Stress isn’t just about nail biting or trembling hands or shaky voices or clenched teeth. Stress can get the best of you sometimes and leave you completely paralyzed in a situation. It can take away from you the ability to think clearly or act sensibly. It can sometimes make you lose all the words that were on the tip of your tongue.
Stress can make you procrastinate things to do for days and days, if not months and years. It can make you avoid certain situations that should be faced, but you just keep holding them off because of the fact that they might trigger a certain kind of anxiety that you’ve been avoiding for a while.
Stress steals your joy and your enjoyment of the moment, because you can’t be in the moment any longer—your mind is always somewhere else stressing over something. It’s the thief of happiness. It takes away your ability to be fully in the moment because even if you are physically in it, your mind is busy stressing over future scenarios and panicking over things that could happen. It takes away your ability to fully live and experience the moment with a present mind. It takes away the chance to enjoy and acknowledge the little details of the current moment.
It makes you feel like you’re constantly in a race that you didn’t sign up for and have no idea when you will reach the finish line. It strips away your creativity because you don’t have a clear or rested mindset to create something and unleash your creativity any longer. It makes every single action feel like a heavy one because it’s accompanied by the burden of your stress.
And the worst part is, it’s not easily explained. It’s not a simple thing to explain to someone how sometimes something so insignificant can cause you such an enormous amount of stress, because most of the time people don’t get it. They don’t get why this tiny thing might cause you such distress or why you are feeling this way towards certain situations that might seem very normal and very routine; yet to you, it doesn’t feel the same. It never feels that easy or normal for you.
Stress can change you and make you act in ways you never desired. It can completely consume you and leave you defeated to its power by the end of the day. It’s an internal silent battle that most of the time no one knows anything about but you. It’s a battle that you have to fight deep within you every single day.