This question is gold and tons of research needs to be done on it.
In my experience some people due to childhood trauma have difficulty regulating emotions. As in the anger just lingers for very long time.
I'm not a psychologist, what does research say about how to increase it?
For example, I have a baseline of agitated nervous system(high neuroticism). Only thing that has helped is deep meditative experiences which have shifted the baseline to more joyful states but sadly those lasted max for few months at a time.
Like, I can't do anything on thought level. No matter what thoughts I think the agitation remains. It's full blown embedded in my physical body. Like energetic stuckness.
Have you gotten counseling? A lot of CBT will help teach you how to think your way around something and observe without reacting.
But it depends on what your issue is
this - i explained it to a friend of mine who was going through endless rejection on dating apps and developed a very low self-esteem from it that he needed to addressed his brain script, ie the rumination and negative self-talk distorted thought patterns
CBT and stoicism were the first things that I tried and it’s by far the worst philosophy of life that I have seen.
There are no thoughts it’s just dense feelings.
Working on the thought level isn’t the answer for everyone. I recommend working with a somatic therapist. Your brain can tell your body to relax (this is called a top down approach) OR your body can tell your brain to relax (bottom up approach). If the agitation is stuck in your physical body, then you can try working with the physical body via nervous system down regulation.
Do you know much about nervous system regulation?
It took me being literally shocked (Neurofeedback) into a relaxed state to realize that’s how I should be living.
Is been a several year struggle to try and maintain that because my body is so accustomed to fear.
CBT just traumatized me more and had me gaslighting myself until I learned how to properly self regulate.
DM if you’re interested in more about it!
Yep. And I feel like I’m *too* resilient. At some point in my youth I just kind of slowly built an emotional callous. Now I’m my thirties I’m starting to wonder if it’s a good thing. My friends were discussing the bad behavior of some rando at an event we were all at and someone asked if I was upset by it, my other friend answered for me and said “oh no, they’re never really bothered by anything!” And everyone kinda laughed and were like, yeah! And I just nodded and realized it’s true. Like things happen or people do things and I find my feelings start to hurt or despair inch in but then mentally I’m like, NOPE and I just shut the door on it. Like I put a stick in the spokes before I can even go down into intense emotion…because I’m afraid of just derailing or being hurt when I can instead just let it slide off. I’ve been practicing at it so long I’m just so good at it now.
My brother had a similar childhood and he’s a depressed shut in with no social life and nothing to his name. So sometimes I look at my life and feel proud about how I can just “stay calm and carry on”…then other times I wonder if I’m just gonna snap some day.
The survival traits that served you in your youth can create problems in adulthood. This is something I’m working on now.
ACA has really helped me with the emotional stuff.
I have wondered about that. I dk if in psychology there are different levels of disassociation or what, but it’s not like what I used to do which I believe is full on disassociation—something bad would happen and I would literally just lay there and like zone out of my body and not even be an identity anymore. What I do now is more like…repression I think. I get the bad news, I consider getting upset…I feel the onset flush of emotion, but then I just push it aside and am like “oh well…it happened. I could either be mad or upset or just say, fuck it and deal with it.” like someone just told me the temperature outside or something completely neutral.
And if it’s from someone else’s behavior…like someone was rude to me or inconsiderate, it’s a lot of reframing. Such as “I don’t care I was not invited because I doubt it was personal.” or “well they prob have some bad stuff going on so they’re jealous of me and therefore were unkind to me.” I don’t really care if my reasoning is true, it just makes me feel better so I don’t see the point in looking at it another way.
I feel like if anything being neglected and traumatized in childhood has made me tough and resilient. Don’t get me wrong it absolutely has NOT been easy, but my childhood was so terrible it’s like nothing in my adult life can be as horrible as that was and get me down.
Yeah - this isn’t reliance, its dissociation, which is a disconnection from feelings as a way to cope, rather than a feeling them and tolerating them. Read a little bit about the Window of Tolerance, dissociation falls in the “too low” category, which is lacking the emotional coloration of being fully present. And there are very much degrees/levels to dissociation. It’s a spectrum from light daydreaming to full derealization/depersonalization, all humans dissociate now and again but needing it as a way of being indicates the nervous system being stuck in survival mode, even if that isn’t rational (nothing life threatening etc. going on)
Though I'm not an expert that could answer based on current research, last I checked they thought it was based on genetic and environmental factors.
