Handling Stress

I was reading old articles today that I saved and this one is a gem. It is a Star Tribune (11-8-2015) article from the New York Times, written by one Jan Hoffman. The psychologist with the journal Emotion studied law students waiting for their bar exam results, to figure out who handles stress, worry and anxiety better, when waiting for good or bad news of life-altering importance.

Those that worried, were anxious and upset but embracing these tense emotions during the waiting period did better than those that were completely calm, not anxious or worrying at all. My hunch is that the Stoics felt worry and anxiety but had, for a life time, as a coping mechanism, learned to severely repress any emotional outbursts or geysers of such erupting into consciousness. The Spock approach to living may not be the way to go.

Those that thought about flunking the bar exam were dealing with their powerful emotions, thinking about them and working with them and through them in the conscious state of mind. When these fussers passed the bar exam, they were elated. When they flunked the bad exam, they were more able to deal with the failure, and plan positively on how to go forward.

The Stoics, according to Professor Kate Sweeney were blown away with shock and grief when they flunked the exam. When they passed the exam, they were underwhelmed.

It all goes back to the law of moderation, that natural law that needs to guide us all in our moral, intellectual, physical, spiritual, biological and emotional responses to the victories and defeats that the world send to us many times per day.

The Stoic approach is healthy as an overall metaphysical approach. We should think more than we feel, and be rational more than we emote, but consciously working through the whole range of psychic mental categories of response leaves us strong, tested, engaged and durable to better interact with what comes our way.

A robot may not survive, and one that is wearing her feelings on her sleeves needlessly exhaust herself by making a mountain out of a moe hill over every mini-crisis that life sends her way.

We need to live calmly and logically, but expressing our emotional states constantly and consciously seems to be healthy for us--this is what the Good Spirits--as promulgated under the law of moderate living--and Dr. Sweeney are advising us.