STRESS

 

When anyone takes on a challenge, they are literally inviting stress into their lives—on purpose!. Games are stressful. So is learning the piano or raising a family. These things can have huge rewards. There's a relationship between how much stress your constitution, or psychic musculature can "handle" and how deeply or completely you enter into certain challenges. It's always a balancing act. 

 

Our brains may say we should be running the 100k marathon, but our temperament may be such that, physiologically and emotionally, we are just not cut out for it - no shame in that. We may have a gentle, sensitive nature and be the "wrong" gender, trying to fulfill a societal role set up for us that simply does not jibe with our deeper nature. There's that "good stress" feeling called excitement when you're doing just what you want to do, and want to run and run and run; and there's that "bad stress" experience when you feel like you're in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, forcing your square-peg self into endless round holes...

 

Much of it may boil down to NOT doing what you can't do, and DOING what you can do—strange but true. Counseling can help us gain practical new skills as well as course-corrective insight concerning where we are and where we might want/need to be.  TB