It might be surprising, but the act of compromise is an essential tool in any stress busting armoury given the many colours of opinion.
While this recognition only comes to many with age, experience and the emotional scars to prove it, the sooner one learns to accept and embrace it, the better.
The reasons compromise is so important to maintaining healthy stress levels are various and include the following:
● it helps avoid conflicts and arguments that can otherwise be polarising and escalate needlessly into highly anxious scenarios
● it allows you to focus on and find common ground with others in a constructive way that bodes well for future dealings and encounters that may be inevitable with those persons
● it avoids feeling as if you have to continually look over your shoulder - for this reason, never dismiss an olive branch out of hand!
● it reduces the pressure of feeling you always having to get your own way or control events, and have somehow failed if you do not
● it accepts that, given radical developments in technology and infrastructure, we live in an increasingly interconnected world in which our own choices can and do regularly affect others
● it promotes cooperation, so generates better end results and enables you to learn from the often different but no less worthy perspectives of others.
Of course, compromise is a two way process and there may be occasions where despite best endeavours, common ground with a person or situation cannot be identified. But in that case, at least if a compromise has been attempted, there is no need to look back on what might have been with regret or disappointment.