3 Ways Good Stress Helped Me Become More Resilient

Action creates good stress and thinking about action creates overwhelm, anxiety, and things we want to curb.

When I was 12 years old, I barely cleared my final exam in 8th grade, but I was happy I cleared it. By the way, I was pretty good at Table Tennis — my focus was to play Under 14 nationals that year.

But my father had other ideas about this subject. While collecting my marksheet from the school, my father noticed I was happy scoring 74% marks, and scolded me. He told me, “I don’t see an ounce of shame on your face.”

To be honest, I was damn scared of him and to get rid of his scolding, which could easily turn into a slap or two, I had to show some “stress,” some “tension” on my face.

This was the first time when I was fueled with the conditioning that if you’re pursuing something, you need to be stressed.

That’s the way to pursue something.

Utter B.S.!!!

Also, my pursuit and what my father wanted me to pursue were two different things — but that’s an article for another time.

“You can’t change the word, but reframing what it means can change the impact it has on your life.”

Vertical lines used to appear on my forehead whenever I heard “Stress.”

Not anymore! Stress has multiple meanings for me — resilience, strength, grit, growth and so much more but not stress in a conventional sense.

Letting Go of Complacency

Whenever I hear the word complacent, I see an image — an image of me lying on a blue couch all day, with a pizza box in front of me, a half-eaten pizza peeping out of the side of the box and an ant playing with that thick cheese leaking out of its crust.

If that’s not visual enough evidence, let me just say it — I have been there.

And it’s boring as hell, even though I invited, envied, and desired it before getting there.

The human mind is designed for pursuit, it’s designed to get challenged and if you don’t consciously give it what it's designed for, your subconscious will create challenges to pursue.

And when your thoughts begin to play the challenge game — that’s the beginning of your eventual downfall.

We need to understand this about ourselves and humanity as a whole — we were born out of pain, we grew and evolved out of our need for survival and we won.

The paradox is that our survival is not at stake anymore, but our primal brains don’t understand it.

And so, it creates an image of a problem so big in front of our eyes which threatens our survival — especially, when we don’t have a good enough purpose in our lives.

At that moment, when I saw the ant playing or maybe it was licking the molten cheese bursting out of the crust of a half-eaten pizza, I instantly spiraled into a momentary depression and began to question my existence.

I walked into my bedroom and looked at myself in the mirror and figured that I was overweight, the length of my hair was longer than I preferred, and I looked older than my age.

That moment was a good enough trigger to change the way I was living my life, so I decided to take a shower and while the lukewarm sprinkles were hitting my head, I made a plan to workout, eat healthy, and design my days better.

That worked out for a month and then I was back into the complacency wagon sitting next to the driver’s seat because of course, the subconscious mind drives the complacency wagon — making us feel like someone’s driving us and we might feel comfortable in the moment but the truth is that the subconscious mind doesn’t have a robust navigation system, so we’ll never know where we’ll end up.

But I knew I could get back to the ideal lifestyle whenever I wanted. And it just takes a moment to snap into it.

It’s a choice, and once you do it, you realize that it’s not the switch that’s the tough part but to maintain that lifestyle — that’s the real challenge.

Letting Go of a Mundane Existence

Routine is like waking up every single day and preparing yourself to run on a hamster wheel and expecting to reach somewhere. In other words, it’s insanity.

While breaking the routine has its ebbs and flows.

Nine years back, I left my job and got into the big back world of filmmaking as a freelancer, expecting to figure this out on the go.

Might have been a great mindset — seems like that even now.

But I wasn’t ready.

The intermittent ups and predictable lows taught me something that can’t be learned unless you take the journey.

Bad stress played a massive role during the lows and almost became an unwanted habit.

When I was on a shoot, I was stressed that if I got this wrong, I might not get an opportunity to work again and when I was looking for work, there was bad stress of being constantly rejected which kept leaking into the times when I was working.

It was only when I distanced myself from filmmaking and Mumbai, that I was finally able to see things for what they were.

Other people were working there.

They were trying to figure out stuff, they were hustling, and I was complaining — never got tired of it and at the end of every single day, got tired of it.

And I give all the credit to the bad stress that was clouding my mindset.

The cloud was so thick, that I never gave it a much-needed thought that possibly I just had to make a small yet vital shift into reframing what this stress meant to me.

The reality of stress is your perception of it.

“If you think this stress is harming you, you are right. If you think that this stress is helping you grow, you are right.”

For me, this stress was harming me, and so I was harming myself and the people around me.

When you let go of a mundane existence, you have to be ready to walk on a path that is less traveled or not even made yet. You might have to build the path while you walk on it.

But if you keep looking at the highways as you pick up the bricks, it’s not gonna help quite a lot and eventually going to tire you.

Good Stress Means Growth

Picture this.

You have never taken good care of your health and you prepare yourself mentally to go to the gym for the next six months — three times every single week.

For the first few days, your muscles will be sore and it will hurt. This pain is because of the stress, because of the discomfort which is caused due to the new external practice you have invited in your life.

Most people lose the long game here because they don’t want to go past it. They don’t want to feel that pain in their muscles which they feel during the first week.

That’s how good stress works — for the first week, month, sometimes, a couple of months — there’s going to be incremental pain.

And then, there’s going to be incremental gain. But a lot of us give up while going through the pain and so there’s no gain to experience.

Only if someone could go into the future and show us what’s waiting for us, we achieve anything we put our minds into. But life doesn’t work that way.

And that’s where the true test of mindset comes into existence.

It’s not about the results, it was never about them — they are just the shiny objects that we blindly chase, just the sensation of dopamine that keeps us going — the real result is in the by-product of the process — something that would surprise us towards the end.

Imagine you continue going to the gym for six months — the weights that troubled you in the first week would feel like a cakewalk now.

If you stay late in bed, you will start to miss the cardio which makes you tired in the first week.

“Just like an unhealthy lifestyle, a healthy lifestyle is an addiction too — one that makes you wonder how could you live any other way.”

A healthy life is not a life without stress, it’s a life filled with good stress — a stress that helps you grow beyond measure.

Last

Once you apply this reframe to one aspect of your life — you’ll be surprised to see how it seeps into other areas of your life and that’s what I call building resilience.

My father taught me how to live with bad stress because life and society conditioned him into believing so.

But life taught me other lessons and now I know how to use stress to my advantage rather than allowing it to make me miserable.

I want to make one thing very clear here — I’m not complaining that society and my family made me go through so much.

There’s a life lesson hidden here.

The times that our previous generations have lived in, and the ones we’re living in are very different in ways we can’t even comprehend.

So many things are available to us at the tip of our hands which took months for our previous generations, sometimes, their entire lifetimes to figure out.

Rather than blaming our parents or playing the victim cards, it’s only fair that we learn to mend these patterns and break the chain of these ridiculous habits and lifestyles.

If we don’t, do our lives even have a meaning beyond earning money and killing ourselves with every passing breath while doing so?

Until next time,

Ciao!

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