Your Stress is Not Responsible

What is your relationship with the word “responsibility?”

If you are like most people, you have mixed feelings when you think of the word. Your mind may go to your job duties, your family obligations, or perhaps your finances.

And as your mind travels to these places, you may have a feeling that lies somewhere on the spectrum between a mild sense of burden or irritation and a full blown panic attack.

We know intuitively and intellectually that responsibility is a sign of maturity. We are meant to take pride in being responsible.

So why do our responsibilities sometimes create so much stress?

To answer this, we need to look at the Latin root of the word “responsible,” which, when taken literally, means, “able to respond.”

As we take on certain responsibilities and obligations in life, we frequently do not yet have the ability to actually respond to what we are taking on effectively. So there is a cognitive dissonance in our minds between the choices that we have made and what we are currently capable of doing. Throw in a slew of unknown circumstances and you have the perfect recipe for stress.

And then what do people tend to do to cope with the stress? They frequently add pride to the concoction, as though the stress they have taken on is somehow a badge of honor.

Pride may tell you that you are stressed out because you have so many responsibilities, when, in fact, you are stressed out because of all the obligations that you are unable to respond effectively to.

The unconscious mind will learn to associate responsibility with both stress and pride, and you will likely end up seeking and attracting more stress as a result.

Rather than truly being responsible, you will be emotionally reactive, because stress needs an outlet. Then you will blame the reactivity on your responsibilities (which, of course, were the things you were actually not able to respond effectively to).

The “pride-stress-responsibility” association has become so ingrained in our culture that many people believe that it is an inescapable part of being a high-performing human, when, in fact, it is not only escapable, it is our responsibility to escape it!

After all, excess stress can only lead to poor job performance, poor health and an unfulfilling life. Truly being responsible means doing a daily assessment of our present capacity from an honest perspective.

And when we do take on more than we can presently handle, which we often need to, we must have the humility to accept that we simply have not yet developed the ability to respond to a particular situation with a sense of grace.