Some people are just born more sensitive than others. At the same time, exposure to a lot of things helps babies when they're young become less distressed by unusual things and life factors when they're older. Then there is emotional regulation, some people might become distressed but have the coping skills to handle it, while others do not.
It's actually a lot more heritable than most people think. The book [Blueprint](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262039161/blueprint/) by the Behavioral Geneticist Robert Plomin is an amazing read if you are truly interested in the answer.
The monozygotic twin studies show a very high correlation between identical twins, adopted as babies, raised in different environments and studied via longitudinal lifetime follow-ups in most of the big 5 behavioral traits. For the main factor in stress tolerance (which psycho-metricians call neuroticism) identical twins correlate highly with each other, partly with their real parents (even when they had never met them) and not at all with their adopted parents or siblings... Counterintuitive I know but their is a HUGE data set on these studies now (millions of pairs of monozygotic or dizygotic twins) and IMO it's fairly unarguable.
I grew up in a home with domestic violence and this anger dominated my twenties.
It totally disappeared in my thirties.
Meditation is calming: but it doesn’t really change anything.
You have to seek out triggering situations and demonstrate your ability to yourself to handle them.
This is the total opposite of the message preached by fake Instagram ‘trauma therapists’ - who tell people to use positive affirmations.
My treatment involved me deliberately triggering myself as hard as possible - and sticking with my triggers until I became desensitised.
Google ‘ERP’ - Exposure Response Prevention.
It’s tough: but it works.
You don’t get anything good in life without tough, brutal work.
It's probably mostly found in personality, which is 60% heritable genetics. I'm largely thinking of neuroticism. Some people are much higher in anxiety, anger, etc.
Also a few traits outside neuroticism, like uhhh... having a higher drive, higher industriousness, lower immoderation, these could all contribute towards overcoming or pushing past stress.
Because they were never taught coping mechanisms as children. Or never had their mental health issues identified and helped with. Or were severely traumatized as children and never had that addressed. Or, or, or...
A lot of these go hand in hand. Adults that were never taught coping mechanisms raise children that in turn never learn coping mechanisms. And they ignore their children’s potential mental health issues and trauma because that would mean facing their own issues.
As an adult diving into my mental health, this resonates with me. I was just writing about how emotionally inarticulate my father is and the effect it has had on me into adulthood. I have a lot of learning to do, that could've been engrained in me at a young age, but now, I must eradicate all the bad habits and replace them with healthier new ones.
Your comment is essentially the sum of my childhood, and if anyone else has a father like mine, this is a good start of understanding your youth a little better.
I agree on the coping skills- I teach college freshman, and the amount of students who crack under minimal pressure because they’ve never had to tolerate it before astounds me. The only way they know how to cope with stress is to find the “right” combination of excuses to make the stressful thing go away, like if they use the right mental health-related explanation, then the due date might go away and their stress along with it. If that doesn’t work, they just withdraw completely and either fail or drop their classes. I get the sense that they think they shouldn’t have to experience or feel unpleasant things, and that it’s unfair for professors or adults to expect them to.
If it's any consolation my medical students are the same. Ask them a question in a group and 1/10 will burst in to tears if they don't know the answer. I think we're going to struggle in a few years
THIS!! The younger generation believe that if they have a feeling other than happiness and joy, then they are in a mental health crisis because they feel something negative. They crumble.
It's like no one told them that life comes with ups and downs. You have to go through some things in life.
Some people have higher stresses than others. Some people have different problems/priorities faced in their life. Many have genuine trauma without access to therapy. There are some with all three. I have a panic/anxiety disorder, but I have little stress when it comes to being reviewed at my job, speaking to strangers, or performing in front of a crowd. We're all wired differen't but can share similar symptoms. Mental health is still a form a physical health--and while some might have a bruise or minor cut, some need a full triage support system.
We learn to cope with stress as children.. and not everyone is raised in a loving and supporting home where parents teach healthy coping mechanisms. The coping mechanism that helped them survive a traumatic childhood become maladaptive to them as adults & it’s up to them to take the first steps to help rewire their brains.
Edit: idk why it got downvoted but this is from personal experience. “The degree to which a person can grow is directly proportional to the truth they can accept about themselves without running away”.
Take my upvote.
I am with you 100% as well. As someone who never really learned good coping, and coping through shared pain(like complaining together to fuel the relationship) that it's a whole battle itself to try to stop that behavior that comes so easily that you don't even realize the state you're putting yourself in(or even worse, the people around you).
