Anti-Stress Panda
The way someone deals with stress, is a great indicator of what kind of a human being he is intrinsically.
Human beings are masters of faking things, from faking a smile, to faking drama, to faking orgasms, we have even gone to the extent of faking relationships. However, our mechanism is such that in certain moments, faking isn’t possible at all. The moments in which we are in grief or when under high level stress, we are unable to fake our personality. In the book, Fault In Our Stars, the writer says, “Grief does not change us, it reveals us.” I believe the same to be true for stress too. Stress does not change us, it just reveals us.
Why is it that when faced with adversity, we are unable to fake a positive personality or for that matter, a calm one? I contemplated on it, and realised that since the time duration of responding becomes so less in stressful situations, we hardly get the time to come up with a proper response, let alone the best one. Different people come up with different mechanisms, but most people when things don’t go their way, become agitated, anxious, and isolated. Not the best response, I’d say. Some people however have better coping mechanisms, and they try to use humour to zone out of the stress for a while. Better response mechanism, I’d say. Some others, who have a greater zen like aura, become calmer than usual in stress. They use all the logic and pragmatism and focus on the controllables. A combination of the last two options could make the best possible scenario to deal with adversities.
What most of us fail to understand is that in order to get the best solution to our problems, we need to have a certain part of our mind relaxed, if not all of it. While some amount of negative stress can be used constructively to deal with difficulties, yet the application part of it should be done in a calm way. When we give our mind more pressure than required, it gets confused and agitated. In that case, anyway, it cannot come up with the best solution because the body gets largely involved in dealing with the high pressure we subject it to, rather than working on any other challenge.
Getting isolated from the world when you are undergoing through stress also almost never helps. As human beings, we have the inherent to need to socialise. Cut off from our friends and family, we make our mind go through an unseen kind of stress and unhappiness. Subjected to this level of happiness, we cannot be as productive as we are when we socialise. I am not saying socialising all day and night is the right way, but some extent of it is important to maintain your sanity. While isolation to some extent can help in coping and is important too, but prolonged isolation can have a damaging impact on your social, and mental skills of dealing with society.
If you look at all the successful people, they always say one thing, that at the end of the day, you need to be at peace with yourself. To get that peace, you must hustle, work hard, but is not possible to work hard with a smile? Is it not possible to go about the day without feeling the world on your shoulders? A wise man once told me, “Chinta aur Chita me bas ek Bindi ka farq hai, dono kaafi ek jaisi hai. To chintan karo, chinta nahi.” (Pressure and Pyre are almost the same thing. Don’t pressurise your brain, just pragmatise it.) Next time, when you feel like sulking when faced with a challenge, try smiling, relaxing and then coming out with a solution. Swati Sachdeva’s Instagram bio says, “You can’t start a fire by worrying about your little world falling apart.” Use this theory and work.
Waiting for your responses on how you deal with stress at sdhivanidubey@gmail.com
