I’ve been recently talking about stress with some friends. It usually revolves around handling stressful events, and how to bear stress in everyday life. Stress when badly handled kills you. Literally. And if it does not kill you, it greatly hurts your life.

Stress arises when you feel under attack. It’s an instinctive response from your body to preserve you when a Lion is running behind you to cut you into pieces for example. Of course, we don’t have the same problems that our ancestors. At least I don’t. Our issues revolve more around our modern lifestyle, work, money, etc.

Problems with stress surface when stressful situations are repetitive and your brain can’t adapt. Then comes the bad things; anxiety, tiredness, irritability, less focus, less productivity, and all the garbage you want to avoid. People do not have the same response to such attacks. We’re not equal in front of mother nature and we must deal with it. That’s life. We’re capped by our brain’s ability to overcome those situations and our DNA. But we can train it to be better!

If it’s reasonable, we become used to a certain stress level over time. Imagine that you’re facing the same problem every day for the rest of your life. The first time you might be stressed as fuck. But after a few times, your prefrontal cortex will tell your hypothalamus, that the situation is ok. Stress is controlled and lasts for a short duration. This means that you could, in a way, train your brain like a muscle. You can see stressful events not as a threat but more like a training. I noticed that when starting Morpho. Some events were stressful; meeting deadlines, handling issues, HR, etc. The more we go, the more we get used to it and the less we’re stressed.

One major issue is that people tend to overlook and anticipate everything; a diploma, job, or whatever will decide for their entire life. In practice, 99% of what we are stressed about is just complete crap. A meeting won’t kill you, an interview won’t kill you, and planning your holidays won’t kill you either. Things happen and it’s fine. After the fact, a little voice tells you “It was not such a big deal after all”.

So what can you do to limit stress?

• Practice sport. Humans are not designed to sit staring at screens or to stand for hours. Humans have been designed to MOVE. So move your body; walk, run, shoot in a ball. Stress comes a lot from a lack of self-confidence. Sport has been the best remedy for me to gain self-confidence; this is the first solution I would recommend to everyone. The more confident you become the less stressed you are.

• See your friends or family. Humans are social creatures we are not (yet) robots. Avoid loneliness. Interactions on social media are not valid. Remote working is cool but working with humans is healthier.

• Take a moment for yourself. Really. Take time to think about things, what you love, and what you want to do. This is very important to know what you like or dislike. Avoid spending half of your life doing things in an automated mode. Do as most as possible what you’re passionate about. Work will almost never feel like work when doing so.

• Is something looping in your mind? Write it, put it in a to-do list, in your calendar, on your hand or whatever is best for you. Just remove it from your mind. Ask yourself if you know someone who was killed by that. If not, then that shouldn’t be a big thing (99.99% of the things will fall into that category yes).

• Avoid stressful situations. You have something urgent to do; Why do you need to do it first? Would it have changed your life a lot if you’d removed it? If not, remove it. Write a list of all the things that you do in a week. Enumerate the stressful ones, the ones that can be entirely removed, and the ones that you can externalize. Then, do it. Remove. Externalize. Breath.

• Do stressful things first. If you can’t avoid a stressful situation, do it before everything. It will be hard but after you’ll feel relief. If you have many annoying things to do you can bundle them on Monday for instance. Kick your ass. Tackle them. You’ll thank yourself for offloading your mind for the rest of the week.

• Don’t bear the stress of others. You’ve enough to worry about your problem and your mind already. You don’t need to add others’ problems to yours. Of course, you need to care about your boy/girlfriend or your children but don’t be the go-to recipient of others’ problems. That can feel egoistic, but it’s not. If you’re less stressed you’ll be better at helping your close friends when they face an issue. Someone who’s stressed is not helpful, it’s counterproductive.

• Tell your brain that you’re training him. See it like a game. Learn from the process, progress, and improve. Personally, I’m trying to trick my brain into thinking that the next stressful thing is cool because I’ll learn from the experience and better manage its next occurrence.

• Sleep. Try to sleep enough. Avoid screens before going to bed. On my side, as I work every night I try to have at least 30 minutes during which I read or discuss with my GF before sleeping. It helps a lot to release pressure.

The things above might not work for you. I’m not a personal development or coaching guru either. You’ll notice that I did not mention meditation for instance. This is because I realized that 30min of sports was way more effective for me than the same meditation time. Try things, experiment. If cooking while listening to classical music is what appeases you then go for it. Find your stuff. But please give a try to some of the points I’ve written.