Principle 2: Avoiding Unnecessary and Harmful Stress

As part of the trials during a person's lifetime, they are occasionally placed in situations that cause stress and mental pressure and must deal with them. Therefore, the human psyche is designed to withstand stress and pressure without collapsing — but only up to a certain limit.

 

Indeed, the pressures and stresses that come upon every person at different times in their lives arrive in a way that doesn’t exceed their capacity to withstand them. For Hashem does not bring a trial upon a person unless they can bear it (as stated in the sages' language: [1] "Hashem does not confront His creations with demands beyond their capacity").

 

Just as a person has the power of choice to choose between good and evil, to keep their Creator's commandments or to transgress them, to heal their body or to harm it, and as a result, bears the consequences of their good or bad choices, similarly, a person can choose to protect their soul from unnecessary stress and pressure or expose it to them, ultimately bearing the consequences of their choice.

 

A person who chooses to inject unnecessary stressful information into their mind — in addition to life's regular pressures — by watching suspense and horror movies, weakens their ability to cope with pressures and, worse, lives with the false notion that the world is terrifying and prone to calamity far more than the reality they live in. For the content they have consumed painted a picture of a world filled with violence, troubles, fear, and horror.

 

Thus, when experiencing severe mental stress due to any crisis during their life, all the alarming images stored in their subconscious surface, combining into a massive imaginary threat, causing them to mentally collapse.

 

According to this principle, we were commanded in the Torah: [2] "And you shall not wander after your hearts and after your eyes after which you go astray".

 

In other words, you follow and stray after them. This is stated in the verse as a factual assertion that a person follows their eyes and heart unless they make an internal effort to avoid it. This is the tendency of the material body and its inclinations. The curiosity that causes the eyes and heart to wander like a tourist seeking what to see, and the desire that seeks to implement what the sense of sight has captured and heart contemplation has envisaged, leading a person to sin whose beginning is desire and end is suffering.

 

Just as in forbidden matters of modesty and holiness, a person is drawn to follow their eyes and heart due to the curiosity urge and ultimately suffers both from staining their pure soul with forbidden images and from losing sensitivity and the level of emotional enjoyment in their private life in this world, they are similarly drawn with natural curiosity toward negative content such as those presented on the internet, television, and violent movies, to watch them and excite themselves with it, resulting in both the tarnishing of their pure soul with the corruption of cruelty and other bad traits, and the erosion of their ability to handle stress and pressure throughout their life.

 

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