Why worry about managing stress?
Evolutionarily, your body is well designed to handle life-threatening situations. It instinctively knows exactly how to respond when you run across, say, a bear in the woods. Your body’s stress responders automatically react with a complex series of physiological reactions that help you to survive the immediate physical threat before you. Happily, most of us don’t encounter wild animals on a regular basis; unfortunately, our body’s stress handling mechanisms respond to common psychological and emotional stressors with the same intense physiological response as they would to a bear. And while some days, you may feel like your boss is a bear, in reality your boss is not a life-threatening emergency, even when s/he hands you yet another impossible deadline to meet, NOW. When you perceive such interactions as stressful, your body can’t tell the difference between your boss and the proverbial bear. Your body responds by asking you to resolve this stressful situation by either fighting or fl
