Marcel Legros - Play the Game of Life

Stress is a poor, misunderstood creature. It’s vilified and treated as a mortal enemy. People want to conquer it, manage it, and escape from it. Stress management products are everywhere. Yet stress not your enemy - it’s your best friend. Stress is healthy and necessary for your growth and survival. That ugly pit in your stomach or low-level dissatisfaction you feel isn’t stress at all. That’s anxiety, not stress. The difference is more than semantic. When you look closely, stress and anxiety are not the same at all.

Why You Should Embrace Stress

Stress is the single most important feedback signal, next to pain, necessary for evolution and growth. Stress tells you that you’ve pushed just a little past your current boundaries. If you systematically overload a muscle, it will grow in size, become stronger, and faster. If you apply stress to your mind, you learn new skills and adapt to new environments. Without outside pressures, we would be weak, shallow, and extinct. The reason you mistake stress and anxiety, is because they both feel uncomfortable and usually appear at the same time. Here are two situations that are highly stressful. Which one is free from anxiety? Why?

• A single mother is down to her last five dollars. Rent is past due, pay-day is ten days away, and her two children are hungry. She just received a phone call that the phone and electricity will be cut off at the end of the month if she cannot pay the outstanding balances.
• It’s July 24th, 2005. Lance Armstrong is minutes away from winning his 7th Tour de France and can see the finish line now. Every fibre in his body aches, burns, and is screaming to stop, but he will not. The mental suffering endured on his bike after 22 days and over 3000 kilometres, and the toll taken on his body is beyond our comprehension. He’s going to win, of course, but it’s going to hurt - a lot.

Why is the first situation full of anxiety and not the second? Both are certainly painful but one is a tragedy while the other is a triumph. The answer is ‘me’.

Stress says, “This is too much pressure. You need to get stronger.”

Anxiety says, “What’s going to happen to me? I am going to suffer.”

The worst thing about anxiety is that it compounds your problems. It creates panic, fear, and intensifies your pain.

Get Out of Your Own Way and Conquer Anxiety

The next time you encounter a difficult situation, I suggest you lean into it and embrace it. Shrinking from challenge or adversity is the absolute worst thing you can do. Of course stress is uncomfortable. It can be downright painful. We all experience emotional, physical, and mental pain throughout our lives. You only have two choices:

1. Face the situation directly without worrying about ‘me’. You will suffer and you will grow.
2. Worry about ‘me’, suffer horribly anyway, and gain nothing.

I encourage you to try daily meditation to become aware of that little ‘me’ voice in your head. It’s the voice of fear, and it’s almost always wrong. Tomorrow’s post will give you a few powerful tools to deal with anxiety. Hope to see you there.