Belly Button Lint

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Tag: stress

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    Cyclic waves of stress

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    1–2 minutes

    Cycles of stress present themselves as waves in which we must surf rather than be pulled under.

    Judging the swell of the peaking bundle of energetic stressors determines if they are personal, interpersonal, corporate, or global anxiety. Discernment requires a paradoxical release: holistic subjectivity is available only when you release intellectualization.

    The right brain feels and gauges, recognizing patterns, while the left focuses, which blots out the ability for meta-awareness. To cope with stressors, you must release to acknowledge the wave you must ride.

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    Overload cycles

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    1–2 minutes

    When we are content and peaceful we begin looking for an additional challenge: some tension, hopefully, constructive and growth-oriented.

    We take on the challenge and become stressed, this is when things start to break in our lives.

    How we handle ourselves during these moments is vital, because being under stress creates a narrow focus of our attention, which leans towards analytical efficiency and rationality, not towards empathy.

    Understanding and witnessing this cycle allows us to keep from overreacting, which prevents us from having to clean up a mess we made with apologies and self-recrimination. The trick is to ride the highs of overload without creating the inverse lows.

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    Our monsters bring us onboard

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    1–2 minutes

    “The monsters we create welcome us aboard.”

    Mark Downham

    Our fantasies we provoke to frighten not only become transformatively terrible, but they take us further into terror. They perform the inverse of scaring us away: they teach us to become comfortable with the monstrous, if not to be monstrous ourselves.

    The revelation is our familiarity makes our intimates, the creator lavishing attentions thrills in the creative distress.

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    Inflating into a fuck up

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    1–2 minutes

    When I fuck up, it is because I am looking for a conflict, which usually means I am looking for validation.

    I feel unsettled for a week, maybe two, and then I force something that is usually unfair.

    I like to say I don’t know what I am doing (I was an asshole by accident, immaturely acting out). But I can feel the pressure rising for weeks, pressing me down until I pop.

    The goal is to either bleed off the pressure more frequently or address the inadequacies that inflate me.

  • Theme:

    Trivial repetition as antidote

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    1–2 minutes

    Much of our life is trivial, banal, and absurd. To give it meaning, we focus on something particular and drive it forward.

    The temptation will be to do something grand: become a Mozart or Michelangelo. However, if most of life is trivial, you could choose to excel at the trivial.

    Bypassing society’s heroic values through excellently boring repetition would allow you to find an acute (and more accurate) sense of who you are in relation to the world, sans manipulation.

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    Don’t Corner Me

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    1–2 minutes

    Don’t put somebody in a corner unless you’re ready to accept the opposite of confrontation.
    Often a fight is a way to re-secure position or bid for attention, but it is such a stressful encounter that a secure person will avoid your attachment style, leaving you no one to fight with.

  • Theme:

    Easily unbalanced

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    1–2 minutes

    When you are under stress your passage narrows from a trail to a bridge, and finally into a thin line upon which you balance. On the trail you could brace, on the bridge you could wobble, but upon the tight rope a gentle breeze can topple you.

    Our resiliency is fluid, and while we may weather the wobbles gracefully your increased stress will guarantee a fall from the softest touch.

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    Your absence of rut is your rut

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    1–2 minutes

    Without being pressured, one thinks they are free from being influenced.

    However, the absence or negation of pressure creates a rut: a person who feels free freely pushes for autonomy. This is your rut.

    This person tends to end up in the arts or media, arguing for their conception of life. Yet, they are often unable to reconcile their shaped role of opposition as the archetype of an outsider who is inside.

  • Theme:

    Aggravation prompts action.

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    1–2 minutes

    When you are anxious, or under anxiety, you don’t feel profound. You just feel like you need to be speaking or doing something.

    Aggravation generates action. This is a bodily response springing from a psychological state.

    Soothe the mind to soothe the soul, and the body will follow.

    The first step, of course, is recognition, and then allow yourself to map out the stress into what you can solve and what you can’t.

  • Theme:

    no return to the simple self

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    1–2 minutes

    Once people have made several incremental and voluntary commitments, they form increasingly complex interactions with community, which is how they establish themselves as individuals.

    Dewey argues there is no going back: There is no return to the simple self.

    Any return is a simulation of simplification, and maintaining those artifical and antithetical stresses would necessarily distort any commitments, producing a “bewildered individuality.”

    The nostalgia of return is itself antithetical to the simple life, due to the stress it causes.