To accept the positive stress

If we start from the premise that “life is a wonderful thing but it could also turn into hell if one is not careful,” then it quickly becomes clear why stress, in turn, can be equally wonderful or fatal. It is the difficult situations that drive people to work hard to overcome them and achieve the results they set out to achieve. Let’s think about the first date with a girl or a guy, how I felt, was he/she quiet, no for sure. Was one thinking will he come or won’t she come, will I be clumsy? It is only by putting yourself in that stressful situation that you were able to experience that feeling of uncertainty and then pleasure.

It is from challenges that the response or positive stress arises. By challenges one should not only mean the extreme ones of Olympic champions or those related to one’s professional accomplishment, both of which require long-term work to acquire and continuously improve skills.

Challenge is also more than that. Even seemingly simple challenges, such as finding time during the week to do something you enjoy (a walk, meeting with friends). In this case, the challenge is to do something you enjoy, for the sake of doing it, to achieve immediate goals, to feel pleasure or to have fun. In this sense, leisure outside of work is one of the best predictors of well-being, and enjoyment positively influences couple relationships and social life, which are also key indices of well-being.

What it’s proposed, then, it’s to develop an active lifestyle, synonymous with a life not only crushed by professional and family duties but in which there is room for activities that promote pleasure and satisfaction. It is an invitation to people to prefer experiences to passivity brought about by comforts (“Why should I go out, toil, when I can be so comfortable on the couch and be on social”), to do rather than to have (“But if I buy myself that electronic devise that makes me lose weight while sitting, why should I go on a diet and go to the gym?”).

These ideas are not new!!! Benjamin Franklin, an 18th-century scientist and politician, argued that teaching a young man to shave and keep his razor sharp would contribute far more to his happiness than giving him 1,000 guineas to squander. Money would have left only remorse. Whereas knowing how to shave frees a man from the barber’s harassment, his sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths and unsharp razors.