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Eustress, or The Feeling of Mastery

When I heard the word "eustress" I didn't care for it, because it felt more meaningful than the word itself could hold. I explored that concept, over the next couple years, kept having experiences that returned me to it. Eustress: moderate or normal psychological stress, interpreted as being beneficial. How silly. There was a something in that word, but the word was an inappropriate enclosure for the something.

I made my own doctor's appointment and went to it. This was the hardest thing I did that year. It was a new kind of hard. I had always thought I would feel the sickening tightness of forcing, the nausea of silencing my body and my feelings to comply with orders from another person. That was the essence of my medical experiences throughout life: coercion, lack of autonomy, shame, being demeaned and belittled. The trauma resisted being treated as an irrational fear to be pushed down and ignored, so I accepted it. I released the werewolf gnawing on my guts and let the wolf-part of me decide how medical professionals would be allowed to speak to me and to touch my body. I wrote down these boundaries, brought them to the appointment, and walked like an apex predator. And it worked. That fall, I got my flu shot for the first time in my adult life. No crash of adrenaline, no trapped, agonizing panic.

A new kind of hard: not the hard of a dog in a cruel experiment being shocked with electricity no matter what it does, more like the hard of a sled dog running as fast as it can, a bloodhound latching onto a scent, a herding dog weaving and dodging to maneuver the sheep into their pen.

That's how I feel when I'm out, somewhere I probably shouldn't be, exploring some woods or a neglected hay field, searching for plants. You can discover anything in the places no one looks: little pockets of biodiversity, rare species, ecosystems thriving under the mercy of being forgotten. I feel...focused. Locked in. Perfectly stimulated by my environment. I'm good at what I'm doing: good at navigating thickets and clambering over rocks, wading through weeds and mud and weaving through brambles, observant, sharp-eyed, and I know what I'm looking at, where almost nobody else does. Swamp milkweed. Smooth carrionflower. Lyre-leaf sage. Alsike clover. Knowing them all by name is like a sixth sense, a power to move through a higher dimension. A world invisible to others becomes known to you.

Sometimes I feel this way when I'm writing, or rereading my own writing. Damn, I'm good. Sometimes I feel this way when cutting kudzu or invasive bamboo in the forest at work, tying them into a bundle and using my strength and stamina to drag them back to the nature center where they can be made useful in crafts and projects. Sometimes I feel this way when walking, covering ground between A to B, cooled by the breeze through my comfy linen pants. I'm a machine, a persistence predator, an animal doing what it evolved to do. Solving a chemistry problem and realizing I understand it. Pulling off a tough platforming section in a video game. That intoxicating feeling of strength and efficacy.

The counterpart of eustress is distress, the usual association of the word "stress." That's why eustress is hard to wrap your head around, because you imagine the feeling of being overwhelmed and powerless and try to come up with a version of that that's good and enriching (you can't). Insight arrived after that doctor's appointment, when I experienced the crucial ingredient of feeling powerful, not powerless. Then I thought of other times when I felt powerful, when I felt challenged but also engaged, stimulated, maybe even exhilarated.

Another word for this feeling might be mastery. It is good for us, I think. Not just to experience mastery, but to be exposed to it. Watching Simone Biles perform gymnastics makes my brain light up with pleasure, recognizing that I am witnessing pure excellence. Music, art, athletics, films, dance. Wow! That's excellent. Wow! Such mastery of the craft! Wow! So much practice and training! It is amazing how many things a human being could potentially become excellent at.

It's the same when watching a creature behave as it evolved to do, showing excellence within its niche. A tree swallow looping and diving, bumble bees pollinating flowers, a deer leaping gracefully. Wow! Millions of years of evolution, a creature thriving and excelling. I felt this when seeing a soft-shell turtle next to the road sprint into the creek and dive beneath the water as I approached. I didn't know a turtle could move that fast. Wow! What a weird-looking creature- but it's excellent at being the thing that it is.

Humans are adaptable, incredibly so. We can choose the thing that we are. We can be a lot of things. And we can be excellent at them. And no matter what it is, whether swimming or rock climbing or singing or dancing or worm charming (it's a real thing, look it up), there can be that glowing hum of pleasure at being good at it. Or watching others be good at it. That feeling can be a form of guidance. Okay, you're good at it...how does it feel to be good at it?

Are you challenging yourself enough? Are you pushing yourself hard enough? Maybe that's not the right question. Maybe instead it's: Does it feel good to be good at it? When you're doing less than your potential and not growing, the activity would probably cease to be stimulating. Eustress has two opposites: distress and boredom.

Of course it's bad for mental health when things are not effortful enough. That's why zoo animals need enrichment, and even pets can benefit from puzzle toys and ways to "earn" their food and treats. If things are effortless, then you don't experience effort leading to results, and that is a lot like being powerless. Whereas if you have the opportunity to expend effort and focus towards a result, getting the result makes you feel empowered.

Maybe this is one of the purposes of play: to psychologically recover from coerced effort, fruitless effort, or lack of opportunity for effort and reward, by rehearsing scenarios where a creature can feel effective and masterful doing something. From that perspective, play is a way of getting your healthy dose of eustress.

I am working on how to apply this knowledge...

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I’d like to live through a week that’s not a whole new verse of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

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If I were a security guard for a person who’s being targeted by assassins I simply wouldn’t devote my entire attention span to every single noise I hear.

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I sometimes wonder… do I paint because I'm happy? Or am I happy because I paint?

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ily, menswear guy

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If your fic is 1000 words long, you can’t tag it slow burn. It’s not slow burn. That is a matchstick. And this is my personal bias here but if those motherfuckers you’re writing experience significant forward momentum in their relationship in under 5k words, then that is just a regular old burn. Slow burn should be borderline intolerable and a mistake to start reading at 2 in the morning.

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THIS IS NOT REAL. If you get this comment, they’re just trying to get you to delete your fic.

1) I would have gotten some kind of email from Ao3 if this was true

2) this comment is formatted to be perfect to tack onto any fic they choose

3) ALSO why on earth would Ao3 get rid of entire fandoms off the site? Even if they WERE inactive? Who knows if others will be ‘late’ to the fandom and want some fic to read. Who knows if someone wants to come back to their 6 year old account only to find most of their fics deleted.

I’m lucky to be a reasonable adult who has seen tricks like these who also had a very kind person comment their own doubts.

Please let your Ao3 friends know <3

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Another banger from /r/stupiddovenests - at least the tag is appropriate this time

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"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you 🙄" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence

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I finished reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in my life. With all of *vague gesture at everything* this going on.

I Am Not Okay

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Nintendo hatedom is crazy because like wdym y’all think the switch 2 not having an OLED screen and having inflation pricing is the most anti consumer, discourse worthy thing they’ve ever done but peach’s VA finding out she got recasted the day Mario kart world launched isn’t worth raising hell over or talking about whatsoever???

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'I asked chat GPT-'

oh did you? You asked something that steals shit to lie to you about a subject? And you just tell me this like I care to know what it said? Like I wanted to know its opinion? I regularly ask my cat Cheesey Gordita Crunch about many subjects and I think I trust his judgement more than whatever bullshit ur shitty algorithm spat out

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Last call for "it's 100% June"

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people will really have the gall to look me (Femme with a capital F, protector of butches) in the eye and say “well at least you’re not one of THOOOSEEE bull dyke lesbians”

n that’s when I pull the hammer out of my tote bag