Many of you will be familiar with the movie and/or the musical Annie, originally, featuring a cute, ginger, orphan living in the 1930s and the song the children sing about how tough life is for them. The song simply reminded me of life and how tough it has become to simply exist and be happy and healthy in the 21st Century.
A recent study by the charity Shelter suggested that over 37% of households do not have the financial capacity to cover their housing costs for a month should they experience job loss. Given that it takes 7 weeks for any type of benefit to kick in and over 13 weeks for you to get any assistance with a mortgage (information based on the actual experience of a close family member) then that makes pretty scary reading.
In 1967 2 psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe looked to prove the causal link between stress and illness. They came up with the Holmes Rahe scale that shows 41 stressful situations and its propensity to cause illness. Looking at these 41 stressors I was struck by how many simply pertained to ordinary life. The top ones are predictable, covering death and loss, but also on this scale are things like outstanding personal achievement, work conditions, holidays or vacations and of course Christmas. Many of the top 41 elements covered financial issues e.g. loss of job or loans or bills etc. Again every day occurrences that crop up for people all the time.
I am not even going to begin to suggest that a little positive thinking is going to change this. Trust me, I know from personal experience how hard just coping day to day can be. However, it is during these trying times that we really need to draw from our bank of resilience. Being resilient enables us to keep going and to be able to continue to move forward looking for the next opportunity. Like any bank we can only really draw out what we put in; if we don’t want to add to our stress. By that I mean we have to build and deposit resilience in order to draw from it in trying times. This is one account that you really do not want to go into overdraft.
Doing ‘something’, even once a week (but once a day would be better) that helps us to take our minds off our troubles helps to keep our resilience account in the black. In the blog ‘Being mindful – does it make a difference’ Ian Wade gives up hints and tips on being mindful and how it works. Mindfulness is only one thing that you might try to help with this. Another suggestion is using an inspirational daily email, like the ones I receive from the Brahma Kumaris, when you see it pop into your inbox take the pleasure of time and a little silence to contemplate what it says and how it can benefit your life. Just a couple of minutes of silence, for yourself, to simply recharge and take your mind off the daily stressors, will help to keep you going.
Give yourself the gift of silence and peace for just two minutes – think of it as a small deposit into your resilience account. Because we really do live a hard knock life and anything to make it easier is worth the investment.
Silence and Peace
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