EPTI think we can all agree here that stress in general is not a fun thing to have around your life.
Do you like losing hours of sleep because you are stressing about something the next day or about something that just happened?
Are you stressed about money?
Are you stressed about your social situation?
Are you stressed about getting to masters in sc2?
These 4 questions cover sleep, financials, social, and hobbies. Stress can be in all of them. If stress starts to take over too much of your life then shit that sucks. Obviously we all know how to accumulate excess stress, but how many people know how to get rid of stress?
The most common ways are relaxation techniques such as controlling your breathing rate or meditation. Ultimately they aim at giving you a sense of relaxation to replace the stress. This doesn't fix the core problem of getting rid of the stress in the first place. All it does is help balance out the stress so that it becomes manageable, BUT you can simply just get rid of the stress all together by looking at a stressful situation from a stress-free perspective. In other words, do you see the glass half empty or half full?
Let's say the glass represented a monetary goal. If you see a glass half full, you tend to think "hey I'm halfway there!". If you see the glass half empty, different thoughts come to mind such as "fuck my life I will never reach this goal".
The glass itself did not change. The only thing that changed was your perception of it. Here's the "challenging part". For any situation that might cause you unnecessary stress, CAN YOU, during the initial moment of stress, look at it in a better light? Let's take a look at laddering in sc2.
Let's say you play 10 games in a row. You win the first 3, but then end up losing the next 7. After you win your first 3 games, let's say you go get a drink of water. During this little break, you are just thinking about how invincible you seem today. You get back, and lose 7 more games. Let's say after you lose 3 games, you start to doubt your abilities and whether or not you should continue playing or not or you get really fucking pissed off and angry.
You now have a choice in what your mindset is going to be in your next 4 games (worst case scenario is you lose all 4). How do you want to approach the next 4 games and what mindset do you want?
It is really easy to "tilt" from here and start getting pissed off at every small mistake you make. As a result, you make more mistakes, you get angrier, and you end up playing shitty and lose all the games and at the end of all your losses, all you have to show is a hot tempered reaction to a possible learning experience
A "healthier" mindset might consist of realizing that you are not going to win every game and that losing is actually good. All the other person does when they win is that they exploit your weakness and show you where you need to improve so you don't lose like that again. That way, after you lose 4 more games, it just feels good because you know you learned new shit which makes you a better player in the long run.
In both mindsets, you end up with the same results, but the difference in the two mindsets creates two completely different ways at looking at the same thing (glass half empty or half full).
Now which one, the one where you get pissed and lose games or the one where you feel like you learned something from losing games, are you going to have less stress from?
+ Show Spoiler +
probably the 2nd one...
This laddering scenario is just one example of reducing stress in a certain area of life. This can be applied to every other area in life......in other words by thinking in a more "stress-free mindset", you can eliminate stress simply with a different perspective!
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