The Most Important Tools To Deal With Stress in 2021

Stress is like a rock in the shoe that, no matter how often you wiggle your foot, is still piercing the most painful spot on your foot as you walk. We all deal with it or at least have it. Coping with stress was one of the hardest things I had to conquer. I was horrible at dealing with it. The smallest things in the world would throw my cortisol levels straight through the roof of my skull. Today let’s dive into everything I have learned about stress and how to better deal with it.

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Firstly, stress is caused by an external event that is interrupted by your mind. We all deal with “stressful” situations, but the stress aspect is in our total control. I break stress into two different categories: Situational and ongoing.

On-going is just anything we normally stress about. Money, relationship, work. Things that might be really high at some points and next to nothing in others, but overall we spent the majority of our lives stressing about it. This can also be things like worrying about what other people think about you. We tend to build a tolerance for this kind of stress. You can’t shut down your whole life whenever your marriage is going through a rough patch.

Situational stress is anything temporary to the given external situation. This could be running late to a meeting or finding out your brother had a heart attack. It could also be procrastination or if you should take a job or not. These are stresses that can consume our life for a short amount of time. Often we view it as a massive life-changing situation. We drop everything, and it becomes a top priority. Usually, people undergo much more stressed in these situations. But this normally won’t last more than a few days/weeks. These situations are all temporary, and chances are you aren’t thinking about it one year down the road.

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There are rare cases of stress that are outside these two categories, but I would say that the majority of situations fall under one of the two. Now that we know where stress comes from, let’s talk about interpretation.