It’s a scary fact that chronic stress is considered one of the leading causes of major disease.
Contrary to the airbrushed and edited curations of Instagram influencers, life and work can be messy. Best laid plans can be brought down in seconds when life throws a curveball your way.
Comparing your insides to other people’s outsides can lead to some profoundly unpleasant psychological discomforts. As well as FOMO (fear of missing out), these can also include dissatisfaction, frustration and perceptions of inability—all categorised as deficiencies of the self. They are all types of suffering that stem from a non-physical origin. The bad news is that they are also widely believed to be an inescapable aspect of being human.
While physical pain is often localised and frequently explainable through injury or disease, psychological discomfort is harder to define and describe. It includes a range of subjective experiences, which are all characterised by an awareness of negative changes in the self and functions accompanied by negative feelings.
Psychological discomfort appears ingrained within the human condition but changing our mindset to stress is one way of turning a negative experience into useful lessons. This can help us to build a sense of resilience and even wisdom for when life throws you the next lemon.
I’ve previously written that we make memories from the good days, but we can also flip the experience of a bad day on its head and reflect on the learning that we’ve gained from it. You can read more about eustress, a positive perception which can help us to use stress as something that can be beneficial to us.
The Optimist view…
Finding the meaning or reason behind a stressful situation and gaining a motivation or lesson from it isn’t easy, but it does provide a pathway that can help you move forward and push past those feelings of discomfort.
An “attitude of gratitude” remains the mantra I live by and is still something I am cultivating. It will always be a work in progress, and I’m comfortable knowing that it’ll never be perfect.
- This article originally appeared here.