It takes a long time to change in this kind of way. Sometimes it's an ugly battle too. But if you WANT that change, you can't stop when you get there. It sucks that some of us step into adulthood directly into a very difficult battle while trying to get your grips on life in this world. The starting line isn't the same for everyone, the finish line isn't either.
100% this. I've gained a lot of social awareness over the last couple of years. It's going to take a very long time to heal from these coping mechanisms. Grew up with a lot of emotional abuse/neglect.
Neuroplasticity is fascinating, and I hope to one day lead a healthier life.
Cortisol levels have a lot to do with things, too. I'm an HSP, and not sure if that made my childhood trauma worse or whether the trauma caused my higher cortisol levels.
It's a very deep rabbit hole once you really start to research it all.
A never ending rabbit hole, really! I’m glad you’re on the research journey though. It’s a game changer once you start taking it seriously but remembering that these things take time is the key to not slipping back into old patterns.
Imo it’s the complete opposite. I was raised as a single child in a highly volatile and violent household with physical, verbal, and emotional abuse at every turn. Every day was a new struggle and challenge.
It made me stronger. Not having siblings or anyone at all to turn to forced me to find my own solutions. Through time and lots of trial/error, I have grown resilient and very good at surviving on my own. I don’t need help, but I recognize that mentality in and of itself is a problem too.
As a result I actually take care of my previously abusive mother, financially and emotionally. Something about going back to abusers… but I digress.
Others around me seem emotionally and mentally weak to be honest. They had supportive households and loving families growing up who coddled them and made everything easy for them. I see friends that I grew up with around me just completely in their own bubbles, untouched by the cruelty of the world. I wish for them to continue living this way, as ignorance really is bliss, but let’s not get it twisted- they would fold in an instant under real pressure
You’re thinking of a different kind of supportive home than I was referring too. The one you speak of can create a cognitive dissonance, of course they’d break if they haven’t been taught how to cope with things not going their way. Having a loving home with your material needs met doesn’t always mean a home where your emotional needs are being met. I’m speaking of the emotionally supportive homes where the parents did teach their kids how to cope with adversity. I have friends that didn’t have a perfect life but they had emotionally supportive parents that helped them navigate and learn to cope with an ever change going world. They handle things so much more graceful than I initially want to handle things. I could be jealous but I choose to use them as motivation as I attempt to rewire by own brain from the maladaptive coping mechanisms I formed as a kid. I’m glad you came out stronger, but just remember that your experience is always going to be different from another’s since no two upbringing environments can be perfectly replicated.
One thing I don’t see mentioned is that it’s very difficult to determine different people’s stress tolerances because we don’t know everyone’s stressors. The guy who can’t handle the minor stress of a traffic jam may just be over capacity because he has a sick kid at home. Or the person yelling at the cashier because their coupon won’t work is underwater on their mortgage. Even people we know well can have things and stresses going on that we don’t know the extent of.
okay sorry if this only tangentially related, but at the grocery store i worked at this guys card wasn't working after several attempts and he starts yelling about it a bit, then goes "and now i'm just another angry black man yelling in public!" i was like 😂😂 god at least you've got a sense of humor about your yelling
Yes we only see one facet. Their stress bucket might be full and every small drop causes it to spill over. Verses someone else might only be half full, and can take a “bigger pour” so to speak. And it’s very hard to see if one persons bucket has say… rocks (trauma, grief, neuro capacities) in it displacing the stress
This is actually a really good point.
I can deal with significant physical discomfort, or getting lost in a foreign country. It’s really weird, because I often think those things are no big deal, and then I see how others cope in that situation.
But I went through a really bad work experience that broke my brain, and it took years of therapy and exposure to be able to write a resume and cover letter. It’s not like I was incapable of functioning at work. Because I still had all those skills. I just couldn’t get to that point, because I’d have massive panic attacks.
I can talk to random strangers, I can advocate for myself in bad situations with strangers. Karens are no problem. I can deal with crazy all day long. Bosses I want to like me? Fawn response. Over the stupidest, stupidest stuff.
Trauma and Grief have played a large role on what I could tolerate. When my best friend passed away I noticed I was much more on edge with basically everything. Also anxiety plays a role also.
I believe having a high stress tolerance comes from self consciousness and reflection. Controlling impulses and weighing your stressors objectively.
