# Stress > Stress is treated as a signal that a person is expressing their joy in a way that is not actually joyful or is carrying a load something was never designed to carry. - Canonical: https://sassani.app/topic/stress # Stress Bashar treats stress not as an inevitable byproduct of responsibility but as a signal that a person is expressing their joy in a way that is not actually joyful, or is carrying a load something was never designed to carry. The response he asks for is not to endure or "cope with" stress, but to transform the way one is doing what one is doing so that the stress bleeds out of the life. ## Stress is contradictory energy, not a necessary cost of doing what you love The clearest formulation in the corpus is that stress reveals a split between the activity and the manner of the activity. Bashar tells a teacher who insists she enjoys her work but is showing stress fractures, fatigue, and nail damage: If what you're doing is your joy, make sure you're doing it in a way that you enjoy, because if you're not doing what you enjoy in a way that you enjoy, you're not doing your joy. You can't separate it out and say, I am doing my joy, but I hate the way I am doing it. That's contradictory energy. Self-destructive dichotomous energy.— Bashar, Fourth Density Balancing Act (fourth-density-balancing-act#qa-10) On this framing, the work and the way of doing the work are one equation. "It is your joy or it is not" — partial joy expressed through a stressful method is treated as a contradiction that will wear the body down. ## "Coping" is the problem, not the solution Bashar is unusually sharp with the word coping. When the teacher says she has been "coping with the stress," he interrupts the framing itself: We're not talking, nor have we ever talked about coping with stress. We have talked about transforming your reality to allow it to be stress-free. Whether you change exactly what you're doing or not, but change it in a way for yourself that allows it to become stress-free, creative, or whether you realize that what you're doing is not you and therefore must be stopped in order to become free of stress.— Bashar, Fourth Density Balancing Act (fourth-density-balancing-act#text) He then names stress as a direct physiological cost: "Stress fractures will occur in your system. It will sap your system of mineralogical health. It will bleed your system of nutrients and imbalance you chemically. And no repair is possible in that state." Stress is placed among the seven factors (oxygenation, hydration, non-toxic food, toxin removal, exercise, creative expression, and stress reduction) whose care prevents disease — not as a psychological nuisance but as a load-bearing condition for the body's ability to repair itself. ## The load is often being carried by something not built for it A second strand treats stress as a symptom of misaligned roles inside the person. In Being Your Full Self, Bashar describes the ego laboring under a weight it was never designed to bear: It is tired of laboring under such stressful circumstances, it is tired of bearing the weight, and you're going to take the load off… it was never designed to handle that kind of weight, that kind of stress. So it's all about loving all aspects of yourself enough to be trusting enough to let them fall back into their proper place in the relationship.— Bashar, Being Your Full Self (being-your-full-self#text) The relief of stress here is a rebalancing: the higher mind, the physical mind, and the ego each have a job, and stress accumulates when the ego is asked to carry what belongs to the higher mind. ## Reduction through creativity, presence, and the carefree memory When asked about a daughter under severe stress from caregiving, Bashar's prescription is not to remove the circumstances but to insert a creative, carefree state into them. He tells the mother that the daughter "must give herself an opportunity to do something creative that gives her joy," and links this to a specific state: If there is something she misses doing as a child, something she did and in the doing of it allowed her to feel carefree — that's important — carefree. She needs to revert to that carefree moment… That state of being is where she wants to come from to reduce and eliminate the stress.— Bashar, On Our Own (on-our-own#text) He adds the paradox of time — that living more in the now "actually creates more time to experience what you prefer" — and pairs creative expression with detoxification so that stress does not aggravate existing toxicity. The pattern across these exchanges is consistent: stress is addressed by changing state and method, not by endurance. ## Practical implications Inspect the manner, not just the activity. When stress appears around something you love, the question is whether you are doing it in a way you actually enjoy — not whether the activity itself is wrong. Treat "coping" as a warning word. Coping is framed as a quiet acceptance of stress that the body will still have to pay for; the alternative is to transform the situation or stop what is not truly you. Take stress as physiological information. Bashar places stress reduction alongside oxygen, water, food, and exercise as one of the factors whose neglect blocks the body's repair. Look for misplaced load. If the ego or physical mind is carrying weight that belongs to the higher mind, relief comes from letting each aspect return to its designed role. Seed a carefree state. A creative, joyful, carefree activity — even recalling a childhood memory of that state — is offered as the practical entry point for letting stress drain from a burdened life. ## Representative passages If what you're doing is your joy, make sure you're doing it in a way that you enjoy, because if you're not doing what you enjoy in a way that you enjoy, you're not doing your joy.— Bashar, Fourth Density Balancing Act (fourth-density-balancing-act#qa-10) We're not talking, nor have we ever talked about coping with stress. We have talked about transforming your reality to allow it to be stress-free.— Bashar, Fourth Density Balancing Act (fourth-density-balancing-act#text) It is tired of laboring under such stressful circumstances, it is tired of bearing the weight… it was never designed to handle that kind of weight, that kind of stress.— Bashar, Being Your Full Self (being-your-full-self#text) That state of being is where she wants to come from to reduce and eliminate the stress.— Bashar, On Our Own (on-our-own#text) ## Related - [Excitement](https://sassani.app/topic/excitement) - [Health & Wellness](https://sassani.app/topic/health-and-wellness) - [Self-Empowerment](https://sassani.app/topic/self-empowerment) - [Natural Self](https://sassani.app/topic/natural-self) - [The Ego](https://sassani.app/topic/the-ego) Markdown twin of https://sassani.app/topic/stress. The HTML page is the source of truth.