We talk about this in my house, and laugh about it; it's a phrase which came down from north of the border, in fact, we used to use it to describe my mum.
"Up to high doe" is when someone is stressed out, and my mum used to get "up to high doe" more often than other people did.
It describes it pretty well, describes the stress response pretty well, at least in my mind.
The problem here is that it used to just be getting "up to high doe", and now the whole feeling about getting stressed, uncomfortable, and worried (a completely normal human state of affairs) has become weaponised into an industry.
We don't talk about being stressed anymore; we talk about being anxious (for a time, I fell into that trap, and now I've managed to drag myself back out again).
For some people (and I completely understand this), anxiety is an unimaginable pathological burden, but for the rest of us, we're not anxious, we're stressed.
This is a fundamental difference because anxiety is worrying about something within, and stress is worrying about something without; stress is external, anxiety is internal.
We don't need to convert our external stresses into our internal anxieties; we can block them off, change things, look in the other direction, and move along.
We live in a world now where we can find stress wherever we want, we can find a billion different versions of it on our phone, on the news or the newspaper or social media or YouTube, or not; we can also decide not to be stressed, it is absolutely possible to do that, all you have to do is lift yourself out of the environment and just think about it for a little while.
This weaponisation of anxiety into an industry where people are making money, explaining to people that they are anxious all the time, and they need to buy things to stop it, is madness.
It's time to take a look, to take a step back, and it's alright to be stressed. We're supposed to be stressed; it's a normal psychological response. If you're too stressed, then you're having too great a stressful input, so change the input.
The likelihood is you're not anxious, you're stressed.
Blog Post Number - 4166