Rage to Resilience
Using commonly stressful environments to train stress management and resilience.
What upsets people is not the things themselves but their judgment about things.
-Epictetus
I write a lot about the benefit of intentionally causing stress to train resilience.
I also write on stress management strategies and their ability to effectively disrupt the stress response and encourage rational thinking until eventual recovery.
Intentional stress is awesome, and stress management is vital. There are, however, limitations to both strategies.
Practice with complete control over your stressors has many pros but there are also a few restrictions. In self-created adversity, we can fully expect when the stress response will begin and have plenty of ways to modify or discontinue the challenge when needed.
Fantastic training, unrealistic conditions.
Stress management is crucial for effectively responding to life’s inevitable stressors. Unfortunately, life and stressors are quite complex and having a reliable stress management toolkit for every circumstance is impossible. No matter how resilient or prepared one may be, life always has something up its sleeve to throw us off course.
If you’re consciously responding to stress, you’re late.
Intentional stress is excellent for proactively conditioning resilience.
Stress management systems are imperative for early intervention reactively.
Training Reactivity Proactively
The man who has anticipated the coming of troubles takes away their power when they arrive.
-Seneca
A way to combine intentional stress and stress management is to identify common environments in your life that produce distress. Knowing you’re about to enter a perceptually stressful environment allows for preparation of appropriate strategies for that circumstance combined with the uncertainty of if/when a stressor will arise.
Intentional training in an uncontrollable domain.
Options could be aspects of your job like working with a challenging individual or undesirable tasking. Certain social situations or being solely responsible for taking care of the kids for a period of time can also work.
For the longest time, my answer was simply being behind the wheel of my car.
