Stress

(Sunday regurgitation time…)

You’re stressed out. Don’t lie about it, don’t ignore it, just embrace it. We’re all stressed out. Heck, I’m so stressed out that I wake up and check my Blackberry at 2 am for no real reason. I’m so stressed out that if things are decidedly unstressful I spend some serious time racking my brain to figure out what it is that I should be stressed about. If I’m not stressed, something must be wrong. Stress has always been a part of life, but life has gotten a whole lot stressful over the past several months. Something to do with Dow 7800 for most of us, unless of course you cashed out of the market in May and stuffed your money under your mattress. If you did, I applaud your foresight. I’ve always found Chicago to be beautiful, exciting, invigorating, and yet, stressful, even when pleasure is the purpose of my visit. Heck, the traffic alone can have me wondering if I’m too young to consider scheduling an appointment with a cardiologist. Chicago is indeed a stressed out city, and now there’s proof. Forbes Magazine did a study, and it turns out that Chicago is America’s most stressed out city. In the spirit of full disclosure, the story was from last September when we still had $4 gas at the pumps, but before we had Black October. Poor air quality, traffic congestion, and that festering capitalistic desire to succeed that just gets us all a little batty at times.

We know we’re stressed, but to be fair to stress, I don’t think that’s entirely bad.

I personally do some of my best work when I’m stressed, and I don’t think I’m unique in that regard. Some of the least stressed people I know are also some of the laziest, least ambitious people to ever walk God’s green earth. Stress is good, but how about we trade a stressful 24/7 life for stressful weekdays and pure, unadulterated, relaxing weekends? It’s not the stress that kills us, it’s our lack of ability to balance the stress with relaxation that does us in. Apply yourself Monday through Friday, then take the short hour or two drive up to Lake Geneva, and see if you can still maintain that high performance, high stress level while you sip a cold drink on a white pier while clear water waves lap the shoreline. Try that for a few weekends, or a lifetime, and see how much more bearable those stressful Monday through Friday’s become.

Perhaps we should change our little catch phrase from “Lake Geneva, it’s always been the place” to “Lake Geneva, just come up here already and you’ll live longer”.