Thank you stress!!

Stress is a gift, why didn’t anyone explain this to me before?

William Lennan
4 min readNov 5, 2021

Anyone can win from stress.

We can sing better, run faster, code longer.

And we can use stress to show us where we need to learn something new or practice something we need to improve. This may not be the message that you’ve heard previously about stress — and that’s ok.

During a meditation, I realized that I’ve used stress to drive my learning and personal development for the last 15 years. This effort earned a nice list of accomplishments — which makes me very happy.

You can do this also — anyone can.

Kinds of stress

To start, let’s do a fast overview of the 4 kinds of stress — of which only one can contribute to ongoing health problems.

  • Fight or flight (or freeze) — this is the one everyone talks about when a lion is charging a dinner eland on the African plain. It’s a big spike of adrenaline & cortisol so we can handle business. And when we get that spike but don’t have any physical activity those chemicals are not metabolized as they should. When you are constantly repeating that last part “chemicals not metabolized” is where the problems arise.
  • Excite or delight — this is…

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William Lennan

Mental wellness fan. Ardent believer in effort. Parent, partner, persistent, physical. Co-Founder The HAERT™ Program. DBT is awesome :-)