For me, it's not necessarily just that I pushed too far too fast. It's that I realized that if I do push far, that I need a good amount of recovery time to deal with it. That is, I'm OK with dealing with one big stressful event, but it's the "death by a thousand cuts" that I just can't handle, cases where I have lots of little stressors or interruptions.

And that's OK. There are plenty of ways I can be happy by not putting myself in situations where I need to deal with tons of these little stressors. Just probably took me longer than it should have to know what I'm good at, and how I like to be challenged.

Or, in other words - you need to learn how to pace your stresses and over time you’ll couch yourself to a person who’s capable of handling stress better.

I am a very sensitive person, nevertheless it took me years to learn how to do big leaps; and while at first I believed the only way forward for me were those “revolutionary, yet incredibly painful steps”, I had then reached an age when I could no longer progress in larger, rarer chunks.

So I learnt that I need to pace my pushes. It still is a cut each time, but I had to know how big that cut can be so that it would not be an irrecoverable wound.

Remember, none of those people jumped off a cliff to stop fearing heights. Neither have they worked out in a situation with a vitamin deficiency. It’s all healthy and psychological.

Thanks for sharing. That's awesome that you gained a better awareness of what works for you. Cheers to that.