Self-preservation and Unnecessary Stress

How does unnecessary stress look like? It comes in many shapes and sizes like any candy that is bad for you. It may be:

• overthinking due to too much time spent on social media

• less time with yourself

• resolving conflicts that are not yours (at work for example)

• pressure you put on yourself when you shouldn’t

• keeping toxic people in your life

• not shutting up when you are angry and ending up hurting yourself and people around

• accepting people (or you) telling you that you are not good enough

• restricting yourself from what you like, saying you don’t deserve them

• creating paranoid scenarios for the future

• thinking about what people think or say about you

• procrastinating and feeling bad about it

• keeping grudges for a long time towards people you love

• eating unhealthy and complaining that you don’t have energy

• trying to impress people instead of being comfortable about who you are

• and many, many other examples…………….

I am not saying that we should try to be perfect and do everything right; as you know by now that’s basically impossible. I am just saying that there is the stress that can enable growth and stress that destroys what you already have. For example – if I want to be a professional dancer my stress is how to get there, how to evolve, what sacrifices to make, how much it will cost? This will ultimately pay off the moment I will become a professional dancer and it will bring countless lessons with them. If I am stressed because of destructive behavior that will ultimately teach me not to be destructive that on some level I already knew, that is really unnecessary. I can just say: smoking is destructive and not do it. By smoking you are actually saying to yourself: I know this is unnecessary but I don’t value you enough to quit, I am too weak, I don’t care it will hurt you-it feels good now, and so on.

I learned the notion of self-preservation at a later stage in my life after a lot of shit started falling down (how can we learn otherwise?). I learned that self-preservation is:

• the ability to allocated the right amount of time and energy to certain topics, people, moments of your life;

• the ability to keep your mental state safe from unnecessary stress

• the ability to know your worth even in hard times, or when you make a mistake

I see self-preservation as a detached attitude towards external things that can cause you harm and no benefit in the long term. The idea is that “as long as I am here to protect myself, I am safe. I am who I am, good and bad, without hurting people around me and without additional explanations. I am the only person that can judge if my mood or my day is ruined. I am the only person that can dictate how to react. I am kind to myself every day. This enables me to be kind to other people around me also. Bad things change me only to the extend I let them change me. I am preserving the peace in my heart and mind every day, day-by-day”.