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March 5, 2022

 In life we will all go through stressful and hard things. We may experience the loss of a loved one, losing a job, suffering from health challenges or extended sickness, being forced to change life plans, moving to a new location and the list could go on and on! Sometimes when we already feel overwhelmed by so many life stressors, it seems like that is the time everything begins to fall apart, and even more, things happen that can wreck any sense of normal we ever felt. When we are faced with so many life challenges or stressors it can sometimes leave us feeling overwhelmed, alone, anxious & may lead to feelings of depression. So why do stressful or unexpected events leave us feeling anxious or sometimes hopeless? To understand this we have to understand & a little bit about our brains & how we react to danger.  

Our brains can split into three main categories, the Frontal Lobe, the Limbic System, & the Brain stem. Each has a different role to play.  The Frontal Lobe is where we think, process things, and problem solve. The Limbic System is where we form emotional responses and control our behavioral responses. Lastly, our Brain stem controls our metabolic responses including heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, digestion, & circadian rhythm. All of these brain functions work together to help live our lives each day. However when we detect danger or are scared somethings change in how our brain works to respond to the danger. We revert to our survival mode. Our frontal lobe turns off, making it hard to think clearly & our emotions sort of take over causing the Brain Stem to make the whole body go on alert. This response can be referred to as anxiety which is a natural response to danger! I am sure we have all experienced these stressful feelings in our lives maybe while taking an exam or talking to new people. This response plays a huge role in why the change in our daily lives can be so stressful but it also matters how we see the event or stressful thing in our lives. 

Stressful events are inevitable in life! We really have little power to stop them from occurring but the one thing we do have control over is how we think or perceive the events. Will we see them as the end of the world and take away all our hope in life or will we choose to see them as temporary setbacks? Maybe we will even see them as an opportunity to learn something new or develop new skills. How we see things can then influence how we feel about those events. Our thoughts can lead us to either do nothing because we feel hopeless or lead us to find the good and seek to grow despite the challenges we face. 

In my life, I have experienced many stressful events that made it hard to keep going! At the beginning of the year, I started another semester at BYU-Idaho. I had been here for school for several semesters before so the campus wasn’t new but this semester I was experiencing several other stressors that piled on top of everything making it very hard to adjust to being back at school. To name a few I didn’t know any of my roommates and felt alone in my apartment often, I missed being with my family, I had just lost my dog who I was very closer to and missed a lot, and I had just switched majors and felt very new and unsure about myself. All of these factors lead me to feel overwhelmed and for the first several days back at school I felt terrible and cried at least once a day. It was very hard but after serval days of feeling awful, I decided I needed to make a change or else I was going to feel this way for the whole semester. I decided to start small by noticing when I was feeling super down and thinking there was no hope for things to get better and instead of looking so some good things that were happening despite all the bad. This small change in perspective didn’t happen overnight but as I worked to change my thoughts I was able to find more hope and see that I could do it. I still felt sad and lonely at times but I knew I was going to be okay and everything would work out in the end! I was able to find joy despite the hard things I had to experience. 

I think it is so important for us to understand this possess so we can see that no matter how dark and hopeless things may seem we can always try to see them in a new light and this may help us see that things can keep going. Unexpected and hard events are part of life but the challenge is to see how we will handle them. I hope that we can each learn to overcome these stressful events in our lives rather than letting them overcome us!

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