Sure, you might not think about visiting a graveyard to chill out. However, walking around and thinking about life and death among the tombstones can surprisingly help ease everyday stress. The peace and quiet can provide a space for reflection. Plus, it’s a reminder that life is short, encouraging us to let go of our worries.
So, What’s Up with Your Brain When Stressed?
Imagine you’re on a hike and suddenly, you run into a wild bear. Your heart starts pounding, your senses go into overdrive, and you’re ready to either fight or run. That’s your brain pumping adrenaline for a “fight or flight” response. Though it’s great for dealing with bears, it’s less helpful when the stress comes from something like an avalanche of emails or deadlines at work, but your brain reacts similarly.
The Graveyard: A Big Picture Setting
Graveyards come into the picture here. Walking among tombstones is a vivid reminder of our mortality. But it’s not about freaking you out. It’s about perspective. All that stuff stressing you out? It’s going to look pretty tiny when you consider it in the context of your entire life, and inevitable death. And as you’ll soon learn, that’s not as scary a thought as it seems.
Meet Your New Friend: Optimistic Nihilism
This brings us to “optimistic nihilism.” The name might sound like a contradiction, but hang in there. You see, nihilism argues that life, given that it ends in death, doesn’t have a pre-set meaning or purpose. A bit grim, right? But here’s the twist: it’s also empowering. It means that we are free to design our own purpose in life to make it fulfilling for us.
It’s almost like calling yourself the artist of your own life. You get to decide what’s impactful, what’s worth your time and effort. It takes the spotlight off the small, stressful stuff, and puts it on the things that give your life joy and meaning.
What Now?
So, the next time you feel buried beneath a landslide of stress, perhaps consider a quiet walk among the headstones. Get out of your head for a bit and think about the lives all these people may have lived. How, like them, we’ll all end up six feet under at some point and all this stress will then be pointless. It’s not about fixation on the morbidity of death, but rather a recognition of life’s fleetingness and the liberation this can bring.
In embracing our mortality, we can start to appreciate the present.
And, don’t forget to breathe…