Want to avoid stress in your life? Then you’ve got to choose your stressors. First, what is “stress”? Stress is such a buzz word these days, and when researching this post, I found there are about 101 different definitions that are not really practical. When I try to define these types of mental health terms for my clients, I really want the definition to have something that you can learn from and take into your daily life to change your perspective. So I define stress as a stimulus that you can’t handle (yet). And this You part is really important. We’re going to get back to why in a second. The second point is that enough stress can kill you. Enough stimulus, like gravity, for example, can kill you. And the counterpoint to it is that not enough stress can weaken you.
So let’s go through this list using the gym as an analogy. The gym is a stimulus. If I put too much weight on the bar, I am going to potentially damage myself. But if I do not put on enough, then I will not get enough stimulus to force my muscles to change and grow like I want. We need to give systems progressive stimulus to force change, but it has to be something that we can’t handle by just a little bit. We get to choose. The challenge is that when people delay doing this until later in life, their body can’t handle very much and all I can say is, “We’re gonna get on your back. We’re not gonna fight gravity today. We’re just gonna learn how to actually fight the structures of your own body and resistance until it fails”, which is only a couple minutes for a lot of people. So we have got to choose to add a little stress on a daily basis to make sure our body can keep handling more and more of what it needs to, or those activities of daily living become so hard that even vacuuming can injure your back.
Now HALT (hungry, angry, lonely, tired) is an interesting term that I have come across the last couple of years. These are the four things that will set you up to feel weaker in the first place. If you are hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, then it is not the time to start adding more weight onto the bar in my workout analogy. To understand this, remember the last time that you were hungry and somebody said something to you that came across wrong and you overreacted. Well, being hungry turned a small stress into a much bigger stress. You made it bigger by skipping food. Or, maybe you have a lot of anger issues that you are not dealing with. You could be using meditation, journaling, mindfulness, whatever, to try and get your mind centered. But instead, by not handling that like an adult, you are setting yourself up to be in states that are going to be triggered more easily, simply from the fact that you are allowing yourself to be an angry person. Likewise, you have got to start getting people in your life, getting to bed on time, eating nutritious food, etc. Otherwise, the stimulus that was not stressful to you in the first place is now stressful to you because you are in a stressed out state.
You’ve got to start thinking about everything in life as stimuli that you need to be able to handle; to train yourself to handle more tomorrow than you can today.
“We are what we repeatedly do.” -Aristotle
I love this quote — I like going to the gym and training my muscles, but not because I only care about being big or strong. No, workout because I want to be somebody that constantly is growing and evolving. I never want to be the same person two days in a row. I always want to be in a state of growth and that is why I go to the gym. The reason I chose the gym is because many people spent their 20s in the gym and then got to 30 and said, “What’s the point of muscles?” and stopped going. At some point in my life, I may have a different goal than going to the gym, but the goal of growth is something that will never change.
If you ever find yourself depressed, chances are you either stopped growing, or became afraid of it. This is where I start to get into the psychological side of things. It must be a conscious decision to choose your stresses, otherwise it will be an unconscious one. For example, by consciously choosing to not workout, you are unconsciously choosing to be weak in your 50s. By consciously avoiding conflict in your life, your future boss may start stressing you out because you did not build up enough mental strength to deal with the increasing demands of higher positions.
We must constantly and consistently choose our stresses over and over again, or we’re choosing greater stresses later on.
For example, if you have social anxiety, you can choose to be more social. Don’t start with doing a TED Talk, that is too much stimulus. Instead, try calling a friend that you have not called in a while. Do it on a daily basis. Call a different friend or family member every day for 30 days and see how your life changes. The first thing they’ll do is say you two never talk, which is a low level conflict. Then, after 30 days, if your boss starts yelling at you, suddenly you can handle it and you won’t be in the same weakened state that you would have been before.
Lastly, the accountability part of this is important. When I hear people are stressed out, I usually hear, “I am not disciplined enough to take care of myself, letting myself get hungry, letting myself go to bed too late”, those types of things. Accountability can look like many different things, a friend that you get to call on a regular basis, a support group of some form, a gym buddy, a coach like me (you can reach out to work with me here), or more. But if you’re waiting for discipline to carry you through, you’re risking ending up right back where you started a few weeks later.
Ok, that is it for this post. I hope this information is very helpful to you guys, and as always, have a happy and healthy rest of your day!