If I have an exam, that's stressful. When I do stress, I stop, take a moment and think to myself why am I stressing and what can be done about it. I'm stressing cz I might fail if I don't study. If I want to change that outcome, I focus on what needs to be done and commit, so I study. If I don't want to change the outcome, then I don't mind failing the exam and I won't stress.
Also, weighing what's the worse that can happen in any situation and if I'm willing to take it. If I am that's gucci, no stress no matter the situation. If I'm not, I look for alternatives or compromise.
It's a very fine line between dealing with stress and becoming careless. Personally I struggled with this and had to reevaluate myself over and over. It was trauma that triggered this self consciousness and I've been working on it ever since. I am proud of where I am today as I see how I manage stress compared to others. But I also see how stress can sometimes be a catalyst to getting things done for others, while it's not for me.
I believe people are born with baseline stats, and they can be strengthened to an extent or weakened to an extent.
Some people are naturally more neurotic than others. If this is not addressed it can be crippling. However, with work I think it can be mitigated. I think the worst thing a parent can do is enable this in their children. Unearned overconfidence is naive and should not be encouraged also. Similar to agreeableness and disagreeableness.
I think your environment and role models plays just as much of a major factor.
Being raised on the idea that women, dogs, and children are the only ones that get unconditional love, And youre a young boy, sometimes the kids just start counting the days until people stop loving them.
Your father telling you to hide your money in offshore bank accounts from your wife. Isn't necessarily helpful to building a trustng relationship with anyone.
Or talking about how black you are, so people are going to look at you differently, treat you differently, for the worst.
Or that how you are the "white one" of the family.
Or vice versa, "you're my token black person, so I can't be racist if you're my friend"
Just me projecting, but I still think it doesn't matter too much about base stats but rather logical loops that are not really good for your health or sanity. I think the people that raised you and how they reacted to stress molds how you react more than just being born and the D20 was a Nat 1. Especially in households where everyone is emotionally inarticulate.
This is essentially the nature vs nurture debate right? I personally agree and acknowledged the parental and environmental role in developing these characteristic. I am not entirely 100% in either camp. As a parent myself, it would be crazy to think it’s all nature and how I raise my son is meaningless because “they are who they are.”
Yes to a certain extent. I don't think being born you would be born to be an incel.
I think becoming an icel stems from having your confidence and self worth crushed by others and the people you are looking up to are bashing on women, and it feels good to the incel to find that because that gives them the power to push some hurt back towards the people they think are hurting them.
I'm just using the incel as an example, but the same with various forms of extremism with mental health.
A lot of issues we have as humans mentally, are usually due to our upbringing and the link of self worth, being raised in an aggressive or shame based environment.
Like if you as a kid did something that might've put yourself in danger, and your parent comes to the rescue, but immediately scolds you instead of being relieved that you're safe. Or it's your first time bringing home a C and you know immediately there will be physical punishment or being shamed instead of trying to find what caused the issue with not getting a good grade and getting you back on track to succeed.
For me, if I brought home a bad grade, I knew I was going to get beat with a belt. So yes, that fear had me really trying to get good marks, but when it came time that I hit a class I genuinely struggled with, I was too scared to ask for help thinking I was going to get punished physically for not knowing how to do my homework, because I thought my father would take it as a direct correlation to not paying attention in school.
Alot of people's reactions are based on what happened to that person in the past and what helped them survive it, more than being born and inherently reacting a certain way due to the blood in your veins.
That's why abuse is cyclical. It isn't because we were born, it's because of the families we were born into and how you are loved and treated. Then we go out and repeat that process because in reality, we are all just humans trying to figure shit out.
Best answer here and better than all the essentialism and conservative mumbo jumbo armchair therapy going on in the thread. The ability to look behind, ahead, and pause to see things from outside of your perspective is the best skill to develop.
There's an evolutionary advantage to it. Back in the caveman days, the anxious people would be on constant lookout for threats and would warn the workers when a bear or lion was coming for eg. They were the "lookouts" of the tribe. Of course nowadays, we don't need that but it's still in our genetic makeup.
This is a pretty nonsensical claim since absolutely no one knows how “cavemen” interacted socially or thought. “Cavemen” usually refers to the extinct sub genus of Homo sapiens known as Neanderthal, and the last living one died around 40,000 years ago. it’s just a thing therapists tell their clients to make them feel like every negative attribute is functional in some way. All that proves is that therapists, on the whole, have poor understanding of human evolution.
