Dealing with Pressure...

Good day everyone. I hope we are all good. I want to start by saying a big Thank you to everyone who has been reading, sharing and commenting on my articles. I appreciate you all for the effort. Thank you all once again. For my article today, I will be exploring something really familiar and what I am 100% sure we all have to feel and experience at some point in our lives, even at every point and stage in our lives- Pressure- that feeling that I know has driven me to anxiety and sadness sometimes and has also in a way, at some point, brought out the best in me and made me achieve things that I could never ever imagine myself achieving. But I am sure quite a number of people would agree with me that it is not a pleasant feeling. I will prefer relaxation to feeling pressure every single time. We will be talking about pressure and I will be exploring ways in which it can be handled. Better put, the ways I have tried in the past to put a handle on it. 

Pressure, in technical terms, would mean the feeling of force exerted on a particular point or area. The literal or a relatable definition is not so far from the technical definition. When we feel pressured, we feel weighed down or overwhelmed by a very stressful situation or space. In that moment, it can feel like we are literally carrying the entire world on our backs. This then could lead to  one feeling really sad, anxious, depressed, aggressive and even explosive. Think about it, when you feel a very heavy physical force being impinged on you, it makes you feel really uncomfortable, tired, weakened and it gets to a point where you can not tolerate or hold on anymore, then you let it go or just react in a way that gets the pressure off. Our minds work and react in a similar way. When a stressful situation feels like a lot to handle for instance, being given an impossible deadline to deliver on a particular task or being given numerous tasks to handle all at once etc in those moments, it will feel like we are pressed down very hard and it gets uncomfortable. One, in trying to let go of the pressure, can get explosive, unmotivated, anxious and uninterested in doing anything again.

Some people find feeling pressured a safe place to be. For them, it makes them achieve things they never thought it was possible to do. For my thesis project, I was to perform about 10-14 experiments on a very large number of samples and it was expected to be done in a very short period of time. Failure to be done at the specified time would have meant repeating the entire process all over again. So there was a lot of pressure on me but in the end, I was done and I didn’t have to repeat the process again(though the deadline was extended). It got me doing extra and undergoing a lot of extreme stress but I pulled through. As beneficial as it was for me to go beyond my comfort zone, that feeling wasn't pleasant at all.

Nothing really good comes easy and as life will have it, we do have to endure a little discomfort and feel uncomfortable to achieve some very desirable things for ourselves.  In recognition of the fact, I know that there’s only so much I can do but at least I have to try. So when I’m feeling pressured, what I do is give myself a break to breathe. In doing that, I calm myself down from getting anxious then give the tasks a lot of thought. In thinking,  I take an objective look at  the task at hand and determine its feasibility and get to work. If I see, I can't handle it then I stop. This is my process and for a lot of people, their ways could be different.  So let's share our processes of dealing in the comment section.

Thanks for reading…