Let’s talk about stress

Some people are blessed with infinite mental capacity and a body that never tires. I always thought that I was such a person. I wasn’t. I treated my work as a sprint. As far as I can remember, I have always worked like that. I would get sudden jolts of motivation, set new targets and run after the targets so fast that I would burn out. In the end, I would either fail my targets or do a very shabby job. With each failure, I would put more pressure on myself and the number of failures just kept on increasing.

In the past 3 years, I have improved so much. I am much better at target setting and lately target completion but there is something that I am constantly at a fight with and that’s STRESS. For a long time, I focused on stress only when I was in a burnout, taking temporary remedies to just soothe the pain. I was completely ignoring what has been causing this stress. My fight against stress was a lost cause.

I am well now. I am not under stress now or at least under very little stress. These burnouts forced me to think more deeply about it and I just couldn’t keep on ignoring them. I realized that the following things caused me stress. All by themselve they are not really that harmful but combine them all you have a strong concoction for stress. The reasons were:

• My unhealthy lifestyle: I used to drink and smoke a lot. They might seem like stress-relieving activities but they are not. You just get numb and ignore the problem for some time.
• My habit of forcing myself to achieve my objectives: To move out of my ‘addictive’ unhealthy lifestyle I used deliberative mental force on myself. Good intentions and feelings are not enough to get one out of addictions. You have to force yourself to be in that unpleasant state. For the first time in my life, I was getting results at something so I thought that forcing yourself is the only way to achieve your targets.
• Always being in a hurry and inability to stop: When I started putting more force on myself I would end up forcing myself too much. I thought that that’s how people work, by forcing themselves to be in this uncomfortable state. To add to it, I did too much of it. I used this mental pressure to do everything. I would force myself to control my addictions, to get unimportant work done, to have a good routine, to put in more hours, etc. I had this persona of always being a hurry. I lacked the patience and wisdom of knowing when to stop.
• Bad sleep: This is a big one. I just ignored my sleep. I bought into the zeitgeist that you don’t need sleep. I had unrealistic expectations for myself. For me, every waking moment had to utilized in the best way, I always had to be in control and I assumed that my mind will always be in good condition. So, I never allowed my brain to relax. I was driving like a madman with his foot on the gas pedal all the time and not stopping to refuel. So I didn’t go far and always end up crashing.
• I wasn’t ready to be a different person: I didn’t trust myself enough to let go and try different things. I had so much conviction in ‘Whatever I am thinking is right’ that I thought there is no other way and forced myself endlessly. I was afraid to enter these other states of mind(suggestions from your mind) which you have never tried before. Like stopping yourself from watching a very interesting video just to get more sleep. Or stopping yourself before starting something to ask is there anything else better and exciting that I can do? Once I started making those leaps of faith and moving into uncharted territory, I felt much better.

Stress is different for each person. There is no go-to solution for it. Meditation and yoga may lower it for you but at the core of stress is your persona. Our unconscious behaviors set the stage for stress as much as the external environment. You have to change from the inside to have an effective and long-lasting solution. Stress is a silent dream killer and I assume that everyone has to face it at one or the other point in life.

I was lucky enough that I was randomly reading a 12th class psychology textbook and I was shocked to see that I had all the symptoms of stress. From that point on, I worked a lot on myself. Though all this came at the cost of not doing work at full potential but I realized that it’s important to set the foundations right before raising a building.

I am still learning about stress. After every major burnout, I discovered something important that I was oblivious to and thought that burnouts won’t come again. But they sure did. I guess its a life long learning process. The key is to not lose hope when that next burnout comes. Be in the fight, don’t quit.

I talk more about stress in this video and a few strategies that help coming out of burnouts: