Repost - you don’t keep tensing your muscles (stress analogy)

When you train at the gym, an outdoor park, or home, you push your muscles to grow stronger, more resistant, and bigger through stress (mechanical tension). Your workout session may last about one hour or so. Once you have concluded your training bout, you don’t keep tensing your muscles (besides for a few moments in case you are a competitor practicing bodybuilding poses). You let go. Recover. You know—implicitly—that your time to put muscles under stress has passed. And you move on to other activities/inactivities.

Why not do the same with *stress *in life? You experience stress in some specific situations of the day, maybe due to a work-related endeavor where you need to stretch your capabilities. Or deal with a challenging interaction. Or manage a complicated situation in your family. Stress is a functional human tool useful in the short term. What if you thought of stress as muscular stress? Once the stress-inducing situation is gone, you do not keep tensing your stress muscles. You let go. Move on with conviction and focus. Relax. Surrender to the flow of life.

Reframing the way we perceive and think affects our mindset. The way we think often influences the way we feel, and vice versa, in a vicious cycle. There is a mindset around stress that is considered effective at improving one’s life condition and sense of joy in the daily experience. That is the stress-is-enhancing mindset, a real belief that short-term stressors contribute to making you more resilient and capable of living life fully, regardless of how many metaphorical ups and downs you witness.

To start internalizing the stress-is-enhancing mindset, you may associate life with a workout session, and consider that once you have concluded your workout session, you don’t keep tensing your muscles. You let go and move on.