"Is it Healthy to Live Without Stress?"
An interesting question. There is a mountain of material out there on how to overcome stress; too much to even consider posting it up here. Besides, I'm sure we'll all have our own opinion on the matter; at least the "overcoming it" bit. But what's good about it..? That's quite a different issue; an interesting viewpoint for us to consider.
It'll be interesting to see how well we stay 'on topic' with this one!
See you all Wednesday...
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4 comments:
ohh..jst one other thing, there's some v cool weblectures on itunes these days. One in particular that may be of topical interest is Keth Ward talking about "God,Science and the New Atheism. Its one of the Cambridge University "Science and religion" weblectures. Just type in his name in the itunes search bar and you'll find it. Anyone interested in Human Behaviour Biology? Type in "Robert Sapolsky" for a v cool set of lectures encompassing just about everything to do with that stuff. And finally, not on itunes I think but for Cosmology and Quantum Mechanical stuff if you havent tried the "Perimeter Institute" public weblectures yet then u r in for a real hypo-quantum treat :)
By the way y'all, I think that last comment was from Paul... Thanks Paul: a veritable mountain of new stuff. Once I've been through it all I'll post up any useful links on the Listener or Links page (whichever applies). Thanks again.
Ray
Hello...yep twas me Ray that posted previous. I thought id posted an earlier comment but I didnt quite do it properly. It went something like this:
Its me Paul the atheist taoist bloke with the furry hat. I was wondering if this is a place to post thoughts about upcoming topics? If not then sorry but if so then read on?
Stress a good thing? Well maybe a stressful situation can highlight an area of your "internal economy" that needs working on? For example maybe your belief pattern/system whatever says "I should help those in need" and one day, because you are late for an important meeting (and stressed because you are), you rush on past someone clearly in some sort of urgent need (rationalising to yourself that as there are lots of other people nearby, someone else will help). So stress can be a good thing if it brings to light certain aspects of yourself that you might otherwise wish to not recognise. All that "know thyself" business. Theres a taoist storyby Chuang Tzu that highlights my meaning probably much better. But i'll save that for Wednesday.
For the casual reader, the question we went with was: "what is an acceptable level of stress?"
Perhaps it's a problem that's embedded in the word... "stress": it's got connotations in the modern world. Connotations of something harmful, negative, destructive even... I think we may have found a better word to describe the actual thing, "tension": that which motivates us, drives us to make decisions, drives us towards action, resolution.
I struggled a little with the concept of 'acceptable levels...' ... I couldn't see how this could be defined, at least not absolutely, generally. It seems to be person-specific and perhaps about our abilitiy to cope, which we may be able to/can train, develop and hone through life by addressing how we approach stress (tension) when it arises; building ourselves up to deal with it, and at ever increasingly higher levels.
I liked the ideas about recovery. How, if we don't take care to allow time (? - is it a matter of time or something else?) for recovery from the (seemingly incessant) stressful challenges in life, we can fall foul of burn-out.
Great enquiry folks. Thank you.
Ray
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