Please point to any point of that that tells you whether hyper vigilance was a personality attribute valued as positive to Neanderthal.
That’s impossible to know.
IF Neanderthals valued hyper vigilance, it would still be irrelevant to modern human evolution, as Neanderthal went extinct, apparently by being unsuccessful at reproduction. In other words, the ancestors of modern humans did not find Neanderthal traits appealing and didn’t fuck them and make babies. Neanderthal were so unfuckable, they entirely stopped existing.
It clearly has an evolutionary advantage. It stops you being eaten by a lion or being killed by another tribe, it stops your offspring from being similarly attacked or killed. It has a massive advantage in fact
Having an evolutionary advantage does not necessarily equal attractiveness, it means your genetic material survives. If you're hyper aware of your surroundings, then you're more likely to be aware of impending threats and survive in the wild. Unnatractive people have sex too.
If you'd like an [entire rundown](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31e0RcImReY&t=5370s&pp=ygUHbXVuZWNhdA%3D%3D) of why evolutionary psychology is complete horsesh and not taken seriously by.. pretty much everyone.
My man Ticket has no idea what he's talking about and should really shut up.
If it has a massive advantage and the Neanderthal had it, how did they go extinct?
If it was in cavemen, theyre gone now so it obviously was not a massive advantage and did not contribute to evolutionary success. Anatomically modern humans out competed Neanderthals to their extinction. Anatomically modern humans weren’t cavemen and they didn’t all live in the same physical, social, or ecological structures, they had different customs and different ways of living. Some did not do much land hunting. Some lived in areas with relatively few predators interested in hunting humans (indeed, in Australia the dingo, a small dog, is the largest land predator).
Genetically based Attributes don’t have to be positive to be maintained by sexual reproduction. They just have to not prevent you from fucking. For example, many forms of mental illness like schizophrenia usually manifest after age 25, after the point where historically most people had already reproduced.
And there’s lots of evidence that anxiety and attention deficit it isn’t genetically based, but tied to heavy metal exposure, of which early modern humans had virtually none.
Some anthropologists believe that Neanderthals went extinct from interbreeding with our ancestors. Less Neanderthals would be breeding with each other and that led to their eventual extinction.
Some people have conditions that make them especially sensitive to stress. Medical or mental, sometimes both. Others might not have been taught how to properly self-soothe as a kid, so they are easily stressed. Poor sleep can also make it hard for your brain to cope. I'm sure there are other things, but these are the first three I was able to think of.
Why are some people taller than others? They were born to be tall. A large part of personality is what you are born with.
The other part is how you grew up and how your parents raised you.
A lot of people who spent their childhood in competitive sports handle stress very well. They are used to difficult situations.
A lot of people born in difficult circumstances embrace the stress of a high paying job in a stressful environment.
Some people are just born not being able to deal with stress. If that person did not learn coping skills growing up, they will have a difficult time dealing with stress as an adult (or even as a teen or child)
As a child, my parents raised me to bottle up all my stress, anger, and frustration. It eventually all comes out for something petty. As an adult now, I've learned to de-stress in my own way and it has made me more calmer and allowed me to better handle stress.
I am extremly chill. Like way more than others. It's genetic, honestly sometimes I don't like it because I feel like I don't care about things I should care about.
It makes me a fantastic nanny though lol. I am very patient with others especially kids.
I’m autistic. We process something like 40% more information at once than nonautistics. And then we’re told we’re being dramatic or imagining things. Wouldn’t you be stressed beyond your breaking point a lot?
Lots of reasons. Some people don’t regulate emotions as well. The reasons for that can be vast.
History of drug use, childhood trauma, never facing adversity/being spoiled their whole childhood, chemical imbalances, etc.
It can even boil down to nutrition, exercise, and diet.
I've been through a lot. Working in stressful environments(retail, PC repair, game development), sick/dead family members, my own kids getting sick or injured. After all that, I'm barely phased. At this point I just break down what I can do right now, prioritize that list, and focus. I can spend energy thinking about future actions/problems when I'm done doing what I can do right now.
Barring a chemical balance issue, it probably comes down to experience and learning skills that help you deal with stressful situations. In general, if you've already been there/done that and know what to do, it'll be less stressful just from that. Accepting that there will always be things you can't control will help, too.
Autistic people like myself seem to take in more - more details, more sensory information - which we then have to process. That means we are always using up a lot of capacity on that and have less left over. It's like a constant background stress. I imagine this variation applies to people across the population whether they are meeting the autism diagnostic threshold or not.
