What does the Cheetah have to do with you? A lot, if you are on the African plain.

The Cheetah has a top speed, 71 miles per hour (maintainable for 200-300 yards) and can accelerate from 0 to 45 mph in 2 seconds. Good numbers for a car, but not for a cat that want to eat you.

So what else do you have in common beside the Cheetah being hungry and you being lunch? Nothing, just look at how the Cheetah handles stress and how you handle stress.

Stress is the number one killer; not Heart Decease, not Cancer, STRESS. The Cheetah has to handle more daily critical stress then us. But, we see no evidence of the Cheetah suffering from stress.

Every day of the Cheetah’s adult life it is faced with its mortality. It must be able to hunt, chase, kill and eat or it dies. Hurt paw, it’s dead. Getting a little to old, it’s dead. Gets lost, it’s dead, and so on. This is strictly, life and death situations which is critical stress.

Every day you suffer from some stress. Stress is a natural part of life, but it can be fatal. Most of your stress in our lives is not critical stress (life and death situations). Typical stress come from not being able to pays bills, noisy neighbors, annoying spouse, bad boss, traffic jams, or a million other things that stress us every day.

If you look at slow motions films of a cheetah running, it looks like fat is flopping up and down as each paw hit the ground. That is not fat, but muscles flapping up and down. Huh?

Muscles are in pairs - as with all mammals. Muscles can only pull, they can not push – that is why muscles come in pairs. If you lift your forearm you are using your biceps. When you lower your forearm you are using your triceps.

Stress causes your muscles to tense up. The cheetah completely relaxes the muscles not pulling, as it runs. Professional track coaches have their runners study the slow-motion pictures of the cheetah to help them learn how to run faster.

If the cheetah were stressed (muscles tense up), the cheetah would not be able to run so fast and the cheetah would die (no kills). This is what happens to people, they tense up and die (over simplification, but accurate).

Perspective. The cheetah faces life and death situations everyday, we do not. So when is the last time you saw a person run 70 mph? If someone got rid of all of the bad stress, they would not be able to run that fast (our bodies are not designed to run that fast), but they would be able to run faster.

Does the cheetah know this? Five-billion year from now, our sun will die and so will everything in the solar system. The next time you think you are in a highly stressful situation, compare it to what will happen in five-billion years.

We will be posting a number of articles on stress, how to define it, what it does to us, and how to reduce it. So stay tuned and relax.