Stress Awareness Day: 10 Quotes To Manage, Relieve And Channel Your Stress

I collected these stress quotes because April is stress awareness month, and Thursday the 16 marks stress awareness day. Taxes got you fried? Health problems nagging you? Negative thoughts tumbling through your mind like quarter clanging in a dryer? Sometimes you can solve the problem that’s stressing you out and sometimes you can’t. I’m reminded of a story my mother used to tell me about smashing plates against a wall. As I remember the story, she was a stressed-out nursing student who focused her rage on one particularly awful professor. She faced a constricting curriculum, and a tortuous series of bureaucratic and academic hoops. Her teacher didn’t take criticism, and the nursing schools’ rules were going to change overnight.

With venom in her heart and stress on her mind, my mother went to Goodwill and bought a boxful of ceramic dinner plates. She brought them home and imagined that the brick wall was her professor, whom she pelleted with plates until the floor was littered with white chips. (The photos for this article come from the “Smash Shack,” which apparently turned plate-smashing into a business model.) Think of these stress quotes as a box of plates, forged by others but collected for your relief and reflection on stress and stressors. Some of these stress quotes are from people who’ve conquered stressful situations, while others are experts or humourists or talented people with a different perspective on stress.

Some of these stress gurus might require a bit of background. For example Dr. Hans Selye, the so-called “Father” of stress research. An endocrinologist, Selye studied hormones like adrenaline, and organs like the thyroid, which he proved have a strong relationship with stress. Then there’s Sam Burns, who largely overcame the stresses of a life complicated by progeria, a genetic disorder that caused him to weigh 50 lbs and prevented him from carrying heavy objects, or running. T.S. Elliot, on the other hand, was a prolific author who used his stress to push his work. The same could be said for Tupac Amaru Shakur.

“Its not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.” -- Dr. Hans Selye, the “Father” of stress research.

“I’m okay with what I ultimately can’t do because there is so much I can do. Now this mentality includes staying in a forward thinking state of mind. I try hard not to waste energy feeling badly for myself, because when I do, I get stuck in a paradox, where there’s no room for any happiness or any other emotion. Now, it’s not that I ignore when I’m feeling badly, I kind of accept it, I let it in, so that I can acknowledge it, and do what I need to do to move past it.” --Sam Burns

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.” --T. S. Eliot

“God help me out here, cause I'm possessed / I need the root of all evil for my stress / Cause money's like a strong prescription drug, it's got me addicted / to the pleasure and the pain it inflicted.” -- Tupac Amaru Shakur, in the song “Krazy”

“People tend to put entertainers on pedestals. We're human beings, just like you. You may see us smiling, and whether we have money or not, we still have bills to pay, we still have our stresses. I think a lot of people want to focus on others' shortcomings to make themselves feel better. And it's a very sad thing.” -- Janet Jackson

“There aren't many great adverts for marriage or parenthood. It always looks so stressful, and that's what I've been scared of. What you don't realise is how much you're going to get back. --Robbie Williams, singer and actor

"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important." --Bertrand Russell, British philosopher 1872-1970

"Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind." --Aristotle, Greek philosopher, 384-322 BC

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”― William James

“When’s the last time you exercised?” --My mother, when I tell her that I’m stressed