Anyone remember that dream I had about being on a prison elevator that was essentially trying to kill me?

No?

Well, I do. It was scary.

Anyway, after decoding the dream, I found out some of the symbols (prison, elevator, convict) basically meant I was feeling very stressed out – for a variety of reasons.

Last night, I ran across Eight Dream Symbols That Point to Stress. Like the title suggests, the article lists other dream symbols that may mean you’re stressed out, including:

• Nudity (Few and far between, but I have these dreams.)
• Storms (I dream more about gigantic tidal waves than storms, but sometimes storms are involved.)
• Crashes (Airplane crashes. They’re always headed toward me. Kind of like the dream Ritchie Valens has in La Bamba.
• Hell (I don’t think I’ve ever dreamed about Hell.)
• Death (Yes, but I thought that meant someone was pregnant…?)
• Bugs (Yes.)
• Cats (Not much, which is surprising for someone who currently lives with six and regularly wakes up with one’s butt in her face.)
• Losing Teeth (ALL THE FREAKING TIME!)

Check out the article for in-depth explanations of each of these dream symbols – maybe it’ll clue you in on how stressed you are? (Yeah, as if we need to be told when we’re stressed!) And, if you have any interesting dreams involving any of these symbols (and the stress interpretation is appropriate), feel free to share in the comments!

Post from: Blisstree

Are Your Dreams Telling You You’re Stressed?

And speaking of stress…

Triggers like rising unemployment rates, increasing fuel costs, population overload, and yes, the weather, are why Yahoo! Real Estate just listed these five cities as the top five most stressful American cities:

1. Chicago
2. New York
3. Detroit
4. Los Angeles
5. San Francisco

Kind of makes me glad I work from home and live in four seasons country, where town population is about five and there wouldn’t really be anywhere to go even if gas was affordable.

What about your city? Is it adding stress to your life?

Image: SXC

Post from: Blisstree

Is Your City Stressing You Out?

When I saw a link to an article by Deepak Chopra, Triggers for Stress, in one of my Care2.com newsletters last week, I thought the article would talk about common triggers for stress, and maybe offer a few suggestions on how to manage stress.

Instead, Chopra uses the article to point out that because everyone has different stress triggers, helping someone manage stress is a more complicated task than just offering up a list of stress management tips. Chopra also discusses the idea that this “task” is even more complicated because we all have reactions to stress based on our own past experiences:

Management of stress therefore turns out to be much more complicated than is generally supposed, because a person’s interpretation of any situation is basically projected from his memory–our reactions to new situations are always colored by our experiences in the past.

How are we supposed to go about managing our stress? According to Chopra, we need to “neutralizing these old impressions” and “apprais[e] each new situation afresh.”

Well, that makes perfect sense to me. Instead of freaking out when I’m faced with a situation that once caused me aggravation, despair, loss of income, feelings of hopelessness, etc., I should assess the situation as a new situation – rather than a continuation of a previous situation – and tackle it from there. That way, the stress from the previous situation doesn’t carry over into my reaction to the new situation.

Right? Does that make sense?

Of course, I don’t think that means we shouldn’t draw upon certain reactions to past experiences in order to manage current, similar experiences. We learn from the past, after all. We learn from both our triumphs and our mistakes.

So, what about you? How do you manage your stress and stress triggers? Do you continue to react the same way to stress triggers, time and time again, or do you make efforts to “neutralize” your old reactions in order to tackle each new situation as a new situation?

Image: SXC and Shane Knight

Post from: Blisstree

How Do You Manage Your Stress and Stress Triggers?