Don't lean into stress

I’ve been reflecting a lot on choosing my emotions or at least choosing my reaction to my emotions.
The last few days have felt a bit stressful, with a bunch of technical difficulties with Impossible Incubator (laptop and hard drive and icloud AND all my other storage devices ran out of space all at once, while I was editing 60gb of footage), lots of distractions (friends, friends, and more friends coming to stay) and general life busy-ness (prior commitments).

I’ve felt stress rising throughout my body on several occasions over the past few days, but with a lot of reflection and self control I’ve realised this:

Just because you feel stress (or anger, or sadness or any other undesirable emotion) doesn’t mean you have to LEAN INTO it. You can observe the emotion, and choose “Do I want to go there? Do I want to turn this emotion into a full on meltdown?”

As an ENFP (a Campaigner in the Myers-Briggs Personality categories), my intuition and emotion is a huge part of how I perceive the world. But I also know I can control how I perceive the world. Whatever I believe is what I will perceive. So I choose to perceive the situation differently. Acknowledge the stress, but also not choose to go down the rabbit hole. Just see it for what it is, and choose to believe something else about the situation (i.e. actually, it’s not all that bad).

I choose how I perceive my reality.