10 (Surprising!) Sources of Stress

The stress that most likely affects you day in and day out is based on your mindset, outlook, and mental habits. This is especially true for women, who tend to chronically multi-talk, compare themselves, self-criticize, and put a huge amount of pressure on themselves to be perfect.

Despite being less obvious, the following sneaky internal sources of stress are often the most potent for destroying your health and fitness, your happiness, and your peace of mind.

1. NEGATIVE BODY IMAGE:

Hating your body, feeling uncomfortable in your body, constantly worrying that people are judging your body, and obsessing over your weight (or diet) are huge areas of non-stop stress for many women.

2. DISMISSING YOUR EMOTIONS:

Many people have been taught to reject, suppress, ignore, or otherwise not deal with their emotions. But emotions are natural and biological, and they need to be felt, and to move through you, in order to appropriately discharge. Dismissed or suppressed feelings also increase exponentially in force and power (like a dam), until you’re living with the constant fear that if/when those floodgate opens, you will surely drown.

3. PEOPLE PLEASING:

Trying to make other people happy is one thing, but trying to make other people happy at the expense of your own happiness is quite another. Chronic people-pleasers tend to feel a lot of pressure to make the people around them happy at any cost. They often take on extra projects, say yes to things they want to say no to, bend over backwards to make other people comfortable, and exhaust themselves or make themselves sick because they spend so little time and attention on their own needs and health.

4. SELF-CRITICISM:

Self-criticism is anything negative you say about yourself. It can come in the form of bonding with girlfriends by bashing your body, telling self-deprecating stories or jokes, attempting to be modest by rejecting compliments, and saying things like “I suck at this,” and “I’m the worst.” Most people would never say something as mean to someone else as the things they to themselves every day.

5. NEGATIVE SELF-TALK:

This is self-criticism that you say to yourself in your own head, and it’s often significantly more dramatic and unkind than anything you would ever dare say out loud. Negative self-talk gets especially dark because there is nobody there to hear and refute your statement, so you’re more likely to accept it as truth. For example if you miss your friend’s birthday, to your friend you might say “Ugh I’m such a bad friend, but…” while to yourself in your own head you say “I’m a horrible person and this is why nobody will ever love me.”

6. BEING INAUTHENTIC:

Pretending to be someone or something you’re not adds a whole other layer of responsibility to your shoulders 24/7, and keeps you from ever being able to let your guard down and live fully in the moment. Being inauthentic also often comes in form of “impostor syndrome,” which is a persistent fear of being found out for not actually being as smart, pretty, or successful as people think you are.

7. KEEPING PEOPLE OUT:

You may think this sounds easier than letting people in, but you actually have to work really hard to create and defend your emotional walls. Also, anyone who has built these kind of walls lives in fear of someone eventually breaking one down or climbing over it. Nobody builds intense emotional walls against other people from a place of peace and serenity.

8. COMPARISON:

Comparing yourself to someone else, favorably or unfavorably, creates stress. Trying to determine who is better or who is “winning” reinforces a scarcity mindset in which there is only one “right” way to have a body or be a person, when in fact we are each completely unique and there is no objectively better or right way of being.

9. BLACK AND WHITE THINKING:

When we’re triggered into a flight-or-flight response, we must make quick snap judgements about whether something is “good” or “bad.” This makes sense evolutionarily, because when you’re in danger in the wild, you don’t have time to weigh the options; you have to make snap decisions! But in real life, we should be able to have access to all the nuanced shades of grey in between. Living with black-and-white thinking (or “all-or-nothing” thinking) reinforces scarcity and danger.

10. PROCRASTINATION:

Putting stuff off leaves it hanging over your head until it’s done. We usually procrastinate in the hopes of enjoying a break from the activity we’re putting off, as though it was an indulgent behavior of self-care, but it actually creates a significant amount of stress and anxiety. Procrastination can include anything from not answering emails right away, hitting snooze, and putting the gym off til after work. Putting these activities off might seem insignificant, but it causes stress to grow exponentially.

{Source: http://jessikneeland.com/21-surprising-sources-of-stress/}