Transform Your Life With This One Simple Stress Management Hack
Not all stress is bad stress. We need some stress in life to grow. We also can’t get rid of all the bad stress, but we can learn to manage it.
My life’s approach has been about finding solutions to all my problems. It’s been to control each outcome and make things certain. I thought this approach would help me to reduce my present stress and also eliminate or control my future stress.
It hasn’t helped. Instead it only made me more anxious and stressed out.
Why trying to manage stress makes us more stressed out? It’s like the solution is itself the problem.
There are of course various techniques to tackle and manage stress but there’s this one idea that I found particularly helpful.
And it is that we are doing too much!
To explain this, I’ll have to use an example from a book called Hyperfocus. It’s about the flow of traffic.
What allows traffic to flow smoothly?
It’s not how fast the cars are moving, but rather how much space exists between the cars.
That’s it. We need more space.
Just like machines – If your computer or smartphone storage is full, you start to run into issues. What’s happening to your device? It’s under stress. It’s literally out of capacity to process new stuff.
The same thing happens to us humans. We need some free space, some mental capacity to handle the stuff in our life.
You might say that everything on your plate is important to you but that’s not exactly true. Your priorities would change immediately if you were sick.
Therefore the idea is to identify your capacity, your threshold, the size of your plate. And then do your very best to never exceed this capacity unless absolutely necessary.
The temptation to do more is always going to be there but you have to remember that it will have the exact opposite effect.
The key is to do less, as doing less allows you to have the mental capacity to do it well.
