Life can go by easy, day by day, when we live stress-free. We all know the things that stress us, the things that work us up and create this unforgetting tension in the stomach region. So because we want to live stress-free, we avoid it all as much as possible.
Just the very thought of encountering a stressful situation can evoke strong reactions despite knowing we're only imagining it. Me visualizing, for example, failing my job interview can be enough for me to avoid pursuing that job. The capacity of what I was able to imagine ended up being a greater judge of reality than my own experience of it—the job is failed before I have even done the interview.
Or, fearing I could fail the job interview, I might chase perfection. An idea, a vision of what an exceedingly perfect job interview looks like appears in my head. I put everything into the preparation, and I rehearse it dozens of times. I set myself up for perfection and nothing less; being criticized is not an option in my eyes.
Irregardless of what we visualize and what we do about it, reality unfolds before us. In the case of avoiding an interview, I clearly don't have a job.
In the case of taking it, there is no guarantee of getting the job or not. A very possible outcome is that, no matter how perfect I thought the interview went, the employer didn't think I was qualified.
Whether or not we feel perfectly ready to take action, for a new change in our lives, it can't promise that we get what we want, the way we want it. A quote I heard summarizes this idea well, "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." Hoping that something works out, and it doesn't, tends to be the greatest form of stress in our lives.
And since we all know that stress is bad, the only possible solution to live stress-free is to just avoid anything that could bring risk or change, right?
In theory, it sounds okay, but in practice, how would we avoid all of it? Life is full of change, full of opportunities, and full of things that catch us off-guard. And if we have spent so much time avoiding stress, we have nothing to deal with it when we do face it. Our fragile outline of a stress-free life we tried so hard to entertain falls and crashes into a million pieces, and we're left staring at it all wondering, how do we pick up all the pieces?
What we are able to do after a stressful event, depends on how our body is physiologically. It's not just a matter of "will" or how strong you are, because these things are directly influenced by if you have the biological resources to repair yourself and keep your regenerative processes going. Any form of stress will increase the need for nutrients and minerals, and a failure to obtain them will make even slight stress seem like the end of the world—simply because malnutrition will skyrocket the physiological burden on the body, which will manifest as psychological stress in the mind.
When we give our body what it needs to keep it in good health, and increase our intake of minerals and nutrients (potassium, magnesium, Vitamins C&Bs, etc.) when we are dealing with stress, we get the energy we need to pick up the pieces, to keep moving forward, and quicker than you might expect. We don't have to be afraid of reality, because we know we have the energy and capacity to deal with it, even when we fail.
When our body doesn't have the biological resources to deal with the burden of failure, we struggle a lot more and a lot longer than we need to. Our body doesn't have the energy for us to overcome. Some pieces get swept under the rug because it's easier to keep our failures hidden with us than to try, fail, and break again. We keep that image with ourselves to remind us that we'll fail again, and in doing so, we lose contact with reality—that we could try and succeed.
Thank you for reading my first blog, I hope you enjoyed and maybe took something that resonated with you. I plan to cover this topic again, with more information on the nutrition aspect, so stay tuned.