How to Handle Stress | The 3 Steps to “Stealing Growth”
How to maintain your inner “Peaky Peace”.
1) First way to think about stress:
If external events and the actions of other people stress you out, you’re robbing yourself of:
A calm mind.
Constant growth opportunities.
Knowledge
Physical and psychological energy.
Immense Personal Credibility.
2) Especially relevant in dealing with annoying and frustrating people.
Actually means that others, and the external world, are more in authority of your emotions than you are. That’s not good. So let’s fix that…
3) Understand two things: that your mind overcomplicates things, called “complexity bias”, and understand that everybody on the planet’s clueless.
In any given situation, we know that we don’t know everything, so then we stress about what will happen if we don’t figure out what those things are and therefore solve the problem.
But the situation’s only a problem, because you’ve decided that there’s things that you don’t know, and that this lack of knowledge is bad.
And now you’re stressed. It’s ironic.
Basically, things are only problems because you make them a problem.
So learn to be calm. I do yoga every second day and focus on connecting with myself. In my breaks between working, I also do things that uphold my values of connection. If you haven’t seen this one video I did recently on “work-life balance”, these are Value Activities, and that’s one specific way that I constantly train my mind to be mindful, calm and connected to the world around me.
These sorts of things are substantially effective at turning you into the kind of calm individual who remains mostly indifferent, or even internally giggles at the stressful events that happen around them, and at the annoying people that they need to deal with.
In regards to dealing with annoying or frustrating people, doing these calm things will help you calm down when you begin to feel stressed (diaphragmatic breathing), allow the Understanding of Cluelessness come into your mind, and help with our next point… accountability.
But yeah, we can see from the fact that problems arise because we don’t know stuff, while we also don’t know if that stuff even exists, human beings are absolutely clueless.
So if you can be slightly LESS clueless than other people by simplifying as many areas of your life as possible, and by learning to be calm, which go together, then you’ll be miles ahead of most people.
4) Means that you’re not taking accountability (not for fault, but for this opportunity to be calm and to learn).
Way to think about accountability:
If you stress out over the actions of other people or of stressful experiences, you’re not observing people, the nature of a situation or even observing yourself.
This ultimately robs you of growth in every circumstance imaginable.
If you want to learn from others mistakes or to progress quickly in life, you must understand the idea of observe, analyse, reflect.
And this lack of accountability gives away your energy and both directly (not taking responsibility to learn something from a stressful person or circumstance) and indirectly (less energy means that you’re a less productive individual and less of your authentic self) robs you of growth.
5) So, learn to remain indifferent to frustrating people and stressful circumstances, because stress gives your energy away
You could’ve focused it on yourself.
So stress with people requires boundaries. How to reduce energy given and set boundaries?
Learn to be honest. Don’t sugarcoat things when it comes to the boundaries that you want to set.
Here’s a Reconditioning Sentence for that, that you can repeat every morning or something, or before you go out to a social event probably.
“I’m so glad that I feel no urge to drop my personal boundaries and give in to when people ask for my time or my energy. Unfortunately, many people seem to say that they want to stop giving so much of themselves to others, but then they stretch their private boundaries or start people-pleasing again, as soon as someone wants or needs something from them. Good luck to them. Now, time for the day”.
Find your purpose and get determined. Once you’ve got a passionate direction to move in, you’re less likely to be bothered enough to give unnecessary energy to others.
Verbally tell your family and romantic partner first, and then more physically just start demonstrating them around your close friends and then to other people.
People often find it hard to set boundaries, so here’s how to look at setting boundaries:
By setting a boundary, you’re giving the other person(s) an opportunity to be respectful, and are reinforcing confidence in yourself. Plus, more importantly, I’d say, you’re giving more value to your word, which declared your boundary to begin with. Valuable word means that when you use things like Reconditioning Sentences in order to make beneficial habits desirable, and non-beneficial ones completely un-desirable, your mind believes it more.
Because by setting boundaries and then abiding by them, you’re demonstrating that your words MEAN something, and that you’re the kind of person who stands their fucken ground.
The world is literally energy, everything is made up on energy. People will survive without you needing to uplift them yourself or to offer your own time and energy. Give as much as you can, but be in tune with your body to know when you’ve reached your balance of giving, rather than keeping energy for your own wellbeing.
That’s it!
If you wanna learn more stuff, literally every single week, about becoming a more calm and collected individual who can deal with pretty much all stressors, join the Peaky Pines Email Community!
With people from all cultures, backgrounds and experiences, we chat daily and even run weekly calls to discuss everything related to becoming a new kind of person, and to thriving off of the obstacles that we may face in life.
Talk soon,
Riley.