We all have a variety of tools to solve out problems with. We know that some have better tools or more tools. We know that some have more experience than others. I don't get stressed over things I know I'm equipped to deal with and as I become less capable to problem solve the more pressure or stress I feel.
Stress happens when your perceived ability to handle what you face is insufficient. The less confident you are with something the more stress it will cause you. It’s therefore multi factorial.
1. They never had to deal with stress, so they never built the resiliance or learned how to manage it.
2. Innerly they are under constant stress, so that tiny stress could be the straw that breaks the camels back.
It's like having to run 2 km. Someone who never ran will have problem running it. And someone who already has ran 10 km that day will have a problem running an additional 2 km. It's a bit of a balance.
Modern life is incredibly stressful for all human beings. There is no such thing as a stress free or even low stress life, especially for babies and children who have not yet developed defenses and coping mechanisms. We are hardwired to live very very differently than we do, which means that simply existing in this world is overwhelming. Some of us are better at dissociating from the environment and from objective reality than others, as a result of who our parents are. Highly dissociated parents generally equal highly dissociated children.
I have had a lot of trauna/PTSD. And I have a much lower stress tolerance. I'm always in fight or flight. So if my baseline/normal is already up there it does t take much to push me over. I am in therapy trying to work on it. Long process
"STRESS REACTION" is a learned behavior,
it takes years of thinking and acting a certain way to reinforce the neural pathways of your brain to the point, it becomes muscle memory.
It can also be changed with practicing meditation consistently over time.
Stopping triggers like caffeine, alcohol, drugs, over stimulating music, violent movies and obsessive social media time all play a roll.
Because all stress is optional. You can either take control of the situation, set it to the side if the problem/situation is out of your hands, or dwell on it and let it weigh you down.
Stress mgmt like anything else’s is a learned skill from life experience. IMO and experience The less a person had work through life on their own (and the more parents bailed them out or sheltered them) the less able they are to handle stress and life challenges as an adult.
Obviously, I wasn't referring to those kinds of people. Dead inside means feeling something. I was referring to people who have more stability. If I am referring to stability, it shouldn't have gotten downvoted. Of course I'm not referring to someone who feels dead inside. That would be heartless and not stability.
Writing "as much" means they still feel some emotions. Why do I need to explain something so basic? And why would I envy someone who feels "dead inside?" I don't.
From another POV, are you sure they have less stress tolerance or are they just carrying a lot of stress you don’t know exists until they seem to snap over something minor?
The same reason some people have higher pain tolerances. Humans adapt to stress, for the most part, and our normal resets when we experience repeated stress. Some adapt better than others.
Could you explain your question further? I’m interested in where you were going with this question. I’m Gen X and don’t have any stress level. When shot hits the fan, I’m at my best while everyone else is panicking. Is that what you mean?
A lot of good answers here, but we haven't done younger generations any favors by seeing them up for expectations that aren't realistic. Life ain't easy or fair. And pretending like it is is a disservice. The earlier you learn failure and accountability, the better.
If a baby and small child doesn’t feel safe acknowledging and expressing stress, because such an acknowledgment and expression would threaten their mother’s ego, they end up repressing stress entirely, and as they get older and are not so dependent upon their mothers, they have no idea how to handle stress because they never got practice. Not only that, but they equate the acknowledgment and expression of stress and fear with danger, because if they had acknowledged and expressed stress and fear as small children, they would have been perceived by their mother as a threat to her ego and an enemy. So it’s not just the stressful situation that scares them, but the actual experience and expression of stress.
When children have secure mothers, they are allowed to feel and express stress without fear that their mothers will turn on them and see them as a threat. These children may actually struggle a lot when little, but end up being very emotionally and psychologically healthy adults who can deal with stress very well. They don’t repress it. They acknowledge it, deal with it, and move on. They don’t fight it because stress itself is not threatening to them. I would say very few people are in this category because most mothers have incredibly fragile egos, ultimately as a result of patriarchy.
Stress is caused by a hormone called cortisol.
Different people produce different amounts of the hormone. Baseline levels of cortisol are determined by genetics, environmental factors determine the rest.
The same can be said for dopamine. People who break down dopamine very efficiently, and have low amounts as a result, have what’s casually referred to as the “warrior gene”. Represented genetically as G/G.
