Did you see the lunar eclipse this week? 

A fun fact you may not know is that Columbus once used his knowledge of the lunar eclipse to get back into the good graces with native Arawak people after being marooned in Jamaica for several months. His welcome was wearing thin and the tribe were growing tired and disgruntled with feeding his crew.

Columbus predicted and explained the lunar eclipse as the gods’ displeasure at their treatment. Superstitious, they changed their attitude and Columbus’s people were safe and attended to as a result.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” so the saying goes, and so apparently is superstition, fear, stress and calm.

Early this week, I was delivering a talk on stress and its impact on the body.

Stress always plays the villain. And while we know it exists to help us rise to a challenge, when the stress hormone is heightened over too long, it becomes a problem. The curious thing is that research shows that mastering stress is less about reducing it than understanding it.
 

Isn’t that a mind shift? All my life I’d focussed on ways to reduce stress, control it, keep it at bay. But did you know that the secret to managing stress lies in your belief about it?
 

Kelly McGonigal is a leading health psychologist and her TED talk on stress has had over 26 million views. Her research shows that stress’s impact on health is determined by how it’s viewed by the person experiencing the stress. If you think it’s bad, it is. If you see it as natural functioning of the body to protect and prepare you, it isn’t.

You know that feeling where you’re trying to get to sleep ahead of an important meeting the next day, but can’t sleep?
Then you become anxious about not sleeping and so the sorry cycle continues?
We’ve all been there…..
But according to this theory, it’s useful to consider your self talk. Reassure yourself that this alertness is simply your body preparing you for a significant event.
 

So the next time you feel that anxious tightness of the chest, distracted, shallow breathing, I encourage you to remember the lunar eclipse and Columbus’s story. It’s all in the way you view it. So check your thoughts. They might just save your life.