Not all stress is created equal — but the difference isn’t in the stressor, it’s in your relationship to it. Through a guided exercise, Joe has you compare stress that felt great (playing sports, cooking in flow) with stress that felt horrible (deadline pressure, fear of someone’s reaction). The body reveals the answer: enlivening stress is unresisted; harmful stress is resisted.
This means the same stressor can be either — depending on whether you resist it or allow it to move through you. The exercise then invites you to take a current source of stress and practice not resisting it, allowing it to land in the body the way sport-stress does.
This connects to a broader principle in Joe’s work: emotions aren’t inherently harmful. It’s the resistance to them that creates suffering and depletion. A life completely free of stress would feel meaningless. The goal isn’t to eliminate stress but to change your relationship to it.
Related Concepts
- Resistance changes the emotion
- Attention alone reduces stress
- Stress about stress doubles the stress