We like to avoid stress. This actually makes sense, considering how bad it seems to be for us in excess. Without it, though, I think we become complacent (I wrote about this last week). Stress is probably a huge net positive in moderation.
For starters, we evolved the ability to feel stress for a reason. Let’s pretend you’re a caveman living 20,000 years ago. Now let’s pretend you’re starving, as cavemen often did. If your body didn’t give you some kind of anxiety to jumpstart you into not dying, humans probably wouldn't have been around for too long.
Nowadays most of us don’t find ourselves in life-or-death situations on a daily basis, but the feeling still adapts to drive us toward things we deem important. Since there’s no longer any primal needs being left by the wayside, it becomes a matter of how we react. You can collapse under stress, or you can use it as fuel. Stagnation or momentum.
The first scenario occurs when we don’t know how to deal with more stimulus. Sometimes we’ve overloaded ourselves and sometimes we’ve been too sheltered. In either case, we don’t know how to react, so we react with very poor judgement or don’t react at all.
The second scenario is the ideal one: it drives us further. This happens when we’ve consciously gone through the process of getting to know ourselves and figuring out how we can best harness healthy levels of stress. The solution varies from person to person. Some people use systems, some people use habits. Whether your solutions are calendars, workouts, or both, I’d encourage you to find a healthy and sustainable solution that works for you. In my experience, it takes a lot of trial and error, then revisiting every so often.
It’s an important practice, I think. Many of us have been conditioned to view stress as a categorically bad thing and go on to avoid it at all costs. This is just as bad, if not worse than taking on too much. Stress breeds momentum. We just need to know how to harness it.
Until tomorrow,
Alex