Challenge Yourself Daily
Challenges in Life
Challenge, struggle, and hardship is part of life. They help us to better ourselves. They help us to grow as individuals, and they help us to grow as a species. Challenges can range from small to large, and are encountered in life constantly. They shape who we are, and force us to look at things with a new perspective. We learn from these experiences, and adapt ourselves to better handle similar situations that may be encountered in the future.
The challenges we face in life shape us, and make us stronger. In addition to these naturally occurring challenges, hardships, and struggles, we can also create artificial challenges for ourselves in order to grow, learn, and prepare for those real challenges we may come across. In addition to gaining a mental and physical aptitude from challenging experiences in our day to day lives, self imposed challenges allow us to control these stressors.
Testing yourself with self made challenges allows for a controlled stressor that can be managed and adjusted according to what can be handled. It allows for a steady growth that is determined by the individual. If things become too hard, that’s okay. The situation can be made easier. Or maybe you have a natural ability that makes an activity that is otherwise difficult to others a lot easier to you. You can increase difficulty quicker. By continuously increasing the difficulty of a challenging practice, the individual can increase their likelihood to successfully navigate through the uncontrollable, challenging times that may occur on a day to day basis, and create a preparedness for any extreme situations that may arise. When it comes to how we navigate through challenging times, just like anything else in life, practice makes perfect. That is why it’s important to challenge yourself daily.
Challenge Yourself Daily
The more we challenge ourselves, the better prepared we become for the challenges we encounter throughout our lives. Life is about adapting to your surroundings and surviving the hard situations we encounter. We are meant to continuously face challenges, learn from them, and grow from them.
Small changes in your daily life can be made to include more challenges, and don’t have to always be time consuming or strenuous. You can adjust your schedule to allow for a 10 minute run before or after work, or fit in a 30 minute workout instead of sitting down and watching tv. You can opt to read instead of watching a movie, or simply choose to use stairs instead of an escalator or elevator. Instead of driving to pick up a cup of coffee down the street, walk there. Maybe you have a dog that needs to be taken out several times a day; opt for a walk around the block instead of just letting them out into the backyard. Your furry friend is sure to benefit from this too. These small changes add up, and although they’re not extremely challenging, they are the more challenging options comparatively, and will still provide a benefit to the individual.
Daily challenges should include both mentally and physically strenuous activities. They can come in a wide range, some examples being running, difficult hikes, weight lifting, yoga, sauna use, learning new activities and hobbies, reading, building things, etc. Activities that are meant to challenge us physically will in a lot of cases also challenge us on a mental level. A really hot and long session in a sauna or a cryotherapy chamber, or a long, intense, grueling hike will take a mental strength to push forward to complete. It builds your mental strength and confidence for when you may encounter a challenging situation in your normal day to day life. You’ll be able to enter stressful situations in a more calm and collected manner.
Mentally challenging practices are important to include in your day to day routine. One example would be meditating. It can an extremely challenging task to properly meditate. Controlling your mind, and getting it to relax, and to stop racing through all of the stresses you have going on in your life can be difficult. It takes repetitive practice, and a mental strength to accomplish. When done successfully, you will gain a mental clarity and strength that is just as beneficial as, if not more than some physical strengths.
Activities such as reading are great ways to challenge yourself and improve a mental strength. Even though you may not consider reading to be a hard activity, it takes focus to complete. With continuous practice it builds intellect, speed, and exposure to all sorts of information depending on the genre and topic. It can be just as beneficial to an individual as physical challenges.
From continual practice comes ease. Daily practice eventually leads to situations where you seem to go into a state that individuals often refer to as “autopilot”. This is your mind and body pulling from its database of skills and learned reactions and behaviors in order to navigate a situation without having to actively think about what to do. This is often from repetitive practice. For example, when a soccer player kicks a soccer ball, he doesn’t think “I need to step next to the ball, but not too close or too far from it, and I need to keep my knee over the ball, and I need to hit the ball with my laces, and don’t lean back too far or slice it or it will go up into the air and lose power.” Instead, they just kick it. It just happens naturally, like a learned instinct.
