Stress is the World's Biggest Proxy Killer

And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul?

Jesus of Nazareth spoke these words around 2,000 years ago, yet they have retained their relevancy throughout the ages. The beauty of this passage from the Gospel according to Matthew is that it's not necessarily a religious or spiritual lesson, but can be applied in a purely terrestrial and agnostic manner.

In my last Steemit post, I talked about the greatness of Steve Jobs, and indeed, his legacy will last for the foreseeable future. Yet one of the revelations that came out from his untimely death was that he had likely worked himself to an early grave.

Of course, the technical answer is that Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer. But ask yourself, how did that develop? Despite his enormous talent and intelligence, Jobs complained bitterly about holding two CEO jobs simultaneously at Pixar and Apple.

The man was working double shifts, and he was passing kidney stones routinely. Stubbornly, he pressed on, which earned him accolades that he will never truly enjoy.

We Are All Steve Jobs

The sad reality is that there are millions of faceless, voiceless Steve Jobs that are silently killing themselves. Maybe they are your neighbors, or even your parents. Whoever they are, they exist, cranking away for whatever drives their ambition.

But at a certain point, when does ambition become your end game?

Earlier today, I came across a distressing article from Yahoo News UK's Andy Wells entitled, "Wife says 'never go to bed angry' after waking from row to find husband dead on sofa." Here was a man who worked 16-hour days, grinding himself to the point of exhaustion, and finally, to death. His purpose was that he wanted to provide his kids everything he was denied when he was their age.

I sympathize deeply with that sentiment, as I'm sure many men do. We don't want to just provide -- we want to be excellent providers. But at a certain point, what your family wants, and needs, is you. No amount of Disneyland trips, no extravagant Sweet-16 birthday gifts, will ever replace your physical presence.

The Biggest Proxy Killer

While the medical establishment will take generations to acknowledge this, stress is the biggest proxy killer of our species. You don't need a litany of medical journals to understand this. Just recall the symptoms of stress -- the elevated heartbeat, the shortness of breath, associated aches and pains.

Are any of these symptoms normal? No. Your body is signaling to you that something is not right, and one of those signals is through pain. Ignoring these stress symptoms weakens both the mind and the body, eventually allowing any foreign agent to wreak significant, even fatal, damage.

For those that remain unconvinced in stress' role in human diseases, I recommend reading Dr. Emily Deans article in Psychology Today, in which she lays out the case that prolonged stress can cause our natural defenses to malfunction, potentially opening the doorway to ailments like heart disease or cancer.

Make Changes Now!

Certain activities are commonly known to have a deleterious effect on health, such as substance abuse or cigarette smoking. On the flipside, activities that promote human health -- exercise, nutrition, meditation, regular sleep -- alleviates the devastating impact of stress.

My friends, no amount of money or prestige is worth dying for. So long as you have breath in your body, you have a fighting chance to achieve whatever it is that you want. My advice is to never sacrifice that which is most critical to your life and health!