Becoming the Tiger King

So, I decided to hop onto the crazy train and watch the new Netflix series, Tiger King. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that at the same time I started reading a book by Earl Hipp titled Fighting invisible tigers. I am involved in the field of psychology and so I need to constantly be upskilling and reading psychological material. My supervisor gave me this book to read and I feel that it is so relevant and necessary given our current scenario.

Again, we are facing a time of great uncertainty and the threat of fear is ever-present. For many of us our tigers (Stress? Fear?) have been uncaged and are roaming around without constraint. There are many invisible tigers that are present such as fear around finances, uncertainty around education, will we have enough essentials during lockdown and so on. These are real fears, but we need to be weary not to let them take root in our lives.

So, with this being said I will list a few basics in the next couple blogs with regard to managing stress and making sure we don’t just cope with our invisible tigers, but learn to effectively manage them, hopefully a lot better than Joe Exotic.

Short-term stress is not always unhealthy but often necessary in our effective functioning, it is long-term stress we need to be monitoring.

When we stress constantly, and our life is full of tigers that don’t leave we gradually adapt and become accustom to higher and higher levels of stress. There is often no time to slow down, rest and recuperate. This often takes a huge, mental, physical and emotional toll on us that leaves us unable to function fully and be the people we want to be. “Like a woodcutter who never takes time to sharpen his axe, you discover that it is more difficult to do things that were once easy”. It is also difficult to take time off and rest as the fast pace consumer culture we live in does not value rest and society regards rest as laziness. We need to ignore the “stigma” attached and obey God’s call for us to rest.

If we really think about it, there is no stress in the world. Sure, our society places high demands and pressure on us but stress is something that happens internally. Stress is a result of how we perceive and interpret the challenges we face. Perspective as well as effective stress management are therefore very important in our fight against our invisible tigers. Here is an analogy to paint the picture:

Scene 1: You’re a young, untrained and inexperienced Joe Exotic. You are placed inside a tiger enclosure with a 300 kg killing machine that is looking at you like a tasty lunch. Inside you begin to panic, your chest tightens up and you feel a shortness of breath. GET ME OUT!

Scene 2: You’re a mature, trained and experienced Joe Exotic. You climb into the tiger enclosure with the same tiger as before. However, you have the skills and knowledge on how to safely interact with this majestic animal. THIS IS GREAT!

These scenarios are the same, the difference in these two scenarios is perspective and having the necessary skills. This is why we need to learn effective stress management skills and change our perspective on work, rest and our holistic wellbeing. Hopefully the next few blogs will help highlight and remind you of some skills you can use in dealing with these invisible tigers.

2 Corinthians 4:16-18 – “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

Reference:

• Hipp, E. (2019). Fighting invisible tigers: Stress management for teens (Revised & updated fourth ed). Minneapolis, MN: Free Spirit Publishing. (2019). Retrieved April 6, 2020.