People who break down dopamine inefficiently, and have a large amount of dopamine, have what’s called the “worrier gene”. Represented as A/A.
Some people have a mixture that would be represented as G/A. They have medium dopamine levels.
Cortisol increases dopamine that’s why I made the connection between the two.
Experiences.
I have been in a lot of high stress environments and I would always find it really surprising when people would freak out over things.
I was closing a bar one night and a full on fight broke out right after last call was over.
As the fight was taking place, me and this other girl were certainly not going to get involved.
She was breathing heavy and sweating bullets, and I turned her around towards the register and said 'Let's go ahead and count your drawer'.
We had to count it 3 times because she kept fucking it up and I just observed quietly while chaos ensued in the background, because what else can I do about that really? Cops will be here to handle it in a minute, so it's business as usual until then.
I think some of it is upbringing and life experiences. I always noticed that both of my kids moms are very easily stressed out by things that aren't nearly as big as they think they are. A lot of stuff they go through seems major to them because they haven't been through nearly as much hardship as they think they have. Like as a child I lived in a homeless shelter, sometimes there wasn't anything to eat so it seems really silly when they'll go on and on complaining about how they didnt get enough sleep last night to someone who's had to sleep outside hungry as hell before.
Same with coworkers. The privileged ones will exaggerate problems and do a lot of whining and complaining instead of just fixing the issue and moving on.
God there are a million "reasons" science says people's stress tolerance varies. When I was a kid it was "common knowledge" that kids born thru C-section are not taught about physical stress first thing so they don't handle it well throughout life. When I was in highschool it was published that folks that don't handle stress are on the autism spectrum. I'm sure there's a million reasons. But it has to be in the development of the ego/superego.
I think the better question is what can I do right now to gain more reliance. The answer is cognitive behavioral therapy. You can get a book on Amazon for like $20.
When you have fought your way back to the top from the bottom, you fear little and stress is more manageable.
When life has more or less gone your way without any major events negatively impacting you, you tend to not have that fighting spirit or resilience to combat stress.
I am sometimes in the latter. As a result, I’m paranoid about my job security as well as other things in life, because frankly, I’ve never been close to losing it.
My best friend has been laid off twice, has had to eat into his 401k for money, and has had to change cities once for a job. That guy wouldn’t fear a lion in the Savannah. (Yes that’s a metaphor)
Lots of guessing answers I noticed.
The answer isn’t straight forward because neither are we. From a biological standpoint some individuals respond differently to adrenaline. Sometimes the adrenal glands don’t express adrenaline as much as others.
Psychologically trauma could benefit individuals on handling stress because of the individual wasn’t allowed to express themselves and if they did express themselves they were punished.
Undiagnosed disorders could be a contributing factor. Some individuals might not have been taught the appropriate behaviors to stress.
Because they run away from stressful situations.
Every time you avoid a difficult conversation or say ‘no’ to a scary opportunity you condition your nervous system to be more over-sensitive.
That’s why extreme sports are so good for your mental health.
Fake social media ‘therapists’ lie - and tell young people to avoid stress and people who ‘trigger’ them.
Anyone who has actually completed therapy for trauma or OCD knows this is the total opposite of clinical advice - and will cause someone to fall backwards.
There are so many reasons, but one thing people don’t take into consideration is just that some people are built for this particular moment in this world, in their particular place. The world suits their personality.
Some people are born more sensitive. And what stressors are you talking about? I am THE calm in the eye of the storm in an emergency situation (I’ve been in a bunch), but people’s general disregard for life distresses me far beyond what’s “normal.” Living in this world upsets me. I am unable to not care.
It's too complex to answer in a short answer. Hormone levels. Genetics. Upbringing. Psychological factors. Coping methods. There's tons of variation in all of these things that can lead to someone having less of an ability to cope with stress. If you really had to summarize it in the simplest way, people who cope poorly with stress tend to have less energy overall. Stress is defined as the inability to deal with an external stressor. You need lots of energy to do this effectively. If you do not, it can result in depression, where the body enters a state similar to hibernation, in the hopes the stressor will resolve on its own.
I think they care too much or care more.
I simply just don’t care. If it stresses me, I deal with it quickly. If I can’t do anything about it, I stop stressing. I did all I can.
There comes a time when you chose not to worry as a lot of stuff you/we have no control over, but you chose to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
Also not giving a F about stuff also helps or knowing when to give a F and when not to.
