What Stress Is.

Stress is a fact of life.

At least, that’s true for those of us who continually seek to push our own boundaries and reach beyond ourselves. I like to think of Stress as a necessary consequence of personal growth.

Stress is like a rip current. Rip currents are generated when all the water that is pushed aside by winds and waves moving towards shore, travels back out to sea via a narrow channel.

In a similar fashion, in order to reach beyond the shores of our limited experiences and perceived capabilities, we often to have to push aside all the self-doubt, pessimism, and other negative notions that often stand between us and personal growth. The thing is, all this negativity that we push aside doesn’t just dissipate into thin air, and I don’t know anyone that has actually been able to convert negative energy into positive energy (much akin to the “fat can be turned into muscle” myth). Given that there’s no way for the negative energy to be simply vanquished, it must go somewhere.

That somewhere often turns out to be a narrow channel of self-doubt — a gap between our solid underwater sand banks of resilience and fortitude — that compresses all that negative energy into the rip current we’ve come to know as Stress.

The Nature of Stress.

The most common myth about Stress is that it is necessarily a negative force, to be avoided at all costs. “Stress is unhealthy.” “Stress can give you a heart attack.” “Stress ages you.” We seek all ways and means to avoid it as far as possible; from the passive-aggressive move of turning off our mobile phones while chilling on the beach, to the more desperate action of fleeing overseas on a holiday.

I posit that Stress, like a rip current, is only a natural and neutral force. How it affects us, whether negatively or positively, depends on how we react to it. In itself, Stress is neither negative nor positive; it is neither to be sought out nor avoided.

The wrong way to deal with Stress.

There are some questions in the world that have no right or wrong answers. But the question “What is the right way to deal with Stress?” is not one of them. We should start with the wrong way to deal with Stress.

The wrong way to deal with Stress is to avoid it. There are two forms of avoidance: (i) you completely restrict yourself from doing anything that would generate Stress to begin with; and (ii) when Stress comes along, you bury your head in the sand to pretend that it doesn’t exist, so you don’t have to deal with it.

It’s obvious how (i) is a fool’s answer to the Stress question. Even if you are “perfectly happy with your current status quo” and you’ve managed to convince yourself that “happiness equates to contentment with the present”, the fact of the matter is that the world (and society) will continue to change with time. Technology will improve. Social norms will be altered. We all need to reach beyond ourselves from time to time, in order to keep up with a constantly evolving world. The man who chooses not to push himself past his current limitations and experience today in order to avoid Stress, will only find himself overtaken by time and either the status quo that he is “contented” with will continually be diminished, or he will find himself confronted by the Stress that he sought so hard to avoid, only this time, he won’t have the tools or resilience to tackle it.

Avoidance strategy (ii) is not that easy to identify, and we’ll need to break it down in order to see if we’ve unwittingly allowed ourselves to indulge in it:

Being Numb isn’t the same as being Calm.

Stress typically triggers negative emotions and reactions. While Stress in itself is not a negative force, the truth is that while growing up, we have all of us been in stressful situations that have been associated with negative outcomes. It is these past situations that trigger negative emotions whenever Stress appears. Think about it: Stress doesn’t actually feel like anything. When you say “I feel stressed”, what you most probably mean is “I feel frustrated”, “I feel helpless”, or “I feel tired”. Stress isn’t a feeling or condition. It’s a state that triggers certain emotions and reactions in us, most of them reflexively negative.

These negative emotions and reactions are not pleasant, and it’s natural to want to avoid them. We indulge in a whole range of activities in order to avoid having to manage all this negative energy; from bitching about it, to gritting our teeth and maintaining a stiff upper lip. Being “emotional” is commonly frowned upon, and so we suppress the negative emotions that come up so we don’t have to actually work through them, all the while thinking that this is a sign that we are disciplined and gifted with self-control.

The truth is, suppressing these emotions and failing to acknowledge that they exist is neither discipline nor self-control. Self-control, or Discipline, is being able to recognise that the negative emotions (in the full strength of their totality) exist, but not allowing them to control us.

When we downplay the negative emotions that have been triggered by Stress, or worse, allowing them to overwhelm us and drive us crazy, Stress affects us negatively. Like a rip current, it throws us off balance and pulls us out to sea. We spend a lot of time and energy fighting the pull or closing our eyes to avoid recognising what’s going on, only to find that we are consequently exhausted by our futile efforts and starting to drown, or we find ourselves stuck out in the middle of the sea, greatly out of our depth, with no idea of how we got there.

The right way to deal with Stress.

The good news is, when harnessed appropriately, Stress can affect us positively.

Surfers, fishermen, and other people seeking to get out into deeper water with as little effort as possible typically use rip currents to push them out to sea, rather than paddling on their own. In the same way, if we can recognize that Stress is a naturally occurring phenomenon, we can similarly harness it to our benefit.

Lets say we’re gunning for that big promotion, that leads to a bigger job and bigger responsibilities than we have ever experienced. It’s a stretch, right? Now imagine having to live up to the expectations of that bigger job and responsibilities, while fighting to manage or reduce your Stress. It’s impossible. You can’t do it. The bigger the job, the bigger the Stress. Why are you fighting it?

We should be using Stress as a pushing force instead, a fuel. Just as Stress can reflexively trigger negative emotions, so can we train it trigger positive reactions in us instead. The first step to this, is to learn to manage the negative emotions that are always going to come up. Too bad, gotta deal with it; you got stuck with wiring in your childhood that’s always going to lead to negative emotions associated with Stress. It’s always going to be something that you’ll have to deal with anytime something new and unexpected comes around the corner. As discussed earlier, denying or resisting negative emotions doesn’t achieve anything. The trick is to recognise and acknowledge that the negative emotion is right there. It’s not about rationalising it, justifying it, or downplaying it. Just acknowledge it’s there. Realise that it’s there because your Stress triggered it. And then move on. Move On. Don’t wallow in it. Don’t waste time or energy trying to replace it with positive energy.

The second step is not so easy — it requires active intention. You need to intend to ride the Stress current, fully aware that you can’t control its speed or its pull, but you can control the direction in which it takes you. The current can be exhilarating. It’s going to bring you somewhere you’ve never been before. You’re going to experience something entirely new. It’s fast. It’s speedy. It’s thrilling. Stress can bring you adrenaline, which we all know is the greatest fuel of all.

But in order for all this to happen, you need to want it to happen. You need to consciously intend for the Stress to trigger these positive reactions, instead of the negative ones that you’re used to. It’s not going to be easy, because it’s just so much easier to feel negatively than positively, and it’s not going to be smooth because you’ve have at least 2 decades of feeling negatively about Stress to combat. It’s going to be easier than fighting the Stress though. Because now, instead of fighting to get out of Stress or fighting to reduce it or escape it, you’re fighting to stay on top of the current, to allow it to carry you where you want to be. You’re fighting to get your paddle in the water so that the current can carry you forward, and you can steer left or right to the exact coordinates you want to be at.