I Stress Much Less When I Remember These 3 Things

axios (62)in #life • 9 years ago

I'm a big believer in stress being something that can be very good for us as human beings.

The only way to learn and grow is to be uncomfortable and with that comes stress. If we didn't have stress, then we likely would not pay close enough attention to aspects of our reality that are important to understand.

Photo by Ryan Moreno / @ryanmoreno

When you were young, you may have touched the stove top when it was hot and burned your fingers. At that time you were unaware of the ramifications for doing this. You had an experience and that experience was stressful and painful, however it taught you something that provided immediate feedback.

You learned not to touch the stove top when it is hot through the stress of doing so.

If we are growing, typically it means we are making mistakes. The only way to truly learn something new is to navigate it in the wrong way so that we learn what the right ways are.

As we make decisions and learn from those decisions our experience becomes less stressful because we are operating with more feedback and more information, which ultimately required the passing of some time.

I believe that time impacts us a lot more than we imagine. How we perceive time can and does have a huge impact on how we cope with the changing nature of experience.

We can deal with significant stressors in our life by reconceptualizing how we perceive our relationship with space and time by remembering these three things:

1. Failure Is Part of the Process

One major thing that we really forget, especially when we are starting something new such as a business endeavor or a new project, is that there is an incredible influx of information that we are dealing with.

This means that we are far more likely to make mistakes because we have an insufficient grasp on the material at hand. It's easy to spend months on an endeavor, then look back and judge yourself for the decisions you have made.

The fact is that you made the best decisions that you could with the knowledge that you had. If you are at a place where you are judging yourself, it is likely because you have grown to a point where you now realize the mistakes that you made in the past.

This realization in itself means you have grown and are different person because of it.

Remember that it's the mistakes and failures that get us to where we need to be.

2. It's Okay To Take A Break

Sometimes life just gets overwhelming and there are times when we really beat ourselves up for that. Frustrations can set in and really begin to affect our perception and how we operate.

It's during these times when we start to making decisions that we likely would not have made had we had a clear mind. These are the times where it's truly important to recognize that taking a break is an okay thing to do.

Action is not always the answer even though it's the most tangible thing that we have available to us. Sometimes you just need to slow down to speed up and when you do that you give yourself space to pick a different perspective.

This typically leads to a new approach which, oftentimes, looks a lot different than the one we were considering taking when we were experiencing overwhelming or frustrating emotions.

Take a breather, reorient yourself, and then step back into it. You'll be glad you did.

3. Things Take Time

If you live in the US (or most first world countries) then you are quite familiar with the concept of immediate gratification. For many of us, the process of consuming products or entertainment has evolved tremendously and it's easy to get used to experiencing immediate feedback, results, or rewards.

It can be easy to get caught up in trying to rush things and make things happen. There's nothing wrong with being proactive and it's a very great characteristic to embody, but if we always operate this way, we're going to lose ourselves in the process.

Looking at something like Bitcoin, it took years and years to gain any sort of visibility. As with cryptocurrency, anything that is truly great and truly something that will last is usually something that will also take time.

In order for a plant to grow it must take the time to break out of its shell, move through the dirt, and rise up through the ground. It’s a definite process.

It is our unrealistic expectations of time that produce and sustain a variety of stressors in our lives. When we flip our expectations and expect things to take time, it becomes much easier to appreciate the little things, which ultimately serve as a remedy to stress.

In the end, these points involve our relationship to time itself. Time has a huge impact on how we perceive reality and it also impacts how we live our life. If we become slaves to time and let time control us, we will typically feel out of control and chaotic on a frequent basis.

However if we begin to realize that there are natural ups and downs to life, that there are times when things will move slow and times when things will move fast, and that the overall process is a long haul, then we will begin to find true peace and fulfillment in our lives.

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