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I have this ritual where every week I purposely do the thing I’d rather avoid. I call it Stress Fit Mondays and it looks something like this:

Sunday night, I scan the week ahead and make a list of the things I’m most tempted to skip, or have been avoiding for way too long
Monday morning, I pick the hardest, boldest, most uncomfortable thing on the list
I tell myself “YOU’VE GOT THIS” before my mind can talk me out of it
I do it scared, I do it anxious, I do it anyways
I move on with my week

I’ve been challenging myself for as long as I can remember, without really understanding why until recently. My threshold for pushing myself is higher than most people’s. It’s been like this since the young age of 24, in my go hard or go home phase, when I believed that’s what it took to stand out and climb the corporate ladder.

Even though pushing myself came naturally to me growing up, if I’m being honest, I started playing it safe after a traumatic car accident in 2019. At the age of 32, I became a creature of habit. My self-worth tanked. Depression and anxiety hit an all-time high. I got really good at surviving by playing it small, because for a while, it felt like I had no other choice.

Somewhere along the way, choosing safety by avoiding anything stressful became the default. I started noticing my comfort zone shrink, until everything, and I mean everything, started to cause me stress. My fight, flight, freeze response activated more in the following three years than it had in my whole life before that.

That version of me became unlivable (not to mention ruining all my relationships!!). So I built a ritual to recondition how my body responds to hardship, fear, and discomfort. I called it Stress Fit Mondays.

I knew that naming my weekly practice would create the kind of pressure that pushes me to expand what I believe I’m capable of. This is accountability 101: committing to change out loud makes it harder to quietly back out of. In this way, Stress Fit Mondays has helped me ritualize building confidence, overcoming self-doubt, and shaking off my conditioned fight, flight, freeze stress responses.

Not that the doubt completely goes away, of course. Example: I sat in my office this week putting off a conversation I didn’t want to have. My anxiety was working overtime, forecasting every version of how badly it could go. What if it comes across worse than I mean it? What if it harms the relationship? Should I just... not? Could I get away with never bringing this up? This type of doubt often repeats in my mind, but despite this, I do it anyway. Week after week, hundreds of times a year (who says you have to stick with just once a week).

We all have conflicted feelings about doing things that bring us discomfort. The boundary we won’t set with family because we’re afraid of the stress it’ll cause. The thing we keep telling ourselves we’re not ready for yet, for fear of failure. Going to the gym, because it’s easier to stay in our pajamas at home. All of it objectively harder each time we let inaction win.

But if you want to be the most confident, bold, grounded person you can be. If you want to thrive even when life is tough ~~as fuck~~, you have to teach your mind to not need to stress when you’re faced with hardship, when fear creeps in, and when life gets uncomfortable.

Once you’ve figured that out, you’ve won.

What I did last week:

Fighting discomfort in the sauna. Every cell in my body told me to get out. I stayed anyway and taught myself that discomfort isn’t dangerous.
Having a conversation I’d been avoiding for weeks. The one I kept rehearsing and never having. I finally had it. Wasn’t as disastrous as I built it up to be.
Planning a birthday celebration as someone allergic to itineraries. Making a plan, getting everyone to stick to it, not my natural habitat. Uncomfortable and all.

Stress Fit Mondays

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