Stress: it has positive facets!
Probably, the sensations when hearing the term stress are not the most pleasant.
Most people consider stress to be bad by definition. A multitude of articles, reviews and books talk about this concept, emphasizing its nature, its causes, and some tips to deal with it. It is closely related to Burnout Syndrome. Of course, the social construct of the concept appeals to a completely undesirable condition, although hardly inevitable in our time.
Despite everything, stress is not inherently bad. Evolutionary Psychology believes that, in ancient times, stress helped us escape and survive other predatory species. Nowadays, stress helps us live. It is no longer necessary for us to escape from predators, but we do experience situations in which we require the stressful phenomenon. The important thing is to know it well and not trust all the bad press it has.
Let’s see some ways to take advantage of and benefit from stress.
1. Discover your own body
Decipher your emotions through your body. As an example, when you feel that your muscles are stiff, it may be a sign that the situation is worrying you and making you feel out of control. If you notice that your neck is tense and you can’t relax it, it may be a sign of inflexibility. If your shoulders ask for rest, it is very likely that you should listen to them and stop for a while.
Learning to listen to the signals that the body sends us can help us recognize some emotions that are responsible for your stress. Knowing these signs means being able to make them work in our favor.
2. Stress is natural: learn to use it to your advantage
Stress in response to an emergency or critical situation allows us to endure the situation, although it may sound contradictory.
Have you noticed? When you have to make a quick decision, Stress prepares your body’s responses to face danger sharpening your vision, giving you more strength and determination or giving you greater concentration to solve the problem.
It is interesting to discover which environments are most stressful for yourself. Work (see ‘Burnout Syndrome’), relationships, schedule… Your stress can help you know which areas of your life need a change.
3. The influence of context
Try to think about your main areas or thoughts that cause you stress. You may be too involved in them. It’s also possible that your expectations are too high. It is even possible that stress appears as a result of certain limiting beliefs. Stress is a clear sign that something in your life needs to change.
When you feel stressed you realize some strengths that you had never noticed before. The moment we are taken out of our comfort zone, we feel strange and lost. But staying in this uncertainty teaches us things about ourselves that we didn’t know, for example, about our tenacity. These new feelings of self-awareness increase our confidence.
Stress, however, is a source of motivation to try to find what you are made of, and a vehicle to reach your potential.
How do people behave when they are experiencing stress?
Well, as you may have already noticed, a stressed person is constantly moving. The root of this behavior in stressful situations is due to our evolutionary load. If you notice, we need to do physical exercise when we start to notice that we are getting stressed. Precisely this physical exercise, performed rigorously and aerobically, can help stress have a positive impact on your health.
The stress is not going to go away, but we can use it to improve our daily lives.
