Being serious has its place in life. Church ceremonies, courtrooms, instructional talks. The added weight of such conversations is designed to make an impression in the listeners.
Have you ever had to make a public speech? A serious situation, right?
Butterflies-in-the-stomach, sweaty palms, sleepless night before. All classic symptoms of stress that thankfully resolve right after the dreaded event.
But what if you had a steady diet of stressors like this every day? Each day piling on more anxiety. You’d think something would have to give.
It does.
Body Stuff
All of these events that push us outside of our comfort zone produce a fear response in each and everyone of us. Fear can affect blood pressure, digestion, even heart and brain function. Stress directly influences pretty much any bodily function you can think of and that can become quite inconvenient.
The big player in our stress reactions is hormones. Yep, those tiny amounts of chemical messengers that affect every organ in our body.
Think of the reaction you had in school where at the beginning of class, the teacher announced “Put all of your things away and take out a piece of paper and pencil.” The dreaded pop quiz. Not enough to make most of us physically ill, though some classmates did try that ploy.
What had been a pretty carefree morning suddenly became way too serious, eh?
Modern Serious Behavior
All it takes is a glance through social media feeds to see a modern take on seriousness devolving into exchanges from which nothing useful is produced. Someone takes offense at something real or imagined. Whether someone else engages, supports, or ignores this “serious” issue, it does not matter. The original speaker is offended by a magnitude of seriousness that they imagined themselves.
Sound familiar?
“There is no problem so big or so complicated that it cannot be run away from.”
-Charles Schulz
What happens with all of this outrage and fear in the bodies of participants? Classic stress responses, of course. (Remember, the body just responds to stress. It doesn’t know or care anything about the stressors.) So the body/mind remain in a stressful state most of the time and things eventually begin to breakdown. Cardiovascular disease, digestion problems, diabetes, and mental health issues, to name a few.
A Constructive Response
When a situation becomes so overwhelmingly and/or toxic that no amount of work on your part will help, walk away. Or run.
Most all of us are not so indispensable that we must hurt ourselves in order to be useful. Your neighbor gets all headed up about the latest events in the president’s office (either pro or con) and you’re feeling the pull to engage in their conversation? Walk away.
Same goes for that latest controversy online. If it feels good to engage about the authenticity of yet another Photo-shopped picture on Facebook, go for it. I’ll be over here engaged in things I find enjoyable. Because so much comes down to what you find important as your Self. Identify with the crowd or tribe can work for some but if you find your interests lie elsewhere, go to them. There are worse things in life than individuals enjoying the fruits of their own actions.
Go out, be your own person, and be serious about it.
Nobody can hurt me without my permission.
― Mahatma Gandhi
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