How to make stress a friend

It’s been six months. I crushed it with no hitch but without being goody-goody either. The past weeks in my new job was not a walk in the park. If truth be told, this was the most stressful six months of my entire career life! But as I go on with this new chapter, I am finding other ways on how to make stress a friend.

When I was in college, I lived in an exclusive dormitory inside the University and my body had no standard sleep routine. We had a definite schedule on eating, studying, socializing, praying, and sleeping. But since it is a shared community and I was away from home, I always had to fight homesickness at night and found it hard to sleep easily.

It was only after graduation that I felt its effect and I had a difficult fight against insomnia. It took me four loooong years to finally train my body to sleep and wake at a consistent time.

My body finally knew when it’s time to hit the sack without trying too hard until my new work asked me to report from 2 PM to 12 AM. The new company that I work for offers solutions and services to global clients, thus employees are required to adjust according to the client’s or our counterpart’s time zone.

I really had no choice but to give what is being asked of me. While it is true that I did not have to face the Manila traffic arduously, there is something ungodly about sleeping at 2 AM, waking up at 10 AM, and eating lunch at 4 PM. My body was once again in disarray. Almost everything would always stress me out, and just thinking that I was stressed again and I might get sick from being stressed already made me stressed. So much stress! Lol.

Since my schedule is already stressful as it is, I had to find ways how to make stress a friend for me to get by.

Stress is wicked in its essence, or so I thought. It turns out that it can be our friend.

This TED talk, which I came across on the internet while I was waiting for my colleague to go online, gives me a fresh perspective about stress.

“[The] pounding physical heart working so hard to give you strength and energy and when you choose to view stress in this way, you’re not just getting better at stress, you’re actually making a pretty profound statement. You’re saying that you can trust yourself to handle life’s challenges and you’re remembering that you don’t have to face them alone.”

I would often hear from wise people that in order for us to grow and improve, we should surround ourselves with people, preferably wiser than us, who will challenge our views and who will teach us to see everything in different standpoints. They are called mentors. These mentors may not necessarily someone who is close to us, they could be someone who we don’t personally know but excels in their own field. And I think I just found my own mentor on coping with stress. 🙂