One Thought

The most difficult challenges are those that I feel deeply in my gut. They make me nervous; they give me butterflies; they make my mind race; they bring my insecurities to life. They make me want to run away.

I can’t let them do that.

Doing something completely new is stressful. That’s unavoidable. Our minds adapt to doing things a certain ways and perceiving the world in certain lights. Extreme novelty challenges them, forcing them to adapt. This challenge can be painful; a mind at rest wants to stay at rest, and it can take extreme measures to ensure that it does. Stress is the mind’s reaction to novelty, the mind’s pulling back into itself.

However the stress of new challenges need not be bad. Stress can be good–it can be invigorating; it can be energizing. There are good and bad aspects to stress; the difficulty is in eliminating the bad and retaining to good. Stress at its ugliest forces us back into the darkness of comfort and away from the light of new experience. Stress at its most beautiful energizes us, gives us creativity, gives us passion, gives us excitement, makes us feel alive, gives our lives purpose and meaning.

A life without stress is a life unlived. We remember the stressful times in our lives the most, the times that we pushed ourselves the hardest and accomplished the most. It’s in these times that we are living the fullest, and it’s these times that make us the happiest. The downtime between stressful experiences serves to calm us.  Downtime is just as necessary as stess, but it’s an antidote to stress, not an alternative. We must have both stress and downtime, and we must recognize when our lives have become full of downtime–when we are running on auto-pilot–and do something to stop that. We must learn to appreciate stress for what it gives us.

The experience of stress need not be negative. What makes a stressful experience unpleasant? Mostly the thoughts and emotions that run through our minds. We think negative thoughts, which produce negative emotions, which cause us to think worse thoughts, which produce worse emotions, and so on. Our minds enter a hellish cycle.

However, it’s possible to stop this cycle before it starts. The solution is not to avoid thinking about what we find stressful–it’s important to reflect on our thoughts, and it’s probably impossible to shut off our minds completely anyway. We can’t control our emotions directly, but we can control our thoughts and our actions, and both of these can influence our emotions. Thus, we must avoid thinking negative thoughts. We can transmute negative thoughts into positive ones, or we can simply shut off negative thoughts. Sometimes I do the latter simply by thinking “No!” when I feel a negative thought coming. Surprisingly, this actually works quite well.

I find that my mind will spontaneously produce both negative and positive thoughts when I am feeling stressed. The positive thoughts are great–they make me feel better and give me confidence. The negative thoughts, however, can destroy any confidence I’ve gained (and then some) if I let them enter my mind. Because emotions cannot be controlled directly, it’s necessary to alter my thoughts or actions when I feel negative emotions coming. If I begin to experience a negative emotion, I must think a positive thought or take a positive action–simply smiling, for instance, can do the trick. Positive thoughts and actions are usually quite effective at replacing negative emotions with positive ones.

Stress is unavoidable, but it need not be unpleasant. If I find a stressful experience unpleasant, that only means that I haven’t yet mastered the art of neutralizing its negatives.