I was in a stressful situation for about 1.5 years.  I also injured myself playing sports right at the beginning of that stressful situation, so my physical activity level had been down for a long time.  I also tried an IUD, and took it out after 3 weeks because my body did not do well with it.

 

Towards the end of that stressful situation, the stress got worse in a particular month.  I happened to check my blood pressure that month 3 times and noticed it was high each time.

 

High blood pressure runs in my family, so at first I was just like, “ok I guess I gotta deal with this now.”  I was previously grateful that I had not encountered blood pressure for a long time.

 

Fast forward, I left the stressful situation, I was further removed from the IUD experience, and I was getting in more fitness, and I noticed my blood pressure come down.

 

As prevalent as high blood pressure is, you may not hear stories like this as much.  I think it is important how we communicate family medical history to our relatives.  Just saying something runs in the family is not the whole story.  Think about the various things that may have lead to a condition finally manifesting itself.  Sometimes you can pinpoint recent events, and other times it could be that you were in a stressful situation coupled with lack of exercise, coping skills, and not so great diet, altogether for an extended period of time, and things finally caught up with you.

 

Humans have accepted many stressful situations as just part of life.  Working for a living, for instance, is something almost everyone can relate to.  But the current state of jobs can often be stressful and/or toxic.  People keep trying to teach people how to cope better, which is important.  But what I have often seen is an acceptance level of ‘it is what it is’ and the burden falls on employees.

 

Older parents sitting together will tell other parents about their adult children who are in college or at a prestigious job and ‘doing great,’ I suppose as a way to look okay in front of other parents or like they did something right in life.  But they do not discuss how much stress the classes or job is putting on their children and how it is affecting them.  As someone who has had many conversations with a pharmacist, I am aware that it is not necessarily a rare occurrence for people to take various medications just to perform at a high level at work, not because something is wrong with them, but because they are seeking to operate at a level beyond the normal human capacity, to drive results requested by bosses who do actually have something wrong with them (or at the very least are out of touch with the fact that several other people do not operate the same way they do).

 

You do not get the best out of people by force and fear, you get the best out of people when they can thrive, be at peace, and continue to actualize their potential.  You get the best out of humanity as a whole that way.

 

One particular scene I liked from the movie, ‘Hidden Figures,’ is where Dorothy Vaughan (played by Octavia Spencer) is on the bus conveying to her son that even though racism exists, it is wrong, and even though it is all around you and may appear to be the norm, it is abnormal.

 

When something is wrong and abnormal to the point of affecting human health, there is definite room for change.

 

Sometimes people accept things so much that they forget, downplay or become emotionally desensitized to the abnormalities within those things.  You can accept something and acknowledge its faults at the same time, and pass that information along to your offspring.  Thus, when you get the chance to mitigate situations that are not good for your health, you will already have a greater awareness of the importance in doing so when the time comes and perhaps follow through on that urge, and your children can do the same in their own lives.