The theme for today is the top 5 things you should know to overcome adversity.
Adversity in life brings us many benefits. When we are in the midst of adversity, we may feel anxiety, pressure, and stress. While these feelings are generally considered negative, if we can overcome them, they can add value to our lives.
In fact, our strength as humans is often demonstrated by how we overcome adversity, and if we can find meaning in difficult situations, life can become easier. Even if we fail or anticipate more difficulties in the future, we can persevere if we believe that we can grow from the experience or that there are benefits to our lives.
Therefore, in reality, learning how to overcome adversity is much more important for improving the quality of our lives than simply being successful.
With that in mind, today I want to introduce five things you should know in order to overcome adversity, in a ranking format. These are based on a concept called “positive stress mindset,” which is the idea that changing our mindset towards stress can lead to many benefits.
So, how can we gain the strength to overcome adversity from anxiety, pressure, and stress? Here are the top 5 things you should know:
5. Be aware of the adrenaline rush
When humans are faced with unpredictable situations, our brains may go into panic mode and release more adrenaline than usual. Interestingly, this stress-induced adrenaline gives us a certain level of discomfort, but at the same time, it creates a great deal of energy and motivation.
For example, when someone says something frustrating, you may feel the urge to retaliate and prove yourself at work. You can imagine how irritation can motivate you in such cases. This is actually the effect of adrenaline. So, when you are exposed to stress, anxiety, or pressure, instead of wanting to escape from the discomfort, try to think of it as a sign that your brain is releasing adrenaline to give you energy.
By doing so, you can manage your frustration and increase your productivity.
4. Increased Happiness
It is known that we feel a great sense of happiness when we experience a moderate and optimal level of stress. What this means is that most people don’t feel much joy from living a lazy and laid-back lifestyle, but instead feel a great sense of joy when they overcome a job that is challenging for them, succeed in a challenging business endeavor, gain knowledge through studying, or obtain qualifications, skills, or expertise. In other words, the greatest joy for us is what we feel after overcoming stress. It is also known that if a person is in a stress-free state for a long period of time, they may tend to become depressed or develop anxiety disorders.
Therefore, by seeking a certain level of stress, let’s think that we can become extremely happy by overcoming it and seeing it as a sign of growth. Please remember that we feel the most joy not when we obtain something, but rather when we overcome something.
3. Improved Intelligence
People who have experienced a lot of hardship tend to have better use of their brains. Adversity that causes stress is something that cannot be overcome without a lot of effort and ingenuity. And those efforts and ingenuity will repay you by making you smarter.
It is known that appropriate stress can improve our cognitive abilities, or what we call our ability to think quickly. That is, it improves memory and concentration.
Have you ever seen an elderly person around you, who was a business owner, or someone who held a position of responsibility, who was able to maintain clear and solid thinking even in old age, compared to other elderly people of the same age who developed dementia?
When you feel stressed, try to think positively, saying to yourself that you are experiencing appropriate stress, and that you are training to improve your brain’s agility, and that you will be able to solve problems that you previously couldn’t.
2.The fatigue will decrease
Some people might think that stress cannot reduce fatigue, but it turns out that it can. There is research showing that people who have a positive stress mindset, that is, those who believe that stress has benefits, have higher motivation in the morning, exhibit more planning skills in their work, have better daily rhythms, and experience reduced fatigue before going to bed.
Discovering the benefits of stress and realizing that stress actually gives us strength not only increases motivation, but also reduces the risk of carrying over tiredness to the next day, and increases our ability to take action and productivity.
1.Clear understanding of what needs to be done
There are many people who run away from stress or immediately quit their job when they encounter unpleasant things at work. Of course, if the workplace is really unbearable, they should leave, but some people choose to quit their job at the slightest hint of stress.
The benefits of facing stress rather than making such choices include gaining a clear understanding of what needs to be done, and deepening one’s self-awareness, to put it a bit more professionally.
We experience stress when we face our weaknesses, knowledge gaps, or lack of experience. Conversely, situations that cause stress tell us where we need improvement, or that obtaining a certain skill will make our world better.
For example, let’s say you forgot to contact several clients last time and got scolded, and now you are feeling stressed because you have been given a lot of contact work again. This situation reveals that you are not good at remembering multiple things, and if you take measures such as creating a table to keep track of completed tasks and checking them off, you can improve in an area where you are weak.
Or let’s say your boss invited you to a party, but you are not good at talking to strangers and can’t dance at all, and you feel stressed about it. This situation tells you that your brain thinks that you would be happier if you had the skills to talk to people and dance well, so why not train yourself to improve those areas?
I think that sometimes we feel stressed and depressed because we have an ideal image of ourselves, such as performing work perfectly or communicating and dancing flawlessly, and we focus only on the stress caused by the gap between that ideal and reality.
However, stress can also teach us what we need to be the person we want to be, even if we are not aware of it.
I hope everyone can cope with stress well and become a better version of themselves by overcoming adversity.
