As modern people, I think we have fundamentally changed the stress baseline in our lives. We have been shaped and wired to feed off of the anxiety and stress that our complex lives create. Of course it is not intentional. Most of us don’t even realize how addicting the sensation of stress can be. As I have deliberately slowed the pace of my life down in July, my mind could not tolerate the slowness that the space created. I started to feel lost, frustrated, and blamed myself for lacking motivation. I had all these “plans and agendas” for how I was going to “maximize” my rest time. How foolish I was. In the slowness, my mind, having become accustomed to urgency and stress, started to stress itself out in order to replicate the feeling I had become used to. My comfort with tolerating high levels of stress became a baseline for what feeling “effective and live” was “supposed” to feel like. As child of immigrants, this may have been a baseline that you internalized from your upbringing. Urgency and tension showed that you were working hard and committed to important tasks. Without the rush of stress, it felt like life was too quiet, purposeless or lazy. Stress has a function and a purpose. It comes in seasons to focus our energy and efforts. But stress cannot be our baseline for the long term because burnout always finds us and it will not happen during a convenient moment of your life. Instead, could we see that stress is supposed to come in waves? But the relief from stress will not come unless we are deliberate to slow the pace of our lives after periods of intensity. For many of us with how our lives are structured, stress just stretches out into the horizon as far as the eye can see. And that’s a dangerous place to live for the long term. So share with us: Do you feel like you have become tolerant or even addicted to high baseline levels of stress? What does this sensation do for you? What does it cost you? How have you learned to move through stress in waves? Thanks for sharing!