There is a value to stress
Stress is not a bad thing. It's a neutral thing. But if you were to give it a good or bad designation, it's probably a good thing. Let's define stress.
According to Wikipedia:
"Stress is a person's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition or a stimulus. Stress is a body's way to react to a challenge. According to the stressful event, the body's way to respond to stress is by sympathetic nervous system activation which results in the fight-or-flight response."
Once you change your perception and opinion of stress, is when you can begin to control it, master it, manage it. If you constantly try to avoid it and consider it a bad thing, is when it consumes you. It's like sleeplessness; once you try to avoid, ignore, stop thinking about sleeplessness, is when falling asleep and not being up all night is all you can think of.
According to psychologist Peter Kramer, resilience, not happiness, is the opposite of depression.
Being a former finance guy, I think of it the same way I think about risk management. Actually stress is your response to risk. In risk management of your stock portfolio, it's NOT about avoiding all risk. It's about the optimal amount of risk for the most amount of gain (profit). Avoiding risk is not risk management.
Same with stress management, trying to avoid it all together or thinking of it as a negative thing to be avoided at all costs is not managing stress. Once you see it for what it is, something that is trying to aid you and keep you alive and alert; can you begin to control it, master the intensity, and learn to channel that energy. This requires lots of practice.
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| Once you accept it, you can begin to control it. |
Behind every success story is a tragedy (it's the middle act of the three act story arc). Pick up any autobiography of one of the great ones, and you'll hear a story of tragedy early on that really defined their purpose. Tragedies create a lot of psychic energy, you can either channel it to create something powerful like the great ones do, or you can let it consume you and destroy you, which also happens to many of us.
If you don't need to ever channel that energy to overcome an obstacle, there is no need for you to be great. I look at a lot of immigrant families who came here, absorbed great risk, managed a lot of stress, who found not only freedom but financial success. When asked how they pushed through and kept going, their answer: because they had to. That's stress, that feeling like you have to.
For their children, they removed all risk, in fact made them risk adverse, and tried to remove all obstacles and stressors. Without an ability to cope with stress, everything seems stressful. They never needed to be great. They never needed to grow. They had no great psychic debt to channel and no great reward for their risk. Without a need, there is no reason, and without a reason it will not happen. That's evolution, adaptation, and that's how the universe works.
Paul Harvey, a University of New Hampshire professor finds that Gen Y have an "unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback," and "an inflated view of oneself." Their reality never matches their expectations of themselves. They become their own harshest critic.
There are things that cause you stress and your opinion about stress. Stress and your opinion about it are not the same things. Once you begin to change your views on it can you begin to unlock it's true power. That's if you want to be like one of the great ones. Stress makes you smart, fast, alert, strong, maybe to a point that is too intense. Maybe there isn't a place for it to be channeled because you haven't found a purpose for why you do any of the things you do, then stress can only grow and grow. Meaning is happiness. All the stuff you do, who do you do it for? If it's only for you, it can become a great burden. Your good tastes tell you, you could benefit others.
The immigrants who came here who had to start over, raise families, or the previous generations who had to survive war, factory jobs, prejudice and sexism, they had a reason to be resilient. We still need a reason to be resilient and there are still people who can benefit from us. Not just the next generation but also for the previous generations. They had to, so do we.
The Greek word for “suffering” gives rise to our word “passion.” The opposite of “suffering” is, therefore, “apathy.” Passion with the plight of others makes for “compassion.”
I grew this business in a very short amount of time. Right when I was starting this, I had my sister pass away, then my father. Though of course those are tragedies, I used that stress and energy for positive results.
My brain was spinning, my head moving so fast, so many thoughts going through my head, and I used this alertness to read, sleeplessness to write and define what the purpose of my business was, to see the value of health and helping people, be inspired when I speak, and to make my business and my life what it is today, much more positive than it ever was prior to those tragic events. It was my choice, how I perceived this stress and internal energy and intensity.
For others I've seen them never channel it, try to suppress it, ignore it, avoid it, and it put them in a dark downward spiral. And why wouldn't you do those things if you considered it such a negative thing that you're supposed to hide in the basement? There were times in my life I reacted to events in this way and there are family members who reacted to those tragedies, going down a dark tunnel. My opinion and the opinion of my family members was that my father couldn't get over the heartbreak of his child dying before him, he got sick immediately after. My father avoided stress and would typically explode when confronted with it. Him being who he is, and every "good" or "bad" event in my life, failures in martial arts, failures in finance, framed everything to where it needed to be to write this article.
The time of this writing is 4AM and if it wasn't, I probably couldn't have written this. That's the beautiful part.
I think about my father and sister every day and it keeps me driven. It's no longer sad, its just...defining. Every negative and stressful event is the psychic energy for what I do now, because some days you have no energy, but you stay driven.
That's stress and it's a good thing.
Psychologist Kelly McGonical on making stress your friend
Why you will fail, but that's a good thing
The upside of failing
How terrible stress can lead to magic
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Sam Yang from an early age has been obsessed with connecting the dots between martial arts and efficiency, health, mindset, business, science, and habits to improve optimal well-being. For more info, join his newsletter. You can also connect to All Out Effort on Facebook and Twitter.
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