Like any of the events that continually recur in life, stress has an unconscious basis. The truth is though, it is our reaction to stress, not the stress itself, that has been learned and repeated over again and again that we suffer from.

Stress, in itself, is a natural condition that occurs in every situation in life. While you are reading this article, you are causing stress in your eye muscles and in your brain as you strive to interpret the symbols on this page. When you move, stress is necessary to cause specific muscles to engage that enables your body to carry out motion.

The stress that occurs in difficult situations is also naturally occurring. The difference for each person lies in how they have learned to react to stress. Have you ever noticed how one person will not react to a certain situation when another person will almost need to be anaesthetized? The difference is based in the way they have learned to react to related situations.

Since most of the patterns we have learned in life originated in our first seven years, it is likely that the outcome from the stimulation we refer to as stress was also learned during this time.

Have you ever watched a father and son walking? More often than not, their gait is very similar. Wouldn't it hold true that if that is where the child learned his walking patterns, couldn't he also have learned how to deal with stress in the same way?

So where did you learn to do stress? I will leave it up to you to answer that one.

One of the great and very important aspects of being human is that we have great capacity for changing how we live our lives, including how we handle stress. How we deal with it can be changed.

Author Monty C. Ritchings, a long-time HANS member, has published two books in the past year. The first was Embracing The Blend: What Your Mom And Dad Didn't Know They Were Teaching You and most recently, Stamp Out Stress (both available in the HANS library).

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