Addicted to Stress

In today's excerpt from my new book Intelligence For Your Life: Powerful Lessons For Personal Growth I share my insights on a very popular subject to which I am no stranger-STRESS! At a time in my life when I could barely stay on top of my hectic schedule, I realized how addicted to stress I was. I also learned what I could do to make necessary changes to my lifestyle.

A friend of mine once said, “It’s much easier to stay out of temptation than it is to get out.” It’s the same with stress. Stay away. Think—really think—to yourself, Is this stress really worth it? Some stress is necessary and good, of course.

Any way you cut it, there is stress involved in being a parent. The rewards of raising healthy, happy kids are well worth a little stress; that’s a trade-off we’re willing to make. But not everything that stresses you out is worth the cost. And some good and worthwhile things—even parenting—cause more stress than they have to.

It seems strange to say it, but stress in our society has become a full-blown addiction. We thrive on it. We use caffeine to enhance it, and we speak of it with reverence and pride like it’s some sort of badge of accomplishment. Before I met my wife, I was hosting two television shows (Entertainment Tonight, and the NBC show One on One), and each year I was releasing two albums and a PBS special, plus performing forty-five live concerts in forty-eight days—for five straight years! I worked seven days a week, slept five hours a night, and no doubt took at least five years off my life.

On any given day I was likely to lose the feeling in one or both of my arms, scream at my friends, and medicate myself with alcohol or sleeping pills at night—all because of stress. I would do interviews on morning radio shows, and the hosts would ask, “How do you do it”? I would extol the virtues of hard work—yada yada yada.

The pitiful thing was that a lot of what I was doing was garbage. I didn’t really need to do another TV show. Nobody got saved as a result of watching One on One with John Tesh. One album a year would have been fine. I could have played those forty-five concerts over a two-year period. I didn’t win any awards for getting them done in four months.

The truth is that I was addicted to stress. When I didn’t feel it coursing through my veins, I felt unfulfilled, worthless, benign. Stress was a kind of self-medication, just as surely as the alcohol and the sleeping pills.

I’ve got dozens—probably hundreds of tips for relieving stress. But they aren’t going to do you any good until you ask yourself a couple of hard questions. Do I even want to have less stress in my life? I used to say I wanted a less stressful life, but I still made choices every day that ramped up the stress . . . because managing an insane amount of stress made me feel alive, made me feel I was accomplishing something.

If I was honest with myself, I would have had to admit that no, I didn’t really want less stress in my life; at least I didn’t want it enough to change my lifestyle or my choices. I wasn’t ready to de-stress until after I had experienced a much deeper and all-encompassing change of heart.

You can find many more tips on relieving stress in my upcoming book Intelligence For Your Life: Powerful Lessons for Personal Growth to be released in March 2008. You can pre-order your copy at half price plus receive a free concert DVD by just clicking here.

John

Email John: johnsblog@teshmedia.com

Comments

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I totaly agree with you John. Humans are adicted to stress which is really sad. What I am learning thru my new business and from words like yours is to do things that inspire you to take action because you love it!!! (Good things will follow!!)- NOT because you have to. But do what you really need to do, but put love into it and give good energy to whatever it is you do. Like cooking or preparing dinner for your family- did you know that doing it with love actually puts good energy into that food- No JOke!!!
Cool stuff John- THanks!!!!