In order to become smarter, stronger, and faster, your mind and body must be put through and recover from stress.
Avoiding stress altogether, therefore, is a mistake.
The right kind of stress is your friend and your ally.
Stress without purpose, however, is a problem.
Stress for stress’s sake is not helpful to you.
It wears you down and uses up the physical and mental resources you need for other things.
While unwanted stress cannot be avoided altogether, you should do your best to limit its impact on your life.
Interestingly, the best way to make your mind and body more resilient against unavoidable, unwanted stress that breaks you down is through regular and deliberate exposure to and recovery from the kinds of stress that builds you up.
Instead of avoiding stress, then, pursue it, but pursue the right kind of stress so that you will be able to handle unwanted stress when it inevitably comes your way.
Stress is energy directed inward that would be more usefully directed toward that which we want to accomplish, achieve, or affect.
This does not mean that we should displace our stress outwardly.
Stress directed outwardly tends to manifest as anger, frustration, and all other forms of counterproductive negativity.
By the time we feel stressed, we have already mismanaged, misguided, and misdirected the external forces acting on us such that they are now acting against us.
We need to learn how to effectively deal with the forces coming at us that cause us to feel stressed before they become stress.
This means we must learn how to better manage ourselves, our space, and our priorities in a way that does not allow external forces to negatively affect us.
This requires integrity, flexibility, and focus.
When we feel stressed by the goings on in our lives, before simply accepting that life is stressful or thinking the world must change in order to accommodate our mental-emotional needs, it would be far more productive to look at ourselves and where we are lacking in one of these three ways.
Holistic Budo: As it is in budo, so too it is in life. As it is in life, so too it is in budo.
Robert Van Valkenburgh is co-founder of Taikyoku Mind & Bodyand Kogen Dojo where he teaches Taikyoku Budo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
All photos by Robert Van Valkenburgh unless otherwise noted.
Simply because we get used to something does not mean it is good for us.
Humans are amazingly resilient and adaptable creatures with a great capacity to work through stress and pain as long as we feel like we are making progress because of it. This survival mechanism can be extremely useful when we need it for some specific task, but, like every tool at our disposal, it is not intended to be a one-size-fits-all solution for every aspect of our lives. Simply put, we are not meant to push though every difficult, stressful, and painful thing we experience just because we can.
Stress and pain are our mind and body’s way of telling us something is not right, of telling us to slow down or not to do something. They are indicators that what we trying to do, if we do it in this way for a long enough period of time, could cause us injury or even death. Undertaken for good reason, under the right conditions, and with proper precautions, however, working through stress and pain can actually make us stronger, healthier, and more resilient, but only so long as these periods of work are bookended by a proper amount physical and mental rest, recovery, and nutrition.
Without reprieve, stress and pain over long durations actually make us weaker, more fragile, and vulnerable. While we may come to not notice it, if we experience the same stresses and the same pains constantly, day in and day out, we put ourselves in a position to be blindsided by other physical, psychological, and emotional dangers because we have become unhealthily desensitized to their warning signs. It is actually in the space between, in the periods of physical and mental rest, recovery, and nourishment, that we heal and grow.
Holistic Budo: As it is in budo, so too it is in life. As it is in life, so too it is in budo.
Robert Van Valkenburgh is co-founder of Taikyoku Mind & Bodyand Kogen Dojo where he teaches Taikyoku Budo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
All photos by Robert Van Valkenburgh unless otherwise noted.
With everything going on, with the drastic schedule change, and the abrupt halt put on my day-to-day ‘hustle’ (hipster entrepreneur speak for not being able to prioritize and focus on what is essential), I have had to reduce my coffee intake.
Kogen Dojo Coffee Cup by The Joyful Clay in Severna Park, MD
A few days at home made me realize that I was ‘running hot’ everyday with the amount of coffee I was drinking, but I was doing too many things to notice.
I am now drinking about 1/3 as much coffee and, when I need a midday pick-me-up, I drink some green tea to get me over the hump.
Slowing down has revealed a lot of unnecessary stresses I have put upon myself. Now, some of these have been replaced by new stresses and worries, but I am more aware of them and more able to consciously address them as they arise.
Have any of you also noticed this in your lives as you adjust and adapt to a new normal? What have you done to shift gears and wind down in a healthy way?
Holistic Budo: As it is in budo, so too it is in life. As it is in life, so too it is in budo.
Robert Van Valkenburgh is co-founder of Taikyoku Mind & Body and Kogen Dojo where he teaches Taikyoku Budo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
All photos by Robert Van Valkenburgh (artist unknown, unless otherwise noted).
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