You don’t keep tensing your muscles outside of the gym (on stress and its similarity to fitness training)

When you train at the gym, or at an outdoor park, or home, you are pushing your muscles to grow stronger, more resistant, bigger through stress. Your workout session may last about one hour at most, for most people. Once you have concluded your training bout, you don’t keep tensing your muscles. You let go. Recover. You know—even 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 client. Or manage a complicated situation in your family. Stress is a functional human tool useful in the short term. What if we thought of stress like 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.

I first heard a similar analogy about stress from neuroscientist Sam Harris. This resonated with me deeply because I noticed how we default to the status quo mindset when we do not reflect on something from the first principle. Yet, as Khe Hy would put it,* *“what if it was easy?”

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. Stress is an incredibly widespread phenomenon that is taken for granted by many societies and individuals. We may believe—even though implicitly and without further exploration—that stress is an inherent component of the human experience, especially at work. Upon deeper exploration, we may understand that does not have to be the case if we chose to.

Once you have concluded your workout session, you don’t keep tensing your muscles. You let go and move on.