I felt lead to write about perception and stress this week because I was thinking about stress and its arrest on our bodies, minds, and souls. The statistics are out there with regards to stress and its impact on our health not only as individuals, but as a nation.

Hasn’t stress driven all of us at some point to make a lesser choice than we would have had we been calm prior to making that choice? How many knee-jerk reactions do you wish you could do over, versus the well-thought out decision? I reach for chocolate when I am stressed, which means that if I felt stress every day for six hours a day, then I would be eating chocolate every day, several times a day. After a while, this behavior would impact my health negatively (internal cellular function would be compromised), and therefore my physical and mental performance would suffer. This would then damper my mood, and my quality of life would diminish.

So, I thought about how lesser choices impact our quality of life, and I thought about how we could manage our brain’s snap decision to make these lesser choices. My first instinct was that we need to manage our perception. I feel very strongly that our perception of situations around us, or ones we are in currently, or think we will live through two weeks from now, is what drives a lot of stress into our lives and keeps it there.

Here’s the thing though – perception relies heavily on our sensory input (which is unbiased information until we assign a meaning to it). This input is collected by our senses repeatedly throughout our lives to help us avoid danger by notifying us of any potential threat; and, since the brain is wired to protect itself, it is natural for us to feel apprehensive when we perceive a potential threat.

Now, it is important to note here that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a real condition where the brain has felt threatened (physically or otherwise), has reacted to protect itself, and this reaction may and can cause harm to the individual’s quality of life. I am not talking about cases where PTSD is present or being treated. I am thinking on a smaller scale… for instance, the long line in the supermarket that has a new employee (cashier) fumbling with groceries and the register, and is really working as fast as he/she can at that stage of their training; but, you don’t know that he/she is a new employee until it’s your turn to be served and you see that he/she is being trained. Your perception at the end of the line was most likely that the cashier was incompetent. Your perception after you had more information (for instance you saw the trainer standing next to him/her) would then change as would your feelings. My point being that perception does not tell the whole story and it’s not supposed to; it is one piece of the puzzle, and yet we blindly give in to our perception of situations, and the stress begins to percolate.

I appreciate that most of our perception is 100 percent in our control; and yet, it is difficult to shape. There are circumstances where our perception creates problems where there are none. But, can we recognize those circumstances and challenge our brains to re-define what we see?

I have chosen to recognize that my perception is not my reality. I am keeping my mind open, and I am staying conscious of my thoughts; what my mind perceives as a threat, is not always a threat. Sometimes, it is just information.