My story started in 2002, when I had to quickly learn the true meaning of the word “Stress”
Stress can appear at any time and sometimes for reasons that you may not understand. Welcome to Invisible Stress Layers. The information here is to help manage stress in your life, being aware that stress does not always present in ways we would expect. The site was created based on personal experiences with the view to present a different perspective on stress and how it impacts our body.
I will start by telling a story, many years ago I worked on a large project, it was for an IT company. The project was the largest in the history of the organization, I was very proud to be leading it. After many months of planing and implementation, we were ready to hand over the keys to the customer, to cut them over in IT speak.
Everything went very well, in fact the customer was extremely happy, a few teething issues but nothing of any concern. A few weeks later, we received a call, the entire system was offline, every single user was impacted, nobody could work. We quickly investigated the problem, reviewed all systems and managed to restart and get them operational. After extensive research we changed several settings hoping this would prevent a similar event, and also hoping it was a once off issue that would not re-appear.
A few weeks later it occurred again, and then a few weeks after that again and again. After in depth and complex troubleshooting with many software vendors a bug was identified and had to be corrected. Something totally out of my control. The whole event lasted a good few months. A little time after this I visited the doctor, I had a rash and was not feeling well. I was quickly diagnosed with shingles (herpes zoster).
While stress is not directly related to shingles, stress can weaken the immune system.
My doctor asked, are you stressed. I answered I don’t think so, in fact, what is stress? I was only 23 at the time, I didn’t know what stress was. I didn’t understand how there could be an invisible illness in your body with no external symptoms.
Little did I know, all the events over the past 3 months had paid a significant toll on my body, so much that my immune system was run down and exposed me to other viral infections.
I recovered from my illness and took some time off work, it wasn’t long and I was back on the next big project.
Interestingly, when I look back at this story, stress was invisible to me, interestingly, I still think it is invisible in my life now (20 years later). I have found that stress can build up and compound and then normalise in your body. My goal is to present stress in a different way that you may have seen it before, with the hope to help reduce stress in your life. To give you the most amazing feeling when its peeled back and you begin to identify and take each stress layer away.
Come along for the journey, provide feedback and hopefully we can help battle this crazy thing called stress.
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