Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott and you join me on an evening stroll.
It's been quite a warm day today and so I've come out this evening where it's much cooler and wandered down to our little wildflower meadow here in the village where the grasses are golden and tall and high and I'm just strolling through the grassy area now admiring the plantain which is very brown and looking quite dry now and I can see some purple,
I think it's scabious,
Peeping out through the ground,
Through the grasses and some hogweed which has got a very dark white flower and this is a lovely time of day.
I can see above me the last of the house martens still hunting in the evening air and there's a little breeze,
It's just gently blowing the grasses,
Such a soothing space to come and visit in an evening and today's Five Minutes in Nature is all about stress,
It's all about what stress really is and it came about from a conversation I was having with one of my clients today.
She started a job very recently and when I spoke with her last week she was in a little bit of a turmoil,
She was wondering if she was doing things right,
She was wondering if she'd made a mistake,
She wondered if people were thinking bad things about her,
That she wasn't pulling her weight,
That she wasn't doing a good enough job,
That she didn't know her stuff,
She wondered if she was being confident enough,
If she was being a good enough leader,
She was really lost in her thinking and today she sounded very different,
She just sounded more settled and as we spoke today she said to me,
Do you know what,
I think last week I was putting a lot of stress on myself,
I was putting a lot of pressure on myself and when she said that I just said,
Look we just need to pause the conversation because you've just said something that's really profound and will be really useful for you moving forward and she said,
Well I don't know what have I just said and I said,
Let me repeat the words back because I'd written them down,
I said,
You said that last week I was putting a lot of pressure on myself and I said,
That's really so helpful to realise because last week you felt a lot of stress and anxiety and worry and yet it looked like that stress and anxiety and worry was coming from all these things that were happening in your new job,
About the people,
About the communication system,
About the emails you were reading,
About the information you were trying to absorb but I said,
The stress wasn't coming from any of those things,
You were putting the pressure on yourself,
You inadvertently and innocently were putting the pressure on yourself because you were making up stories about how things were and then you were believing those stories to be true and then you were beating yourself up because you didn't live up to how you thought you should live up to in those stories but it was all imagined,
It was all thinking,
It was all thought,
It was pressure that you were putting on yourself and we talked about it further because it soon became clear as we talked about it that she began to realise that stress was something that didn't exist outside of her,
Things couldn't make her stressed,
It's an impossibility and I'd love you to reflect on this yourself,
Just ask yourself the question,
Can something outside of me make me stress?
Well the answer is no and the reason the answer is no is that the only way you can experience stress is through thinking,
It's through thought,
It's through the stories and imaginings that you tell yourself,
It's about how you interpret a situation and then the story you make up about it and the things that you scare yourself with about that story,
It's innocently done,
Nobody goes out of their way to make themselves stressed but it's useful to realise that and as we talked a little bit further she just started laughing and she said do you know what,
Do you know what,
She said you can't catch stress like you can catch a cold,
It's impossible isn't it and I said yes,
It's not a virus,
You can't catch stress and it's just really helpful to realise and my request is that you just reflect on this for yourself,
You put pressure on yourself inadvertently,
You can't catch stress like a cold,
Stress doesn't exist outside of you,
There aren't such things as stressful situations,
Just innocently what you do and what I do is we create scenarios that we scare ourselves with and that's how stress is created,
So let me know your thoughts about stress and whether that makes sense to you.
