No Stress, No Progress!
This is how I use stress to fuel my creativity and get into productive writing.
Can you remember a bad day at work?
Oh, I can! Tons of them…
It feels like my brain will explode. Just like in the movies.
But I know, that…
Stress is a good thing.
No, seriously!
But how?
Remember the fight-flight response? Stress is what makes you jump out of the street when you see a car coming right at you at the speed of light. It’s what keeps you safe.
So what’s the problem?
One thing:
- Balance
Most of us know what to do to keep balance, but we don’t do it enough or at all.
But if you don’t maintain balance, bad things start happening: burnout, infections, sickness, etc.
It’s not stress that drives us into unhealthy conditions. It’s the lack of balance.
Think of your car: you can’t drive at 200mph all the time. You need to slow down from time to time, otherwise the car will start falling apart…It’s the same with our bodies.
How to know if you’re stressed?
Oh, don’t worry, you won’t know.
It’s physical.
And unconscious.
Eating is stress. Exercising is also stress. Facing a new challenge is stress. Learning is stress. Writing is stress. Reading is stress. It happens when you do whatever you do in your awake state.
Everything that makes you focus is stress.
Our brains operate in beta brain waves when we’re highly focused (and stressed) and in alpha brain waves when we restore energy and recreate. Alpha is the state of the brain right before you fall asleep. Beta is when you’re fully awake and alert.
Test yourself: In alpha, you can defocus your eyes. In beta, you can’t. So try to defocus your eyes. You must start seeing blurry. Something like this:
If you can keep that for at least 5 seconds, your stress levels are low.
If you can’t that’s ok! You just need to de-stress after you finish what you’re doing.
So, what to do?
Balance comes from a simple process:
- After you’re stressed, you have to de-stress.
- For as long as you’ve been stressed.
- And as often as you get stressed.
In short: stress is depleting energy and you have to restore it. That’s all you need for balance.
Let’s go back to the car: The destination is your goal, the car is your means, and the fuel is your energy.
You wanna get to your destination. But you need fuel, right? So you drive, you’re running out of fuel, then you refill and go on. Eventually, you’re there.
See? You refill the same amount of fuel you’ll need to burn to get to your destination. Simple as that!
Why is balance so difficult?
There are two main types of stress:
- Negative
- Positive
You have two types of hormones (besides cortisol) that come during stress:
- adrenaline — When you face a threat. Can cause fear, anger and rage. Main emotion is negative, you aim to survive or preserve yourself. This type of stress leads to desctruction.
- noradrenaline — When you face a challenge. Can cause euphoria and happiness. Main emotion is positive, you have trust and confidence. This type of stress leads to progress. This is also the type of stress you have in the flow mode of writing.
Both require de-stress. There’s no “healthy level of stress”. There’s resilience — how much you can bear. To be able to “bear” more, you need to de-stress more.
Think of your emotions. Are they negative or positive? When you eat, read, learn, or even have sex they’re positive. When you fight or argue they’re negative.
Balance is difficult mostly because you accumulate a lot of negative stress. You can’t start meditating if your brain is racing like hell.
You need a transition to de-stress. And this transition is positive stress.
How I de-stress?
I do the following:
- Positive Stress
- De-stress
- Repeat
What’s my positive stress?
I read!
Right after reading, I think, ideate, plan, strategize. All of those require focus, but I truly enjoy it.
Other forms of lighter positive stress I use: laugh, do some sports, meet some people, sing (badly), play with my dog some meaningless games.
Then I de-stress: sleep, meditate, do fasting, simply relax and do nothing. I use Mindvalley for meditation and mindfulness.
And in the meantime, guess what?
I get tons of ideas for new topics to write about. I draft them on Medium and when I need to write, I simply choose a draft.
This story is one of those drafts.
See? No stress, no progress 😜
This is how I use stress to fuel my creativity and get into productive writing.
Thanks for reading!
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