Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Overcoming the Stress

      Stress, a word, an action or someone's life. If I ask someone to explain what stress is and tell him to describe it, he wouldn't be able to. My question to you is how can you feel/get something and keep practicing it, when you simply can't even explain it?. A lot of people maybe opposing to the above but let's take an example, If I ask you Why are you hungry? or What is hunger? then within minutes you would be able to answer me with great detail and also some of you would show me some practical demonstration for it. So let me tell you what stress really is and how you can overcome it.

      If we google search and get the definition of stress? we will get, Stress is "A state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or demanding circumstances". So, if we take a look at our life and see what makes us stressful, the answer is exams, results, presentations, office life, work,etc. If you observe the definition you will see that it is written as a state of mind, that simply means getting stressed or not getting stressed is in your hand and not someone's else hand. So, be it your work, job or anything, getting stressed is not what you should do. Let's take an example of Exams which is a nightmare to many of us. A lot of people including me start preparing for exams a day or two before the exam day. Does that mean we should worry about starting it so late? Absolutely, NOT. The first thing you should do when you start preparing that late for exams is relax and see how much you can cover up within that time. If you can cover a lot of things within that time, then it's okay to start that late. But that is not a practical situation for people like me. So, you can do one thing, cover as much as you can within that time but make sure that whatever you cover is done thoroughly. By this you are creating a base for your next exam, though you might be getting an average marks on the current test but later on, you will be glad that you had studied that previous part already and so well that you don't even have to revise it.

During exams a lot of people get stress mainly because of 2 reasons:

  • They have not studied anything.
  • MARKS.

When we take a look at the first point, then stressing about it will not help you, nor will it help you to remember better during the exam. It could only make things worse. So, rather than taking tension, you could stay calm and study as much as you can. At least by doing this you will study something rather than stressing and messing things up. Secondly, marks are important to some extent, but marks don't define who you are and what you are capable of doing. Remember that all those innovators and great people out there weren't really toppers of their universities. They are who loved their work and were willing to work hard for it. For them, marks didn't matter. If the founder of Facebook thought that what would happen if facebook didn't turn out to be a good social networking site, then that tension would have made him give up on his project. Also, If Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Founder of Google), would have thought that making World's Best and Fastest Search Engine, requires a lot of work and is stressful to build. Then this state of mind would not have helped them instead they would have been demotivated by thinking this way. So, stress is just a word. It depends on you how you see it. If something or some work means something to you then you will do it, no matter what and you won't be stressed about it.

      By thinking of stress you are making your life complicated and unhappy. Stress is good, but only if it doesn't affect your performance or your level of happiness. Consider 2 guys who have to give presentations next week. Both guys are equally good in academics and they have started preparing for the presentation. At the end when the presentation day has come, the first guy backs out and doesn't give presentation simply because he was too stressed out and couldn't handle the pressure. While the other guy who was also stressed about whether his presentation would turn out good or not and whether he will be able to deliver it well enough, simply kept everything aside and went there to give a presentation. The result came out and he was one of the best presentator out of his batch mates. The reason was he converted his stress in small things which usually a lot of people do, like cracking some jokes, walking around a little bit on the stage, pausing for a moment, etc. And by all this he overcame what was troubling him and that was STRESS. Even if his presentation would not have gone well, at least he tried, so he stood out from all those who didn't even try, and that makes him a Winner. 


Demanding circumstances are there just to bring the best out of you. So, try giving it your best without stressing even for a minute.

Lastly, I will end up with a quote stating that,