If You Don't Deal With Stress, You Can’t Deal With Stress
“Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.” — Jerzey Gregorek
“Stress acts as an accelerator: it will push you either forward or backward, but you choose which direction.”
―Chelsea Erieau
We have a love-hate relationship with stress. Our muscles need physical stress to grow and get stronger, so we apply it during our workouts. Materials like glass, clay, and coal need stress to create new, amazing objects. We need stress to bend and break things so they can be made new.
But when it comes to our own lives, we avoid stress like the plague. We want everything to be easy and ‘stress-free.’
And in some cases, this works.
But our entire lives can’t be about avoiding stress.
As children, we depended on stress. Without stress, a child won’t learn to walk. As they get older, they work through stress when learning to read, build models, or solve puzzles. When we become adults, that eustress (aka good stress) goes out the window. We have to deal with real-world challenges and end up lumping all stressful situations into one bucket.
