Where Does Stress Come From?

"People say modern life is stressful. Stress is not a characteristic of life or times, but of people. Stress does not come from the environment, it comes from the mind of the individual under stress. We make certain assumptions about the world, and we become attached to those assumptions. We suffer from thinking. We worked too hard to learn our ideas about the world to give them up. Like poker players who have already lost too much, we desperately double the bet in hopes of forcing fate to give us a good card. We think about things too much and too seriously and we suffer a great deal from trying to make the world match our thinking. We com-plain about how the world fails to live up to our expectations. We think about how life doesn't live up to its billing, and how it should, and how it is rotten that it doesn't, and how we should somehow fix it. Many people think themselves to death.

In order to survive, we have to apply what we have learned from experience. But it is equally true that in order to thrive—in order to stay alive—we have to overcome continually what we have previously learned. If we don't somehow get rescued from our assumptions about life, they devour us. Rescue involves recognizing that the assumptions we so stubbornly cling to as truths are, in fact, decisions we have made about what "should be true" based on past experiences."

-Brad Blanton, Radical Honesty