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How To Cope With Stress
Short-term techniques and long-term foundations
Life is stressful. This is not necessarily a bad thing because biological organisms require a certain amount of stress in order to function adequately. In the natural world, stress is a common factor throughout life and therefore evolution has equipped creatures to cope with a certain amount. When stress is removed, we don’t function properly. It’s the same with challenges to our immune system: when our environment presents too few challenges, we develop auto-immune diseases such as allergies and sensitivities. Likewise with exercise: when we don’t get enough, our internal self-regulation mechanisms go awry.
But just as too little stress can be harmful, too much stress can also be damaging. Now that we no longer need to worry about securing shelter, hunting, foraging for food, or evading predators, we no longer have the primary stressors we are evolved to handle. Today, by way of compensation, we can artificially induce a certain amount of necessary stress in our lives by, for example, learning a new language or by enhancing our ability to perform complex mathematical operations. In fact, trying to acquire any new skill will probably induce a little stress in most adults because of the inevitable failures that occur during the learning process. Therefore by pushing ourselves past our current level…
