It's only really when you become sick that you reevaluate your approach to stress. We should do that earlier but no-one really teaches us how to recognize it, or recognize physical symptoms that come with it. Stress literally tied to kill me.
Not everyone suffers a "widow maker" type of heart attack at 47 and makes it. Fifty percent of people who suffer 100% blockage of the LAD (left anterior descending) artery, what we call a widow maker, die before the ambulance can even get to them. You die from within minutes to an hour.
I got lucky; very lucky. And then I spent a long time reflecting on it.
Stress is in large why we get high blood pressure, which dilates your blood vessels. Those vessels have a breaking limit and they tear slowly. In those tiny tears is where LDL, or bad cholesterol, then aggregates and creates blockages. We don't die from cholesterol and cardiovascular disease: we die from stress.
In our society we hate cholesterol because doctors can treat that. It would take a whole society to change if we wanted to attack the root cause of why cholesterol is bad in the first place: stress.
How you ban stress from your life is not obvious. I know today that it will try to kill me again if I let it. I have a very visceral response to stress today, violent even. I can become very abrupt and even rude towards the people who create stress in my life. It created a number of diplomatic problems for me at work.
What creates stress can also be very personal. I react to certain conditions but that doesn't mean that someone else will react to the same. The thing is: I grew up with a bad case of anxiety disorder, likely generated through a combination of trauma and the behavior of some of my role models. I know for a fact that I am not alone, but I also know that we're not necessarily fully representative of the general population, though I suspect it more and more every day.
As we were discovering the beautiful Arles in the South of France where Van Gogh lived, we reflected a bit on life... I don't quite remember how the conversation came to this but the gist came down to something like:
- How do you manage so many things?
- I throw all the balls in the air and then I go have coffee...
I banned stress from my life. And I'll never go back. I'll chase it wherever it hides and I'll exterminate it. And I'll work with whoever needs my help to do the same.
This was a very useful lesson to me. I hope it becomes useful to some of you as well.