STRESS

I am obsessed with stress. Why? Because it is brilliant!

At the beginning of my workshops I often ask people what stress is and the answers are nearly always the same…

Stress is something we’ve accepted as inherently negative, and it can be if we don’t understand it and manage it well. But if you take control of it, well then stress can be your best mate.

WE NEED STRESS TO ADAPT AND GROW.

Training in the gym is one of my favourite ways to explain this theory. Say you want Michelle Obama’s arms (because who wouldn’t?!), well then you’re going to need to lift weights, and when you’re lifting weights you’re stressing your muscles. It’s that stress that helps them grow and become stronger. Yes, if you go too far, lift too much too soon, you can cause an injury, but used smartly you’ll see gains.

The principle is the same when it comes to everything else in life. Stress is how we grow. To pass an exam you know you’ll need to endure the stress of learning. To get a promotion at work you know you’ll need to endure the stress of a more challenging workload. However, even when we know these things the idea of stress can be daunting. We ENDURE stress, and we don’t always manage it very well.

GOOD STRESS, BAD STRESS

Stress is neither good nor bad, it’s just a state of being. What matters is how we respond to the effect it has on us.

A great example is animals in the wild. The hunter and the hunted both experience the same physiological symptoms during a chase, but for the hunter it’s positive (they’re getting dinner!) and negative for the hunted (erm they’re going to be dinner). It’s fight and flight in action, and if a lion burst into the room right now you’d want to experience that stress because it would motivate you to GET THE HELL OUT. However, although that’s not likely to happen in your day to day life your body doesn’t know that and responds to all stress in the same way, unless you have strategies in place to not just manage that stress but thrive with it - in other words become the hunter.

STRESS, REST AND AWARENESS

We don’t have unlimited capacity for stress, and if you’re not getting enough rest you’re not going to have much energy and you might find that your tolerance for challenging situations goes down. This is why rest is essential. Think about animals, when Loki is outside running around he’s panting, his heart rate is up and he’s in a physiological state of stress. When he gets home he crashes out, recovers and then gets up to do it all again. He understands that after a stressful situation he needs to rest. Humans are not so good at this because we tend to have lots of noise around us (outside noise) that basically tells us rest is for pussies, so we’re not always aware of what our bodies need (inside view).

I don’t want to delve into this too deep in this post - this is just the first of a series and I’ll be coving rest and awareness in more detail soon - but it’s important to mention it because this equation is at the heart of everything I do as a coach - understanding stress, creating awareness and building strategies to get the rest you need.