JJ Virgin and Dr. Aimie Apigian explain that stress capacity comes from two things: removing unnecessary burdens and deliberately tackling hard tasks to build resilience. A wealthy mother overwhelmed by planning a bat mitzvah shows how stress is about perception, not circumstances. Reducing inflammation also boosts your ability to handle difficulty.
I think back to when I used to see people one-on-one and I remember working with this one woman and it was a time I was a single mom under massive financial pressure. And I walk into her house and she is married to a very wealthy guy. She has one child who seems to be like happy, everything great. Um, no financial issues whatsoever, no health issues whatsoever. Family gets along great. And she was over the top stressed out because she had to put on, with a lot of help, mind you, a bat mitzvah for her child. And I remember thinking to myself, wow, like this is creating this level of stress for you. This is amazing. And it was so helpful for me to see how much stress is just our perception of stress. So is it, as you dump out the trauma, could you increase your capacity and move your overwhelm line? And because I contend, when I look around at very successful people, they actually have things that most people would perceive as hugely stressful and it doesn't really bother them. And I don't believe it's because they're just not feeling all these things and eliminating it. It's just that their capacity has increased. Is that the case? Do I have it right? Or have I created something to try to feed my own addiction of liking to work a lot?
No, that's exactly it. And we can see historical figures who have gone through incredible experiences and yet they seem to have navigated it with a level of grace that tells me, wow, look at their capacity to do hard things and to feel hard things. So there's two ways to increase our capacity. One would be to remove the burden. By removing the burden, you create more space, and space means that you have more energy, you have more capacity to do something else. So removing burden is one way to increase capacity. The other way is a way that you are also very competent and master at, which is building muscles, right? We build muscles for emotions. We build muscles for doing hard things. By doing something hard, we build our muscle to do the next thing hard. We build our capacity by practice and by being able to see it as a practice. So many people that I work with are stuck in perfectionism, and that has been one of their ways in which they have tried to keep themselves safe and feeling lovable, as if I'm perfect. And that will hinder their ability to practice doing hard things. And so then they stay in exactly that situation, like this woman that you worked with, where she's never developed the capacity to do something hard for her because it's not felt safe to practice and fail.
So when it would seem like doing both of those would be the way to go.
Both of them is the way to go. And this is where we, again, we want to combine the stuff that we're doing with our mind, with our body and our biology, because if I can decrease the inflammation in my body, guess what? I now have more energy. I have a greater capacity to do hard things. So it's not just the emotional capacity. It's also the biology that plays into that overall capacity. And the perception of our capacity is really what determines that critical line of overwhelm. It is not based on reality, JJ. It's not based on reality.
Uh, I believe we create our reality.
So we create our reality. Exactly. And so this is the perception. There's actually a term for it that comes out of polyvagal theory called neuroception. Or the perception of our nervous system. And that is what creates our reality. And that is what it measures against the danger in our life. So it's not measuring it against the actual reality. It's measuring it against its perception of reality, both what's going on outside of us and inside of us to decide, do I have the capacity to overcome this challenge in my life right now?
