If you find yourself in a dangerous environment, there are two primary paths you can take to reduce the potency of those dangers: you can build barriers between yourself and the threats, and you can acclimate yourself to them.

The barriers we might build range from weapons to clothing to artificial shelters. These are all things that other creatures also make for themselves, but we humans are particularly good at tool-making.

Acclimation generally takes quite a bit more time, but it also doesn’t remove us from our environments the way tool-making can. This approach might entail learning new food-gathering techniques so that we don’t collect and eat the poisonous berries that look a lot like the edible ones, or perhaps adjusting our sleeping patterns so that we’re safely hidden when predators are on the lookout for easy prey.

I sometimes find this to be a useful analogy when considering how I might respond to other sorts of environmental pressures, like personal or professional adversity, psychological stress, or even larger-scale issues like increasing societal and economic uncertainty.

Is this new threat something I should avoid as much as possible, even to the point of building walls around myself for protection? Or is it something I should embrace until it’s no longer a threat to me, becoming something alongside which I can coexist and even thrive?

Should I focus my attention on extracting myself from this inconvenient, perhaps even dangerous new scenario? Or should I try to hug it to death, perhaps changing myself and how I do things along the way so that I better fit within the new reality it portends?

It’s worth the effort required to become comfortable and competent with both approaches, especially since many of us reflexively default to one or the other without giving our less-favored option fair consideration—even when the alternative might be more optimal in a given situation.

Also worth remembering is that these options are not zero-sum.

Most of us, most of the time, end up doing a bit of both, and that’s often the most ideal option based on the outcomes we want to achieve.

Understanding what outcomes we want to make manifest, though, and recognizing that we are capable of leaning more heavily in one direction or the other as we try to achieve those outcomes, can help us wobble toward equilibrium as we attempt to weather increasing imbalance.

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