Stress or Weakness?

For the sake of simplicity, let’s imagine your potential daily output as gas in a tank. As an athlete, you make your way through the day recognizing some of the more obvious gas-consuming activities and make serious efforts towards filling the tank back up with recovery protocols, nutrient-dense foods, and a serious commitment to getting some restful sleep. For many, the considerations fail to extend outside of these ideas, which often leads to the kind of doubts that paint a distorted picture of what you’re capable of.

While rarely talked about openly, the idea of will power is a common theme on an individual level in the world of health and wellness. If you struggle with conflicting ideas of being passionate about your goals while questioning your ability to stay enthusiastic in the trenches, it’s time to uncover what varying head spaces could be doing to your gas tank.

To smooth the entrance towards exploring your mental health, let’s start on the biological level. Your thoughts, moods, daily interactions, and stress responses drain gas from your tank. You are the vehicle in this analogy, and having a blind spot that takes from you from a full tank to a low fuel warning before stepping foot in the gym is a real problem.

Uncovering and accepting the parallels between the effects of physical and mental stressors on your ability to execute can provide a new, yet familiar lens to begin exploring your mental health. Realizing how adept you are at monitoring the physical implications can give you the confidence needed to redirect your skillset to uncover the impact that stress has on achieving your goals.

Let’s change the conversation from a perceived lack of will-power to addressing all of life’s inputs and outputs that affect our gas tanks.