Perception of Stress

There isn’t much in life you individually have complete control over. Your reactions, your attitude, and your effort level are three of the main fundamental pillars for what you specifically own. Life is also seemingly entirely made up of how your mind interprets what happens. Your perception of the world around you shapes how you feel about your life and everything happening. Your mind is what controls almost everything in your life.

Stress is felt by everyone. Stress is built into our biology from times when humans had to fight daily to survive. Living today, our lives are much easier. With food to eat and a roof over your head, you aren’t constantly stressed out about the act of surviving. Even without this constant physical fear, your mind has not evolved to remove the feeling of stress from your life. Stress will be in your life but how you use stress will determine if stress rules your life or if you use stress to rule your life. Remember, your mind and your perception is the great equalizer in your life.

A study by Stanford psychologist Alia Crum shows how a human’s perception of stress will mold their response. In the study, test subjects were split into two groups. One group watched videos that displayed stress as harmful such as causing illness or making mistakes at work. The other group watched videos displaying stress as a positive stimulus leading to enhanced performance, increasing disease immunity, and opening doors of creativity. The group who were shown that stress was negative felt the negative effects of stress and the group who were shown positive effects, felt the benefits of stress. How you interpret the stress around you matters. If you view it as debilitating and a reason for failure, that is what you will experience. If you view it as a positive charge to your system to stimulate growth, that is the direction you will go.

Viewing stress through a positive lens helps you to control your stress instead of letting it control you. As you learn to control your stress, you become its master. If something in your life is causing you angst, periods of calmness and self-reflection can help you determine the cause and then identify possible solutions. If you let yourself succumb to the pressure of the stress, you will continue to spiral and no solutions will be found. Attacking stress with a stoic mentality of understanding and calmness lets you unlock answers you otherwise would have skipped over. Stress will happen. Accept its realness and respond with controlled actions rooted in understanding and calmness. It’s your life, you are still in control—not the stress.