Are you feeling stressed? If so, please know you’re not remotely alone. We all inevitably have stress in our lives, and we need to manage stress in healthy ways while also staying productive.
I recently spoke with Los Angeles resident and business owner Daria Tsvenger. Daria is a mindset coach and has also studied cognitive neuroscience at Stanford University. Daria has a unique program called The Dream Sprint, a personal growth challenge that people gain clarity and pursue their dreams. Here are some highlights of our conversation about stress and what you can do about it.
The Problem With Stress
Stress is a state in our bodies. In a medical or biological context stress is a physical, mental, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension. Stresses can be external (from the environment, psychological, or social situations) or internal (illness, or from a medical procedure). It’s a primal response that occurs in our brain whenever we face some kind of change. If the changes are sudden, our stress levels rise higher. Our brain wants things to stay the same; stress is the brain’s response to change. Thankfully there is a healthy way to handle stress.
How To Handle Stress
Resilience is the best way to handle stress. And resilience is like a muscle in your body. When you train a muscle, you do the same activity over and over. So the next time you do the same activity, it is easier for you to do because your muscles are trained. The same concept applies to your mind. The more we process change, the more we develop resilience.
Moving Past Mental Blocks
We all face mental blocks, things that stop us from doing the things we want to accomplish.
And it might not even be the same challenge that stops us. Daria recommends the “big perspective exercise” where you take into account how long your life actually is.
On average, a human being’s life expectancy is around 80 years, which comes to about 4,000 weeks. Once you are able to realize how many weeks you’ve already been alive, and approximately how many more weeks you have to live, you’ll likely start to see that your time is limited. You know you don’t want to waste your time. This creates urgency and allows you to move past any challenges so you can take action.
Becoming More Confident
Many people struggle with confidence. But what is confidence, really? Daria says that confidence is when you’re able to keep the promises that you made to yourself. Every time you break a promise to yourself, you inevitably become less confident. So the best thing we can do to move forward is to set micro goals. Instead of creating a traditional goal that is larger in scale, you can create a micro goal that is something you want to accomplish over the next hour, day, or week. Micro goals add up and enable us to keep our promises to ourselves. As you keep accomplishing those micro goals, you will start to see momentum in your life.
Next Steps
Wherever you are today, I want to challenge you to take the next small step that will lead you to where you want to go. It is always a great idea to get some support and accountability as you move forward. We all need support and encouragement. Once you have those, you also have hope. And hope is a very powerful thing. Thanks so much to Daria for her great insights on stress.
I want to encourage you to keep taking intentional small steps as you are on your journey.