Stress and America ... WTF

We are all stressed.  What can we do about it?

Transcript

00:01.05
Christina Scovel
Hello, hello, and welcome back to Pinch of Honesty. This week we are discussing bad weeks, right?

00:13.78
Christina Scovel
When everything is turning up snake eyes. Is snake eyes bad? I'm not a gambler. um When everything is basically going the wrong direction.

00:28.18
Christina Scovel
I've had a handful of these weeks recently where it seems like you just can't get a win. In particular, at work, a little bit at home, um and then also with me emotionally.

00:49.59
Christina Scovel
right where you know that feeling of just unhappiness or unease that sits over you, right like you can't you can't get out of it.

01:02.35
Christina Scovel
I'm sure that I'm not the only one out there who has had this feeling where you you aren't happy, you aren't sad, but there's something that's niggling on top of you.

01:13.69
Christina Scovel
just on top of you and it kind of makes you feel like, Did I forget to pay a credit card bill? Did I not turn the stove off? Did I say something that offended somebody, right? It's it's these types of feelings that that hover over us.

01:33.05
Christina Scovel
And since I've had a couple of these weeks, not necessarily back to back, but they've they've been spread out a little bit, a couple things have really settled over me, which is,

01:48.31
Christina Scovel
The first, currently, for those of you that are listening, right, this, I'm in the US.

01:57.59
Christina Scovel
And i went out to go look and see if there have been any studies that have come out recently about stress levels in the US. And it turns out that the U.S. is currently experiencing higher stress levels than ever before.

02:12.82
Christina Scovel
right Nearly half the adults are feeling stressed. And there are a myriad of reasons that over half of our population is stressed out beyond belief.

02:24.69
Christina Scovel
The first of all is economic concerns. So for those of you, again, outside of the US, or maybe you're in the US but you don't pay attention to politics, come October 1st, when our government shut down, the community that I live in is probably something on the order of over half federal contractors.

02:47.16
Christina Scovel
And so the question of whether or not we were gonna be employed, whether or not we we were gonna be furloughed, how long we would get paid for after the shutdown. Like all of these things made life wildly stressful for a lot of us where you don't want to make plans. You don't want to book plane tickets.

03:09.02
Christina Scovel
or you kind of want hold on to all the cash you have because you don't really know what's coming around the bend. And even though, you know, we are fiscally responsible and could weather a storm, it doesn't mean that it removes that stress, right?

03:26.20
Christina Scovel
um The next thing is just, you know according to these articles, political and um societal divisions. So currently in the US, we are really struggling with what's going on politically.

03:42.07
Christina Scovel
um i think when President Trump was elected, there was a strong feeling of support from a lot of his supporters.

03:55.00
Christina Scovel
And with a lot of the activities that have been occurring, that support is waning. And there's still this wild division between people.

04:08.76
Christina Scovel
Besides that division, there's an insane amount of hatred occurring in the US right now. So for people who feel like this is land of the free, it doesn't feel that way.

04:27.48
Christina Scovel
Um, my cousin spent the majority of her life living in Minnesota and seeing what's occurring in Minnesota

04:46.30
Christina Scovel
makes me beyond upset and living in a small community far away from it. It's hard to know what, if anything i can do. to support my fellow Americans

05:02.33
Christina Scovel
and to take a stand against fascism.

05:09.30
Christina Scovel
My daughter was reading up in social studies about

05:20.60
Christina Scovel
the American revolution. And as she was reading it, she turned to me and she said, you know, one of the things that we complained to the British king about was sending in troops to areas of the United States, you know of course before it was the United States, to sow unrest and to put fear into the hearts of civilians.

05:51.16
Christina Scovel
And she said, is this what's going on now? Right? This is coming from a 13 year old who's comparing the American revolution

06:02.42
Christina Scovel
in her mind to what we're seeing on the news.

06:09.93
Christina Scovel
I'm pretty emotional if you can't tell.

