Stress is not concentration.

Relaxation is not slacking.

 

Stress, biologically, is an organism’s response to a challenge.

To put it simply — it quite simply makes you more suited for the challenge. It makes you smarter, faster and stronger. A lovely thing.

Only — what is a challenge?

Is life a challenge?

I like to think running away from an angry tiger is a challenge. Or hunting for mammoths.

Or mating. Given the vitality of the issue.

I don’t think staying alive is such a challenge. Not when you’re not running away from tigers, anyway.

You were never meant to be stressed all the time.

It makes sense for the chronic stress to be unhealthy. Because it is simply not natural.

But somehow the mankind became quite a perverted version of it’s own self. Very unnatural. Very confused. Consequently — very unhappy.

Modernity is a walk in a park, really. No tigers to run away from. Just your nagging boss.

I imagine it got all twisted, and your boss is the tiger now, and you are running away every single day. In your mind, anyway.

 

Chronic stress is a perversion. Stressing up is sickness.

This society is fucking neurotic. Running around like a hoard of mad dogs, barking and biting. Your parents were running around and now you are running around.

More more more and more. The “more syndrome”. You want more so you do more so you stress more. Ultimately you don’t even do more. You only stress more. You get so confused that you confuse the means to an end with the end. And then you confuse the symptoms of the means to an end with an end.

You basically become addicted to your stupid stress.

Human being have this uncanny ability to getting addicted to their frequent psychological states. It has something to do with identity. We really care about our identity, our nation, our name, even though it’s a complete illusion.

You keep whining how stressed you are in your pursuit of success, so much so that you become addicted to that identity.

Now you’re not merely miserable.

You are also stupid.

 

See, one problem with chronic stress is that it makes you stupid.

It makes you see things.

It makes you paranoid.

It also exhausts your organism. It literally ruins your engine. You will not get to the “finish line” if your fucking engine breaks halfway through. Stress is fucking stupid.

STRESS IS NOT FOCUS.

Get it out of your head when you still can.

Just because you worry more doesn’t mean you care more. Just because you worry more doesn’t mean you do more. You do what you do. You care what you care about. Your chronic stress is just an illness. It doesn’t make your life and your doings any more important.

 

Then,

RELAXATION is NOT SLACKING!

Get it out of your head yesterday.

You can be as relaxed as it gets — and STILL get everything done.

Actually — you will get SO MUCH MORE DONE when you’re relaxed.

Realise this — you were meant to be relaxed.

Unless you’re running away from a tiger — you were meant to be relaxed.

You were meant to relax in your cave, mate, and perhaps depict your adventures on the cave wall.

You were relaxed and creative.

Apparently – one is more creative in a relaxed state. It has to do with the ALPHA WAVES of the brain. It is also linked to happiness.

 

This is deep. On many levels.

I don’t know if you ever noticed how creative you are intellectually while strolling. I imagine one of the reasons is the relaxed state.

I don’t know if you ever noticed how stifled you are when stressed out. Remember having to make a public speech or having an exam? Your stress can make you stupid. It can make you forget what you have learnt. Stress too much and you are ill-equipped.

Now this goes deeper. If you continuously force yourself to doing certain things, and if it accompanied by stress — you will develop a very strange kind of coping mechanism, in which you escape the pain of the chronic stress by procrastination and stimulation. You think procrastination is a problem with your lack of discipline. Not at all. Procrastination is a sign of your confusion. No wonder you avoid doing something which you “should be doing”. You created tremendous amounts of pressure around it, and the more you procrastinate – the more pressure is mounting up. It’s a vicious circle.

On the other hand — when you are relaxed — TREMENDOUS AMOUNTS OF ENERGY ARE BEING RELEASED. When you are at last not squandering it on disciplining yourself and combating inner resistance — there’s so much energy left you can work all days. Only it’s no longer “work”.

 

Take it in — THE MORE RELAXED YOU ARE — THE MORE CREATIVE AND THE MORE EFFECTIVE.

And that is only of secondary importance!

See, this tension, this stress — it will make you sick, it will make you miserable, and then it will KILL YOU.

Perhaps you view it as a trade off for some imagined “success”.

It is not a trade off. Because stress makes you less effective. It’s a fact.

Really — I recommend DOING NOTHING the whole days.

If you’re a typical hard-worker of the XXI century — let it all go and just do NOTHING for some time.

You are probably so deep into the machine that you lost all touch with your true calling. You are probably complete addicted to stress too.

Unless an action springs out of nothingness — it is always corrupted by some imagined result. This result limits you. And it imposes on you. Thus it stresses you.

I say — don’t stress. Not now and not in general.

But I say more then that, I say — DO NOTHING.

Reduce all the stress to zero. Reduce all the redundancies to zero.

Only from nothingness can you be reborn.

This is the ultimate meaning of the stressless, the relaxed, the PEACEFUL.

And it springs from the nothingness.