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Managing Stress Effectively: Make Stress your Ally, not your Enemy
Most of us are battling with degrees of stress. The coping strategies that worked earlier seem to fail now. By losing our ability to handle stress or not understanding when to look for help (or both), we’re putting our health, professional success, and personal relationships at stake.
At the core of this hurdle lies a misled notion of stress per se, contributing to our inability to identifying and managing it. Several professionals perceive stress as an unmixed negative, something to cut through or mitigate. As such, they might address it inadequately.
Indeed, stress serves a natural, physiological purpose that can help us address critical issues and learn and grow from our experiences. Rather than striving to stave off or reduce stress, we must seek to understand it and optimize it, minimizing the downsides while pouncing the upsides.
The Supercomposition Theory
The analogy between stress and sports helps elucidate a massive challenge in managing stress — poor self-awareness. At gyms, for instance, we pretty much know when we’re straining muscles or resting them (the two…