The Myth Of Healthy Competition

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The essence of human behavior lies in the fact that we are all subconsciously afraid of each other, so we live fully armed, every now and then taking preventive measures to protect ourselves

Modern society encourages competition. Such a concept as "motivation" in the corporate environment is closely related to competition. A person feels the need to compete with others or with himself, and personal well-being is often sent to the back.

Competition can be public or private. Open competition is when a company announces competition between teams of employees involved in different projects. Unspoken competition is our desire to bypass the other person in anything at all costs, from production successes to an avatar on a social network.

Can competition, despite its positive results, be the impetus for the disunity of society?

With the advent of the Internet, competition has intensified in earnest. Any of us, provided that we have access to the network, has the opportunity to compete with each other 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. With the advent of fitness bands and apps that automatically track our athletic performance, we can track our own progress against friends and strangers.

The danger lies in the fact that competition at work and in sports seeps into everyday life, where the vaunted ambitious entrepreneur becomes overgrown with neuroses and is completely attached to the desire to "be the best in everything."

Much has been said about the flip side of ambition. In the biographies of famous people, you can often find references to how the greats of this world, as power and influence accumulated, were characterized by an increasingly unstable psyche. Fear of loss of capital prompted 20th century political leaders to build bunkers and exterminate other populations; at the level of the collective ego, church leaders declared anathema and annihilated a colossal number of people, hiding behind a holy mission, behind which was the desire to preserve their own inviolability.

With the flourishing of individualism in the post-Soviet space, the need to compete, to promote one's brand falls on the shoulders of each individual individual. The culture of startups, with its inherent free thinking and openness to creative input, has generated excitement in the hearts of generations of the 90s and 2000s. Man, like a robot, must be productive and efficient today.

A recent study by the University of California Business School found that those of us who are guided by the time is money principle are more likely to experience stress, as evidenced by the presence of increased levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, in our bodies. (The emotional-mental state of the subjects who did not evaluate seconds in currency was assessed as normal and supported by hardware measurements of cortisol.)

In an attempt to resolve the problem of emotional stress, you need to realize that stress resistance is primarily formed not through exhausting attempts to muffle unpleasant manifestations of stress, but as a result of a healthy attitude towards reality. A healthy attitude means such an interaction with the world in which we feel safe: physically and mentally.

In the Eastern teachings, there is such an interpretation of karma: karma is not some kind of consequence sent to us by an almighty power from above; karma is our own conscience, which punishes / rewards us as soon as we take action, thereby pushing us to seek punishment or reward in the outside world. Thus, we ourselves create causes and effects for ourselves, completely ignoring our role in the production.

Our subconscious, aimed at protecting our personality and maintaining homeostasis, often throws rationalizing maxims “into the furnace”, which are subsequently grinded by our inner voice. The result is anxiety, restlessness, suspense - all that we seek to avoid.

How to stop competing? First, you need to feel what sensations are supported by endless competition. Acknowledging the problem is the first step.

Once you have compared yourself to another person, concentrate on bodily manifestations and try to identify them. This is where the mindfulness technique I covered in previous articles can be helpful.

To stop worrying and return to a state of emotional stability, you can use the meridian technique of emotional freedom with tapping.

“Square Breathing” helps to remove the body from the state of stress.

And the main recommendation: include the witness. As Vadim Zeland used to say, “rent yourself out, go down to the auditorium and watch yourself from the sidelines”. And again, in the words of the greats: do not get involved in anything with your head: after all, life is a game, and people in it are actors.