“Stress happens when the mind resists what is.” — Dan Millman
TSST = Trier Social Stress Test
MBSR = Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
The phenomenon of “empathic stress” causes individuals who are exposed to people who are stressed to experience stress themselves.
- If someone feels 同情 compassion (“I want to relieve your suffering.”) for a stressed person instead of 同理 empathy (“I feel your suffering.”), they may be less likely to take on that person’s stress.
The Yerkes-dodson Law
- Stress and performance are positively correlated but only up to a point, after which more stress actually reduces performance.
3Q Filters Test
- If you want to curb stress, you need to curate your thoughts.
- Run them through Jon Acuff’s 3 filters:
- Is it true?
- Is it helpful?
- Is it kind?
- If they’re not accurate, not serving you and making you feel worse, discard them immediately.
How to Prevent Anxiety Attacks? Slowly Look around You and find…
- 5 things you can see
- 4 things you can touch
- 3 things you can hear
- 2 things you can smell (or 2 smells you like)
- 1 emotion you feel
This is called “Grounding.”
Stress and anxiety are a tax on extreme ambition. They feed on idleness. When you take action, you starve them of the oxygen they need to survive.
Often, stress and anxiety come from the lack of a plan to bridge the gap between your present reality and future expectations, and are directly proportional to the amount of time you spend in the past or future.
- Solution: create a plan that will guide your daily actions to close the gap
- Once you have a plan, stress and anxiety melt away, because it just becomes a “game” of executing on a daily set of actions, which is entirely within your control.