People are not always the best when it comes to relating to each other. I know that I oftentimes will look at things that my fellow humans are doing and ask myself “what the hell was that?”
Despite this, I think all humans understand that there are a couple of fundamental forces in life that are inevitable. Death is one, taxes are another, but the one I want to focus on primarily is a bit easier to have some control over; stress.
What Is Stress?
Stress is an interesting component of humanity. Stress is a reaction (both mental and physical) to something happening around us. The stress we feel is meant to alert us that our current situation needs to somehow change or we will end up in danger. In the event that danger arrives, our stress levels increase and our brains release chemicals to throw our body into overdrive for the sake of survival Animals have had this function for millions of years, so it makes sense that humans also obtained it somewhere along the branch of evolution.
Stress is something that helps us keep ourselves in check in many cases. If we’re working out, our body becomes stressed to let us know that we won’t be able to continue forever. The stress will increase as your workout continues, until you get to the point (hopefully) where you recognize its not healthy to push yourself any further.
Humans have other traits, unfortunately, that don’t pair very well with stress. The biggest of these (in my opinion) is the fact that we are able to perceive time. We know what the ‘past’ was and we have an idea of what the ‘future’ may hold. That isn’t a trait most animals have. While it is a very useful trait to our growth, it also induces us with a bunch of extra stress.
A Lifelong Curse
Stress is designed to throw us into overdrive when something bad happens. Unfortunately, since humans have vivid imaginations, we always feel like something bad is around the corner. Maybe there is a huge debt hanging overhead? Maybe its almost time for a big repair to be made on a car or home? Maybe things have been falling apart at work and you’re worried about job stability? This constant inner dialogue leads to chronic stress – which is simply a high level of stress that never goes away.
This chronic stress is terrible for the body and mind. Imagine if your car was always on and you always had the pedal to the floor when you drove? The car would not last long, and neither do people when they are continuously under intense amounts of stress.
Most humans are in a state such as this, and what ends up forming (as a coping mechanism) is some sort of addiction. Alcohol and cigarettes are often the first things people think of when it comes to an addiction. However, it’s less about what you’re doing and more about why you’re doing it.
If you’re socializing because you haven’t seen your friends and family in awhile, that’s perfectly normal. If you’re out socializing constantly because it helps you forget about whatever stressors are going on in life, that’s when things get dangerous. The same applies to many things – video games, eating, television, etc.
Addiction is really where the ‘lifelong curse’ portion of stress really starts to take hold. As you allow those addictions to grow, you become reliant on them to function. This will inevitably cause problems for you when they begin to interfere with other areas of your life, such as work or family. If left unchecked, this can snowball into a much greater issue and become something that seems nearly inescapable.
All things have good and bad, however, and I don’t want to spend this entire post completely villainizing stress.
A Necessity For Progress
The week after I graduated from college was surreal. I had been in school since starting kindergarten at 5 years old – it was officially the first time in my life I had no educational commitments. Initially, it felt like the best thing in the world.
But as the weeks carried on, I became somewhat uneasy about the whole thing. I had previously dedicated 15-20 hours a week to school after I would leave work. You would think that gaining back that time would alleviate some of the day-to-day stress I was experiencing. Although it temporarily did have that effect, my brain quickly became expectant of the extra time to waste. The stressors that had always been over my shoulder were still there, and now I was simply wasting more time than before.
Stress is something that will always be present. Some things will make it worse than others, but it’s going to be there regardless of how much of my time I dedicate to being productive. Once I realized this, I started allotting that time back to getting things done. My stress levels went up temporarily, but leveled back out to what I was accustomed to dealing with. I am thankful that I ended up making that decision, because there would likely be no ‘Zenith Martial Arts’ without that realization at the time.
Now, I am always weary about when my time gets freed up and stressors go away. It is important to have balance and enjoy each moment, but it’s a slippery slope. If you allow your new ‘freedom’ to become your norm, then it becomes that much more difficult to re-dedicate the time to something productive if you ever need to in the future. At this point, I know about how many hours a day I need to balance out my stress, and so I strive to stay at that level so that I don’t get over-stressed or start to become less productive.
Conclusion
The purpose of this post is fairly simple. Stress, such as all things in the universe, has positive and negative attributes. We tend to focus on the negative of stress, but there is a lot we can glean from the signals it gives us. It will always find a way to be present, so don’t get caught up in trying to ‘avoid’ it altogether. Usually, ‘avoiding’ things that are stressful is just a temporary solution that leads to a bigger problem down the line.
Instead, try to learn how to productively cope with the stress and recognize what it is trying to tell you. Each person is stressed for different reasons, and I hope in a future post to be able to talk more about this topic and dissect how to best tackle stress in a way that keeps us productive and happy.