What if stress didn’t exist until you created it?

If you believe that stress exists, you probably do things to relieve stress: exercise, medication, meditation, alcohol, food, sex, or therapy. So, in effect, stress is draining your energy and then you are exerting more energy trying to relieve it, creating a double deficit.

What if stress didn’t exist until you created it? What if you are using stress like a thermostat, pressure release valve, or energy regulator? What if you create stress just so you can do something else to relieve it?

What if the primary benefit of stress was to maintain and sustain a habitual range?

What if you could learn to devalue your stressors and eliminate that holding of energy? And most importantly, what if all the energy you are expending worrying about stress, being stressed and relieving stress could be spent on other things, things that bring you happiness, fulfillment, and success?

So, my next question became why would I choose to be stressed? What benefit did I gain from being stressed or from the many other non-optimal decisions I made? How did it serve me to be angry, sad, fat, tense, lazy, or spacey? How did the less than stellar components of my personality play into this? How did I benefit from being sarcastic, irreverent, judgmental, domineering, dismissive, manipulative, untruthful, and unkind? I realized all these things required energy expenditures, and if I was burning energy I was less energized afterward.

Jeff in The Change MIlitia Content Layer One