We spend a lot of time and effort trying to overcome stress. In doing this, it’s helpful to acknowledge your stress in the first place. Acknowledging it can help you understand what’s most important to you, too.
You may have heard that stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It can actually be good for you. As Stanford psychologist and researcher Kelly McGonigal says in her TED talk on stress:
How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress. When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. And when you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience.
Really, overcoming stress is about learning to control it, not just make it go away. Research supports this. In an article at Harvard Business Review, researchers discuss a study they conducted in which people who viewed stress as “enhancing” had a better cortisol response to it and were more willing to ask for feedback. Here’s what they recommend doing to take control of your stress:
The key to “owning” your stress is to recognize that we tend to stress more, and more intensely, about things that matter to us. Stress shows us that we care; that the stakes matter. Owning this realization unleashes positive motivation—because deep down we know that things that are important shouldn’t always come easy.
This is helpful when it comes to creating long-term goals and deciding where to focus your energy. Of course, not every stressor is going to be important; sometimes you get mildly stressed over having to wait at a red light. But if you find that you’re frequently highly stressed about your family, for example, you might conclude that having a healthy relationship with them is important to you.
That gives you a better understanding of where to focus your effort and priorities. It also helps turn the stress into something more productive: a goal.
Learning how to manage stress and our emotions in general is a great sign of maturity. But life never ceases to be a mystery; it’s when we are settled and confident in ourselves the most that we encounter the most challenging experiences of life that seem to be beyond what we, in our individual capacity, can bear or manage.
Many are the options the world offers in order to overcome stress and the many challenges of life, but today, we’d like to share with you a simple truth about a loving God, Whose great desire is to walk with you and see you make it through your deepest hurts and challenges, and come out of those experiences stronger and wiser. If you’d like to know more, click on the banner below.