06:15.67
Christina Scovel
I find myself doom scrolling

06:20.70
Christina Scovel
for updates on what's going on in Minnesota. I find myself watching ICE videos and becoming so enraged that I have to put my phone down.

06:41.98
Christina Scovel
And I find that speaking to people who I once thought were very reasonable about the actions of our government I find that they blindly stand behind a president who, when he was heckled a car manufacturing plant this past week, he not only said, fuck you twice, he also flipped the bird to citizens.

07:15.83
Christina Scovel
And I think more than anything, majority of the US feels like We can't speak up for fear.

07:28.15
Christina Scovel
And I don't know,

07:33.30
Christina Scovel
i don't know what speaks to having a dictator more than that.

07:46.72
Christina Scovel
I've stated this multiple times and this podcast, right? I am the 12th generation in my family to be born in the U S we've been here since before it was a country.

08:05.00
Christina Scovel
And I'm ashamed.

08:09.77
Christina Scovel
I'm so ashamed of what our country's turning into.

08:19.84
Christina Scovel
rolling into another country and stealing the president first lady. If you go to Wikipedia right now and you type in Donald Trump, it will say that he's the president of Venezuela. How does this make any logical sense to anybody?

08:38.29
Christina Scovel
Seeing unlawful behavior where all of us agree it is unlawful. And yet the judicial system has apparently nobility to prosecute these people because clearly the president can roll in and pardon whomever they want.

08:58.67
Christina Scovel
It's maddening, it's maddening. It makes me feel like we have the ability to do nothing about the direction we're going as a country.

09:12.31
Christina Scovel
So that I think affects stress levels probably just as much as economic concerns

09:21.66
Christina Scovel
and watching as our country spirals out of control.

09:28.92
Christina Scovel
I honestly thought in my heart that the last Trump administration was kind of as bad or as crazy as it could get, right? Where we had these proud boys and racism was allowed to run rampant in our face.

09:48.25
Christina Scovel
i thought I thought that was as bad as it could get. um And I guess really the thing to take away from this is um it can always get worse.

10:01.14
Christina Scovel
It clearly can always get worse.

10:05.30
Christina Scovel
um

10:08.50
Christina Scovel
So I want to talk about what we can do about stress levels. So first thing first, when it comes to work stress,

10:22.59
Christina Scovel
I want to address the elephant in the room, which is that often most of us feel like we give, give, give don't receive back.

10:33.43
Christina Scovel
Or as I often like to say, I feel like I'm pushing a rock up a hill. I'm Sisyphus. I'm pushing this rock and I'm never making any progress. And I think This is you know Christina's view on this, um that the reason we feel that way is because we are expecting some type of external validation for the work that we're doing. We also have a tendency to take on so much that we can't do any of them well, which stresses us out. right?

11:07.93
Christina Scovel
a lot of us take on our jobs. We do our jobs because we love them or, you know, we, we need the money, but at the end of the day, we want to come home and we want to feel like we accomplished something. And it is hard to feel like you accomplished something if you've taken on a thousand activities.

11:28.28
Christina Scovel
So this past week, um, I really sat down and mapped out the handful of things that absolutely had to be accomplished, right?

11:39.99
Christina Scovel
Not the thousand that could be, but the handful that had to be. i also found myself saying no. I was asked to give a couple talks and those talks would require me not only to put them together, but my time to give those talks.

12:01.05
Christina Scovel
And it is easy to say, yes yes, yes, yes, yes. But then when the actual physical work comes on, you have to do that work. Again, adding stress to our every single day.

12:13.66
Christina Scovel
And of course, I didn't just say no, right? I said, you know, maybe next time. I'm sorry. um you know, and i I gave my reasons. And hopefully in the future, when things open up a little bit for time, i will have that time to be able to give for those things.

12:30.20
Christina Scovel
But we'll see. and I'm gonna take the approach that, you know, I have a job to do and that job does not always include me bending over backwards.