Each individual will have a different range of what is considered challenging to them based on what they have experienced and learned from, and what they have a natural or developed talent and ability to do easily. They may also find times where they hit a plateau and feel they cannot move forward because they are stuck with a specific obstacle that they cannot figure out how to navigate around themselves. Because of this, challenging yourself in group settings can be a useful tool.
Challenge Yourself in a Group Setting
It’s often easier or more beneficial to challenge yourself in a competitive setting. We are a species that thrives in communal environments, and activities such as sports can help us to challenge ourselves by providing competitors and teammates that we can compare ourselves to or strive to beat. Even activities such as working out, and running can be turned into competitive group activities. Races, marathons, triathlons, competitions, etc can turn hobbies like swimming, biking, running, rock climbing, etc. into more challenging and competitive experiences. Comparing your skills and abilities to others and trying to succeed over them is always a great way to challenge yourself, and has been shown to cause individuals to push themselves harder, furthering their skills and abilities at a quicker rate. Examples of these types of activities can be seen in nature in many species.
When wolves are pups, they often play with their parents, siblings, and other pack members. They’ll play-fight, wrestle, and even sneak up and “hunt” each other. The same can be seen in other species such as lions. It’s a way of using ones surrounding pack, pride, or community to challenge oneself, hone skills, and create mental and physical toughness for whatever nature and life throws their way.
Challenging yourself in a communal setting doesn’t only increase the desire to practice, learn, and push yourself harder. It also creates a system in which individuals learn from each other. They witness how others navigate scenarios, emulate the different methods others use to overcome challenges , and give the opportunity to share their own methods as well. This sense of community is what has led our species to being so successful, and is without a doubt a part of who we are. We are meant to challenge each other, push each other, and help each other. Not only does this prepare us for future challenges, but it gives us a community of individuals with a large database of skills, abilities, and experiences to help us navigate through challenging times when they arise.
The Balance Within Challenges
Like all things in Nature, there is an element of balance that exists in challenges. When an individual stresses themselves mentally and physically by engaging in hard activities such as running or working out, they receive a multitude of benefits in return. Accomplishing an intense activity provides an outlet for stress relief. The most stressful day can be made better by a long run, or intense workout. A sense of confidence also comes from successfully completing a grueling activity. During vigorous training, muscles, ligaments, and bones are strained and pushed to their limits. In return, when properly executed, the body recovers stronger and better than before.
Challenging yourself doesn’t always have to be an intense or exhausting activity. Even hobbies such as fishing or painting can be turned into a challenge. If you are continuously pushing yourself to become better at an activity, reading up about it, practicing it, failing at it, and then learning from those failures, that activity will benefit you. In the case of our examples (fishing and painting) you will be developing a mental strength from what can be considered a pleasing activity, allowing you to relieve stress, and experience enjoyment. You will also become more comfortable with failure, and gain insight on what it takes to teach yourselves new things, which will benefit you in the future.
Pushing yourself to your boundaries and feeling uncomfortable in return expands your bounds of comfort. What was once difficult becomes easy. What used to make you nervous and anxious is now overcome comfortably. Engaging in activities that are challenging and make you feel uncomfortable is met with a newfound ability, skill, strength, and endurance, both mental and physical.
Life is about continuously improving. Everyday we are faced with a set of challenges that push us to either grow or fail. Overcoming challenges helps to improve ourselves mentally and physically. Self-imposed challenges can prepare us for the challenging situations we encounter in our day to day lives while controlling the rate at which we move forward based on what we can endure.
We should always be learning, and growing. Community is a useful tool in helping us to challenge ourselves further, and learn at a quicker rate. We can give back to our communities by sharing and teaching our abilities and methods for navigating through stressful situations. In return, your community will be there for you when you face challenging times and situations.
Continue to learn, grow, and overcome new challenges. It shapes who we are, and betters the individual and community.
