I understand the sentiment and I know where you're coming from with this.

Still, if you want to be less stressed, the only solution that I have found is to just not stress over things. The moment you deeply believe that only stress will improve your life situation, you have made a decision for it to be so. This is the mechanism by which the stress then proliferates not only in you, but also to others. And you don't even get a guarantee that it's worth it. You may end up with only stress and all the goals you tried to achieve with it falling apart anyway. I don't think it's worth it. One needs to find a balance.

The total output of advice in this article are the last two lines:

> Very few people plan or prepare for what they’ll do and how they’ll act during those times. Those who do might well end up turning their worst day into their best.

My suggestion for not failing miserably when something goes wrong is to manage one's stress levels. A therapist once said to me "everyone has their breaking point". Her suggestion was don't allow others to place or allocate their stresses on you, especially when you may venerable to taking on other's stresses through codependent behaviors.

Actually, I think this is a wrong rule of thumb. In my experience, there is more of a "barbell dynamics" (Taleb):

I can take a lot of stress at once, but then I need some time to recover. I find this perfectly healthy and it grows me as a human being. On the other hand, when I'm under constant stress with no relief in sight, that's the real killer.

Organizing society to minimize harm is an understandable impulse, but it's really harmful to people's ability to cope when difficult to avoid or unavoidable stressors hit.

This only makes sense if you assume that being stressed is a correct and useful response to your environment.

I believe this is a huge source of stress today, with 24-hour news and addictive social media all constantly screaming "the sky is falling" and there's absolutely _nothing_ you can do about any of it. As an experiment, for every bit of news and every tweet you read, ask yourself "is this actionable?"

The best thing you can do for your personal mental and physical well-being is stop paying attention. If you can find a source of local, actionable news that actually affects you, great (good luck). Otherwise just focus on the immediate world around you - family, friends, job, community - and let the larger world do what it's going to do anyways.

What are you supposed to do then?

How do you "not accept"?

> stop and recover that control.

Let's say there's a severe security issue in the software you've shipped. The production servers are down, at the same time, bad luck. And you've promised to ... something, on Monday. And dinner with your girl/boyfriend in the evening, or you've promised the kids [...].

(Or replace the above, with something more applicable in your case?)

What would you do?

One thing could be to power off all you servers and software (to temporarily stop the security problem), and take a few days off, email auto responder.

But is that going to cause less stress or more

and it's more like "handle" stress better

It might define how much stress people try to handle. But it certainly doesn't define the limit of what you can handle (which is completely out of your control).

But intense physical exertion _is_ stress, so this approach can backfire when your stress load is too high.

Acting out when under stress is a call for help.

Please do not go around controlling yourself, it only prevents change for the better, as they implied in the article;

"But it helps to have scientific evidence to bolster the case for public and workplace policies that might make our lives less stressful — and thus, we hope, more compassionate.”

We do not need better people, we need a better society.

This is a common misconception when the concept of biological stress is applied to humans. It stems from the correct observation that an increase in external stressors usually increases stress.

If you are interested in the science, two helpful models to conceptualise stress are Lazarus' stress model [1] and the jobs-demands-resources model [2].

Stress is the result of a lack of resources to deal with demands (stressors), not stressors themselves! As an example, most of us will never be air traffic controllers, simply because we would not be able to deal with the demands.

This is not to say the most effective way to treat stress isn't to remove the stressor. It's simply another avenue that can be pursued in parallel, and sometimes the only one available, in particular when stressors are internal (think negative thoughts, phobias, mental health).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appraisal_theory

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_demands-resources_model

I don't think that's a conclusion you can actually make, it's still a very different kind of stress, especially for someone introverted. When I'm being evaluated, the stress is crippling me - I'm overly nervous and can mess up even the simplest things; even finding correct words can be hard. However, when I'm in a urgent situation where something needs fixing, or deadline is passing, I become focused, assertive (but also easily irritated) and take charge much more easily than usual - and that short-term stress actually helps there. Those are very different situations that make people react differently.

" Stress is the feeling one gets when there is so much to do that it can't be done without cheating. For most people, cheating is unpleasant. In order to get the courage to cheat, we need another unpleasant feeling to whip us into it. And that feeling is called stress.

Stress is what we experience when we have too many deadlines to meet too soon. We know that something must go. But we don't know what. So the feeling of stress becomes a perpetual spur to cheat with small things. Maybe work can't be sacrificed. But cooking can. So stressed people eat sandwiches and drink Coke although they know they will feel bad from it in the long term. They avoid double-checking details they know they should be double-checking and hope to get away with it. They know they should be friendly to people around them, but they cheat with that too, because they know they will get away with it, for a while at least. [...] having realized that stress is essentially about cheating, I had the key to stop feeling stressed in everyday life: Only set ridiculously realistic and flexible goals for myself. Decide exactly what I want to do with the time and energy I have and do that and nothing else.

Humans in general want to do more than they are able to do. That is only natural. The opposite, wanting to do less than one is technically capable of doing is called depression. That is not a nice feeling. So the first step towards not being stressed is accepting that if ambitions are higher than ability, that is just a sign of mental health.

Step 2 is to choose consciously among those ambitions. This is hard, because it requires giving up on parts of one's identity. I want to be a person who works hard, keeps physically in shape, spends time with my children, reads books, writes about what I read, maintains a home with a certain standard of maintenance and cleanliness, has many children, wears clothes that are not visibly worn out… I want all that. And I can't achieve all that. I have to choose.

The choice can be made two ways:

1. Consciously and calmly making priorities: What is important and what is less important? What needs to be done right now and what can be saved for later? What should I simply skip?

2. Unconsciously and chaotically. Try to do everything that would be nice to do, and cheat constantly in the process. "

Is there anything you can do to reduce excessive stress?

Scrum has been so co-opted by management that it tries to disallow any sort of self-soothing on a project. I am forever having to misrepresent the importance of work that I 'needed' to do that perhaps not everyone else sees the wisdom of. Either hiding it entirely or overselling it. Because if I have to deal with the consequences (including dealing with other people who are affected) of this goddamned piece of code any longer I'm going to quit, and what will happen to your precious schedules then?

"Refactoring" 1st Ed is, through this lens, formalized self-care represented as philosophy instead of psychology. For many of us it feels good (or at least, not doing it feels awful) but we can't say that, so we make it about ethics.

There was a videotaped interview with Joel Spolsky a ways back, and I couldn't tell you a thing about what he was being interviewed about except for his answer to the warmup question, which was delivered half jokingly, about how over time his job has changed to psychotherapist, and that his bookshelf has slowly converted to a few technical books and a lot of psychology books. Of course we cannot be serious about such things, so he had to joke about it.