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Health & Fitness

Why Women Feel Like Pressure Cookers

Women today function in a variety of arenas. Or, put another way, women today are expert “jugglers,” having learned to keep a variety of objects constantly up in the air. There’s nothing quite like the “ooohhhhs” and the “aaahhhs” of the crowd watching the show and marveling., How does she do all that? And there’s nothing quite like the crash that happens when something gets dropped and all the balls come tumbling down.

Women today are under stress. Stress is defined as when a force presses on, pulls on, pushes against, compresses, or twist something else. Many women can completely relate. It seems like life itself is pressing in on them pulling them one way, pushing against them another, compressing them and twisting their life upside down. Frankly, they feel squished.

I believe part of this has to do with the amount of responsibility women shoulder today. Years ago, keeping a household and raising a family were considered to be a full-time job. When I was growing up, my mother was a stay-at-home mom, one of many. Today, that full-time job of home and family is still around, but it’s been compounded by part-time or full-time work outside the home by the majority of women. This is a financial reality for many married women and a financial necessity for single women. If you had any sort of civic, community, school, or religious commitments, time is compressed even further.

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It is not my intention to wade into the Mommy Wars here, but merely to point out the pressure women today feel. The more responsibilities a woman has, the more her time must be fragmented to handle those responsibilities. Women today seem to turn around with stopwatches in their heads, calculating how much they can get done in smaller and smaller increments of time.

I know women who operate not in ten-minute increments but in thirty-second increments. I remember one who spoke of the stress she was under and how it affected her day. She became irritated and annoyed when her computer was “slow” to boot up at work, when it thirty seconds o dry her hands with an air dryer in the women’s restroom instead of quickly with a paper towel. She began to resent it when other people took too much time on voice mail or spoke with too many pauses during conversation. Each “waste’ of time became more and more grating. Over time, she came to realize she viewed these “barriers” in her day as adversarial. She put pressure on herself to be productive” literally every second. Anything or anyone that took more time than she deemed acceptable became a cause of stress to her. Because she was already operating under stress, each slowdown made her more and more angry. She resented every second wasted and was frustrated with anyone who got in the way of her tightly scripted schedule.

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These tight schedule constraints not only create constant, daily pressure for over stressed women, but they become the ingredients in a pressure cooker waiting to explode. If there is not an extra thirty seconds in the day for using an air-dryer in the bathroom, larger problems like a fender-bender or unexpected health issue become simply overwhelming. Tight schedules and daily stress can turn the acorns of problems, shortcomings, hiccups and bumps in the road into catastrophes.

 I believe one reason women turn acorns into catastrophes is because they have so many responsibilities. Because you are responsible, you believe you should be in control. Stress is produced in your life when you feel out of control. The questions you need to ask yourself is whether or not you really have control over any given situation and then act accordingly. As a woman, you have family responsibilities, but really you only have control over yourself. You can guide, teach, and influence, but other people in your family may and will act outside of your control. This is an acorn, not a catastrophe. As a woman, you have work responsibilities, but you really only have control over your work product. You can model, encourage, and motivate, but other people at your work may and will act outside of your control. This is an acorn, not a catastrophe. It is when you think that your responsibilities should give you control, and they don’t, that you feel out of control and under stress. By learning to let go, you can reduce the amount of needless stress in your life.

Gregory L. Jantz, PhD is the founder of The Center • A Place of HOPE and an internationally recognized best selling author of over 26 books related to mental wellness and holistic recovery treatment. This article features excerpts from Controlling Your Anger before it Controls You.    

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