A fresh perspective on stress: embracing your inner ‘Yin Yang’5 min čitanja

I’ve spent most of my life in a state of stress. Stressed about studies, deadlines, life purpose, others opinions of me, and yes, even about stress itself. I spent hours on end googling and researching with the terms ‘how to get rid of stress’ or ‘instant technique to reduce stress’ putting all of my energy into finding a way to remove stress from my life.

But ironically, that became the biggest stress of all. Yet all along, the answer was so simple.

Perspective.

I had one of those ‘penny drop’ moments where I realised if I just changed how I viewed stress, I could live a relatively stress-reduced existence. This happened when I discovered the teachings of Taoist philosophy, which takes a whole new perspective on the very definition of stress. If you are someone (like me) who has struggled to manage stress your whole life, it may be hard to imagine a world where stress is not the enemy. In Western culture, we can become so fixated on the idea that stress is fundamentally evil. Taoism couldn’t be further from this view. Let me explain.

A core component of Taoism is the belief in dualism, where two contrasting elements depend on one another to exist.

And this is where ‘Yin Yang’ comes in.

If we want to experience Yin, we must experience Yang. It’s simply impossible for one to exist without the other; the same way night cannot exist without day, warmth without the cold, and joy without sadness.
Yin Yang teaches us two very important things: the acceptance that some things in life are inevitable, and that the world is ever-changing as it’s a constant shift between Yin and Yang. Nothing stands still.

Stress, in this context, is viewed as an inevitable yet temporary state, with its counterpart being calm and tranquillity. This contrasts with Western mentality which often denies the inevitability of stress, posing the idea that it can and should be entirely avoided. That we have full control over stress, that it’s up to us whether we experience it or not.

Once on a deep delve into youtube videos at 3am, I found a ‘stress reduction’ self-help video. The first few words really stuck with me, which were:

‘And that’s how you handle stress. You attack it.’

This sums up the Western approach to handling stress – fight it. It implies that stress itself can defeat you. That if we don’t fight hard enough, we lose it all to stress. And this can feel like it’s a never-ending losing battle; because as we have learnt from the Taoists, stress is an inevitable element of life.

And so, by accepting the inevitable nature of stress, you can immediately take away half the stress itself. Because it’s practically you putting your hands up and saying ‘hey man, I’m not looking for any trouble’ saving yourself all of the extra added burden and exhaustion of facing that fight.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t take any actions to reduce your stress levels – more that you should learn to live alongside it to an extent. Be prepared and at peace with the fact that it will come, yet find comfort in the fact that it will also leave. Embrace the fluidity of your state.

Okay this is all well and good on paper, but how can you actually achieve this? Here are a few tips for you to use your inner Yin Yang to live a more peaceful existence:

Practice hope.

This involves internalising the inevitability of opposites. To remind yourself of the calm after the storm. Research even suggests that experiencing hope dampens the anxiety circuits in the brain, improving brain function and ability to be resilient in the future. There are certain proactive steps you can take to achieve this:

➔ Journaling: take time to actively reflect on the past through the act of writing it out. More specifically, think back to a period of time where you were stressed out. Now, recall what and when was the turning point. Write down how that dark period of time made some beautiful times possible. Maybe losing your job changed your path towards something that suited you much better. Writing this out is a great way to achieve this, since putting a pen on paper can help to organise the thoughts you have on your mind and solidify the rational and hopeful perspective.

Be ‘ever-changing’ and accepting.

Taoism teaches us not to resist when life pushes us in a new direction, accepting the dynamic state of existence. Studies show that when we actively engage in acceptance exercises, our brain regions responsible for emotional awareness and impulse control light up. This can lead to a deeper level of emotional intelligence, less emotional attachment, and a faster path to letting go and moving forward. To adapt to this dynamic form of existence, you can try:

➔ Visualisation techniques: these techniques can be an incredibly powerful tool. They can help your brain to accept that nothing stands still, and help it to rewire into processing challenges with more fluidity, which can help get you out of a negative state with more ease and less resistance. Incorporating visualisation techniques before you sleep can help to promote the brain to ‘learn’ this way of thinking, as sleep is when a lot of our memory consolidation occurs. A popular visualisation technique for promoting acceptance is guided-imagery. A pre-recorded script will take you through a scene which you visualise with your eyes closed, such imagining your stressors like clouds passing you by for example.

I will leave you with one quote that really helped me understand this ‘Yin Yang’ perspective on stress:

‘If you want something to be removed, you must first allow it to flourish. If you want to take something, you must first allow it to be given. This is called the subtle perception of the way things are. The soft overcomes the hard. The slow overcomes the fast.’

Author: Natalie Christovic, BSc Psychology and Neuroscience