Don’t minimize stress. Optimize stress
There is something to learn from negative feelings
Sometimes small annoyances turn me into a raging, roaring bear in the split of a second. Let’s say I’m trying to hang a towel on its hook, but the towel slips off as soon as I let go of it. Little things like that can make me want to bite down on the hook and tear it out of the wall with my teeth.
I love when that happens. It means I have been fed up with something long enough to take action.
Often times I don’t even realize how annoyed I have been with something before I finally snap. That’s when I fix things. I sew a loop onto the towel or go out and find a new hook.
That’s the beautiful thing about stress. It makes us change the things we’re unhappy with. Big and small.
Sustaining stress for longer periods of time is obviously unhealthy, but our fight or flight response is what keeping us alive when a grizzly bear comes running towards us.
“The fact that stress is a negative feeling is part of the reason it works”. — Professor of Psychology Angela Duckworth
According to Angela Duckworth, we should look to optimize our response to stress. It comes down to mindset. If we think about stress as enhancing to our lives we start looking for learnings in situations where we feel stress. Those learnings allow us to implement strategies to change. When we know what’s making us unhappy we know what to work on.
