Making the Essential Enjoyable & Easy
Making Monday
I've heard it said that how we feel on Mondays is one of the clearest indicators of life satisfaction. Here is a quick thought on how to make Monday—and every day—work better...
Optimal Stress
Stress gets a bad rap, widely thought of as something to avoid or eliminate.
When I led personal development workshops for a big company, we would go around the room and share what we were looking to get from our time together.
“Less stress” was the most consistent refrain.
That's problematic because there is no possibility of growth without stress.
Growth—be it physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual—is the activity of developing resources in response to a stimulus.
The stimulus is anything that challenges the capacity of current resources and abilities.
In other words, the stimulus is a stressor to our system.
The main variable that determines whether stress is stimulating or damaging is dosage.
There's a concept from toxicology that helps illustrate this fine line: hormesis.
When an organism receives small doses of a toxin, it can evolve an adaptive response, becoming stronger and more resistant to the toxin. Hormesis is the term for this adaptation.
Small, intentional doses of a toxin that would injure or kill in higher doses thus leads to growth, adaptation, and greater resilience.
Exercise is an example outside the toxicology world.
We overload the capacity of muscles just enough to require the muscle to grow back bigger and stronger. We create micro-damage that the muscle “over repairs,” leading to greater strength.
If we overload too much, we tear the muscle, exhaust our nervous system, create a traumatic experience, and otherwise induce misery, effectively side-lining ourselves.
But just the right amount—going to a failure point without injury—sets the conditions for the muscle to grow, given adequate rest and nutrition before the next challenge.
I'll repeat that part: given adequate rest and nutrition.
We don't grow muscles at the gym. We minutely damage them. The growth happens in the 48 to 72 hours after, mostly while sleeping.
Having a growth orientation involves seeking and creating situations that induce the optimal stress failure points that create hormesis.
Followed by adequate rest and recovery.
Moving toward things that scare and challenge us creates resiliency that generalizes and accelerates life change in all areas.
Together, let's end the fight to change—
Delmar
