisol is still secreted and, like a systemic marinade, the caustic stress hormone readies us for an attack that never happens. Blood pressure rises, sweat glands open, breathing rate increases, as we grip the wheel with whitened knuckles and grit teeth. It is tension without purpose, like an engine constantly racing in neutral, wearing the car down years before its time.