12:41.88
Christina Scovel
Right, think there are times where you have to bend over backwards, but that is not an all the time, right?

12:52.73
Christina Scovel
What can we do about our country?

12:56.44
Christina Scovel
I think we can speak up even though we're afraid.

13:01.40
Christina Scovel
I think we can stand up even though we feel as if the fascist regime wants to hold us down.

13:15.10
Christina Scovel
I think we can be aware of where our money is going. Right? So what I learned from my daughter was women during the Revolutionary War stopped buying things. Right?

13:26.01
Christina Scovel
I probably learned this when I was a child, but forgot it, but stop buying things from companies that support this fascist behavior. Right? So a number of those companies, which I'm very sorry to say, right?

13:39.00
Christina Scovel
Target, WhatsApp, Minute Maid, right? These are all, you can go out and you can look up companies which are massive contributors to the Trump campaign.

13:50.55
Christina Scovel
And we've decided to pull back from those companies. We're going to speak with our wallet, right? We are going to use our money for small businesses. We are going to use our money for local businesses. We are going to actively try to avoid supporting this type of behavior fiscally, right? So go out and look for those things.

14:16.50
Christina Scovel
and the other thing I can say is that we should be talking about these things, right? When we hide behind the uncomfortableness of it, when we don't speak about it, ah poor behavior is allowed to continue.

14:32.72
Christina Scovel
Shooting US citizen who's in her car.

14:39.74
Christina Scovel
Sorry. Shooting US citizen who's in her car.

14:45.82
Christina Scovel
is not allowed. When she's done nothing wrong, she's driving away, it is not allowed. Absolute mayhem happening out here at my house.

14:56.66
Christina Scovel
um Phone calls and just just madness. um

15:03.06
Christina Scovel
The other thing is, I think that it is important for us as US citizens to actually know what our rights truly are, right? um And I think Being educated on what we can and cannot do is really important at this time.

15:18.94
Christina Scovel
So, you know, I've been going through and actually reading up on what are our rights, you know, if I were to be stopped by ICE agents, what are my rights if ICE agents come to my door? I don't think that it is wrong for us to understand what our constitutional rights are. And I think the last thing is, is for us to fight for those rights.

15:40.22
Christina Scovel
Right. um We've had to fight for them in the past and it feels like we're right back at that place. So i would say, figure out what your stance is. And you may not agree with me, especially, you know, if you're in the U S and these are not your beliefs and that's fine.

15:57.30
Christina Scovel
um But you should understand where you stand on these topical areas, because I think that we, as a U S are coming to a head. Now,

16:09.85
Christina Scovel
that was a lot. It was a lot of honesty there. So I did grab my 1,227 quite interesting facts book to see if I could lighten the mood for the end of this podcast, which is, remember humans have been around for a while. Humans have been hunters and gatherers for 99% of their history.

16:31.51
Christina Scovel
So us with our cars or with our cell phones or even riding horses, um Yeah, 99% of our history, we were hunter-gatherers. Ostriches can be trained to herd sheep.

16:45.40
Christina Scovel
I think that's fantastic. I'd like to see the Great Plains covered with ostriches. i think it would be great. WTF is an acronym for the World Taekwondo Federation. I had no idea. So WTF that for sure.

16:59.86
Christina Scovel
um and lastly on our big list um In 2011, the internet reached 13.7 billion pages.

17:11.93
Christina Scovel
That is one for every year since the Big Bang. So the amount of information that is just on the internet at this point, right, being 2026, is mind boggling.

17:23.54
Christina Scovel
And so i would really urge you to use that internet to go out and educate yourself. Find what your resources are in your area. If you are outside of the US, please bear with us.

17:36.66
Christina Scovel
oh We're in a shitty time. And you should know that the majority of us don't feel this way. We feel like our country has turned against us. So please bear with us.

17:49.69
Christina Scovel
And with that, I'll catch you on the flip side.