I’ll come to that in a moment.

Some context first:

A couple of weeks ago, during one of the Mindset & Clarity workshops I’m running for my esteemed banking colleagues, I posed the question “is stress useful?”.

The participants jumped in with answers like “stress motivates me”, “stress helps me focus” and “stress shows me what matters”.

But one colleague popped up with an answer I hadn’t heard before.

That answer?

“Stress is useful because it allows me to enjoy the feeling of not being stressed”

This took me back. 

It sounded a bit like saying it’s helpful to sit on a hedgehog to appreciate the comfort of a normal chair.

But a few days ago I realised…

I used to do this all the time! 

(with stress, not with the hedgehog)

Case in point:

Lozzadog, Baby Grundy and I are back in London Town after a week in Crete.

A merry time was had scoffing lots of Greek Yoghurt, quaffing too much Assyrtiko and mooching by the pool.

Before we went away, I noticed something curious.

For 10+ years, work was so full on that when a holiday was on the horizon I'd wake up doing calendar maths to reassure myself that there’s “just 19 days to go”. 

Those 19 days were like a tiny light at the end of a very long, dark, over-caffeinated tunnel.

Then the next day it would be “just 18 days to go” and the light would shine a tad brighter, and so on.

And when I finally set my out of office, an enormous sense of relief would wash over me. It felt like finding the emergency exit from a burning building.

But this time round, before our trip to Greece, I didn’t feel any relief to be going on holiday. 

I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised. 

Now I’m back at work with the benefit of the Subtraction Method, I’ve found a way to release a lot of the stress, worry and anxiety that my banking job used to stir up in me. 

Even when I do feel stressed, worried or anxious, I feel much more relaxed about feeling this way.

As a result, the desperate need to escape the office has fizzled away. 

I don't need to spend three weeks crawling towards the promised land of a circled date in the diary. I don’t need to invest in a bunch of stress tokens to buy myself a few days of holiday calm.

I can just relax.

This runs counter to the usual motivational twaddle which says “no pain, no gain” or “you’ve got to experience the lows to appreciate the highs”.

But more and more I’m seeing we don’t need a reason to enjoy life.

We can enjoy it right here, right now, no questions asked. 

If you'd like to stop earning your peace the hard way, hop on over here:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com