Why is life so stressful nowadays? And what you can do to combat it.

September 10, 2016

Why is life so stressful nowadays? I am sure that we all know someone that is affected by stress, but what are the signs and what can we do to try and combat it?

The zombie zone can be a hard place to climb out of. Staring at the screen for hours on end locked in a trance with no escape in sight. When searching for ideas it's easy to overlook the small things, the millimeters where the details lay. Whats true in everyday life is also true in design especially when designing eyewear, where even 1 millimeter can make the difference between a pair of glasses sitting comfortably atop your nose or sliding off into oblivion never to be seen again.

Most people nowadays make a habit of going through life not living in the present but forever contemplating the past and worrying about the future. The ability to live in the now is one of the hardest to grasp, we let our daily lives consume us until there is nothing left in the tank but the fumes of our daily struggle. Of course there are moments of clarity where one takes the time to sit still and just be but those moments are few and far between, our moments of solitude comprise of sitting on the toilet with a small screen glued to our hands or laying on the sofa letting the waves of nonsense wash over us from the TV.

The world today is a stressful place made even more stressful by the fact that we have forgotten how to just stop, let go and wonder about things. These moments, these millimeters in life's journey are small but significant and without them we get lost and forget that there is more important things that we could do for ourselves other than writing a report, getting to a meeting or watching a film. 

Burnout it would seem is becoming a more common theme in today's hectic life and can be characterized by these three symptoms; emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced performance. For those of you that don't know what each of these means, lets jump in and try to explain. Emotional exhaustion is a chronic state of physical and emotional fatigue that is a result of excessive demands on the body and mind through over activity. Depersonalization is a state one reaches where thoughts and feelings no longer match how one feels. Where you don't feel like yourself any longer and that your thoughts don't belong to you. Reduced performance can best be described as being unable to perform to ones normal level.

These three states can be recognized as symptoms of burnout syndrome which is something that can effect any one of us at any moment when we ignore the signs and just carry on with our lives. Although not a solution it is certainly a worthwhile consideration to take the time each day to recognize the fact that you have to stop what your're doing and just be, do nothing and just sit. 

There is a wonderful speech in the film 'Any Given Sunday' where Al Pacinos Tony D'Amato talks of clawing for those inches, to give anything for those small steps that might help make a touch down. Its a great motivational speech and i think that its continued popularity, as shown by its 3.2 million views on youtube, shows that. 

And like Tony D'Amato says, the millimeters are all around us if we take the time to see them. The opportunities to rest for a minute are the moments that can keep us sane, and like the millimeters in glasses, stop us from slipping down.



Wooden Sunglasses On Desk SideRoot

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