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Tension Is A Habit

Dear youth,

Life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you react to it. Life is not as stressful as you or others often make it for yourself. If you don’t like a certain tendency you have, then the first step in correcting that tendency is to see it for what it is: a habit. If you don’t like the feeling of being stretched to stiffness, the nervousness that makes you unable to relax, if you don’t like stress, then the first step in ridding of that stress is to recognize it for what it is: a cause of itself.

Tension is the inner striving, unrest, or imbalance often with psychological signal of emotion. It may be okay to experience in the short-term, but in the long-term it becomes a warning. It can interfere with your normal daily routine, it can break your relationships, it can lower or even diminish your self-esteem, it can decrease your work stability and effectiveness, and worse, tension may lead you to depression, guilt, and it may eventually nick confidence out of you.

Depression, guilt and low self-esteem are the three painful and toxic habits caused simply by tension.

Two things that often associated with tension are (1) perception and (2) doubt. Research shows that tension normally begins with one’s perception of things. For instance, if three people all undergo a similar predicament, you might notice the first person will fuss over the situation while the second one will only be alarmed to try and avoid the same situation next time, and the third person, after a few minutes of just a mild annoyance over the situation, will start singing ‘don’t worry, be happy’.

With that being true, however, taking into consideration all four factors that cause tension: environmental factor, social factor, physiological factor and of course, thoughts, self-doubt is often instigated by any one or a combination of the first three factors.

While tension is a habit that you can break by simply seeking a new perspective and thought into your own situation, it is also a habit that could take you a little while longer to break due to the other three factors you probably may have no control over. For instance, say the predicament faced by the three people in the above example was an involvement in a car accident, each with a car they borrowed/rented from a friend. Social factor will by no doubt affect their perception. Depending on how each one of them knows how his friend would react to the reality that will determine how far stressed they would be.

By eliminating the first three factors however, thought still lingers. Remember the words of the famed entrepreneur and motivational speaker, Jim Rohn, quoted also in our February 2017 article Who Am I – ‘Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.’

A habit is an action pattern of behavior weaved into seeming resilient by recurrence. It begins with a thought in mind, and if continued, it’ll build who you are.

If you perceive a situation as dangerous or complicated or painful (even when you’re not experiencing the pain already) you are causing yourself some tension. You are giving your own situation the meaning of stress. Already the consequences of whatever you’re going through in your life or whatever the decisions you make about your life are made weighty by your social, environmental and physiological factors, of which are the three things you often may not find yourself in control of. But you can always strive to control your own mind and make the world a better place.

Why is it that rain depresses one person and makes the other person happy? The answer: It is not rain that makes either person feel anything. It is the thought. It is the perception of one about rain – the perception of one about the situation.

Oppression, poverty, unhappy childhood/background/friendships or family relationship, unemployment, academic struggles, alcohol and drug abuse, such trauma, anger and fear, as a part of your life in the past or in the present, understandably may have affected your way of thinking and of seeing things, but they don’t control your thoughts. They don’t exaggerate your thoughts into forming a tension that may later become your new habit. You do. When you try, harder and out of love of humane and yourself, to control your tension, you preach the role of thought – for thought rules but circumstance.

It won’t be easy, true, but it won’t be as hard as facing the consequences of an abiding bad habit. Tension is bad habit. Bad habits can be broken. They should be broken.

Until next month,


Ah-Liang TE

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