The Real Reason Why You're Stressed At Work
Stress is like the wind. Or at least it ought to be.
When a breeze blows by, you don't try to do anything with it, do you?
How about a big gust of wind? You feel it, and your body might be temporarily affected by it, but you don't feel the need to change the wind, right? You just let it go as quickly as it came.
But somehow when stress shows up at our doorstep, we feel the need to do something with it. We push, pull, and fight with it in all kinds of ways. Nowadays, we manage our stress right alongside our finances. Some even wear stress as a badge of honor.
Not me. At least not anymore.
All my life I've been stressed. Stressed about school, sports, friends, money, work. Virtually everything. Then I woke up and realized that I'm causing stress, not life.
Stress comes from our resistance to the natural unfolding of events around us.
Think of resistance as an inability to accept that something has happened.
The natural energies of life flow in a certain direction. If we participate in that dance of energy, there's no stress. But if we resist the natural flow of life, that creates stress.
The formula is very simple: something happens on the outside; we can't handle it on the inside, so we resist it. Oftentimes, we resist our own resistance. That is, we get stressed about being stressed.
In physics, in order to measure stress on a particular structure, engineers oppose a force against it. This force is akin to our resistance on reality. Without it, there's no stress, because nothing in isolation has stress.
Your job doesn't cause you stress. Your resistance to it does.
The moment you realize that you're doing the stress, not life, then you're back in control.
Rather than just experiencing the temporary discomfort of any given moment, we push it back down with our willpower.
Let's say a certain coworker comes to you with a request (we all know this scenario, right?). On the outside, we smile politely, but on the inside, there's a storm brewing.