What Lobsters Can Teach Us About Coping With Adversity
On inevitable growth during challenging times.
I have been thinking a lot about lobsters recently. Especially lobsters in stress.
In a video from 11 years ago, Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski talked about how lobsters are responding to stress and what we could learn from them. In the video, the Rabbi explains that in order for the soft, mushy lobster could grow, it needs to undergo a painful and vulnerable growth process several times in its life.
The lobster grows inside its rigid shell until it becomes confining and uncomfortable. When that becomes too painful to tolerate, the lobster hides under rocks, casts the shell away and grows itself another one. This bigger one will eventually get too narrow again, the pain of the lobster becomes unbearable, so it repeats the process.
The stimulus for the lobster to grow is the unbearable discomfort of its current situation. It goes through pain and it becomes vulnerable so that later on it could grow.
The Rabbi adds that if lobsters had doctors, they would get a prescription and never grow into a bigger, better version of themselves — they would simply suppress the pain and live with it.
“…we have to realise that times of stress are…