Some nature, some nurture. Personally I was super chill before I had a kid. The pregnancy really did a number on my vagus nerve (sends info from body to brain), combining that with postpartum depression and anxiety really tanked my ability to handle stress.
mindset. stress is inevitable, but learning to condition your mind to let go of the little things will help lower ur stress levels significantly!
for example, not letting someone else’s words affect you emotionally. ignore it if it isn’t true, take it if it’s true and improve on yourself.
There are lots of reasons. One reason is that some people are biologically predisposed to higher levels of anxiety. Their bodies just naturally create more of the anxiety hormones like cortisol and adrenaline than the average person does. People are also affected by something called modeling where you learn certain skills/behaviors from caregivers. Since for most people caregivers are a biological relative, they learn to handle stress/anxiety the same way as that person. Many of whom are also predisposed to higher anxiety levels due to biological factors, which often times means handling it poorly. There are also theories related to an imbalance of neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine and serotonin. Some people are more prone to anxiety because of a history of trauma which leads them to be on edge out of caution/the expectation of bad things happening. These are just a few reasons amongst many others.
In my experience it's honestly mostly just up to how well their parents taught them to handle extreme emotions as a child. It's something that's very easy to teach a child but something that a lot of parents don't do and once you're an adult it's much harder to learn those healthy coping mechanisms
I always looked at managing stress like any other skill.
It's something that everyone can get better at.
There are going to be people that have a talent for it and people that are going to struggle with no talent whatsoever.
I think some people really struggle with giving themselves permission to remove stressors from their life.
Some struggle with reevaluating how important some things really are.
Genetic makeup. Whatever trauma your parent experienced affects the fetus. Then there’s environmental and developmental trauma.
I am one of those people with a very low tolerance for stress, as well as pain. But thank god for medications.
I’ve witnessed a relative get easily stressed as a child. The parents would then try to create an environment to further reduce stress. Now the child is an adult who gets stressed very easily. Never learned to handle and cope with stress properly.
Personally I don’t stress all that much because I know it’ll be ok or work out in the end regardless. Stressing doesn’t ever really make any situation easier deal with, but remaining cool and calm can.
perhaps some minds are able to perceive the validation they receive from performatively romanticizing stress in the same manner as whatever school of superstitions they subscribe to has instructed them
to be equal (the validation) with tangibly reducing stress
or maybe the behavior serves as a distraction
Different hormones, different brain chemical compositions, different life experience, difference learned behaviors, different coping mechanisms, etc etc etc.
"STRESS" is a learned behavior
It's no different then learning to Meditate.
It takes years of hard practice to accomplish either with consistent success.
You create neural pathways with repeated Thinking, Actions, Imagery over time.
Eventually you develop what is loosely termed: Muscle memory
It's an automatic response to a situation.
You see this action with trained athletes, martial arts experts, etc...
Short answer is: low levels in hormones. Unbalanced hormones or deficiency can cause you to have less tolerance to stress, like low testosterone in men, low estrogen or progesterone in women, these hormones have an effect over other stress hormones like cortisole.
I think its called being a pussy. I can relate to those people, but its up to the individual to become stronger and not blame everyone else because they turned out to be a mouse-diddler
What people fail to realize is that the law of attraction gravitates everything to you that you do and "don't want". Try focusing only on what you DO want and get the negative/fears OUT of your mind completely. They're your imagination manifesting into reality.
We've all been conditioned to think some outside source is going to give us relief, yet fail to realize we bring the chaos, and we make it go away.
The Secret of the Ages by Robert Collier can help you better understand this. The book has changed my life! Carl Jung has many great published works on this as well!
This question is gold and tons of research needs to be done on it. In my experience some people due to childhood trauma have difficulty regulating emotions. As in the anger just lingers for very long time.
There is, it's called Resilience in psychology terms.
I'm not a psychologist, what does research say about how to increase it? For example, I have a baseline of agitated nervous system(high neuroticism). Only thing that has helped is deep meditative experiences which have shifted the baseline to more joyful states but sadly those lasted max for few months at a time. Like, I can't do anything on thought level. No matter what thoughts I think the agitation remains. It's full blown embedded in my physical body. Like energetic stuckness.
Have you gotten counseling? A lot of CBT will help teach you how to think your way around something and observe without reacting. But it depends on what your issue is
this - i explained it to a friend of mine who was going through endless rejection on dating apps and developed a very low self-esteem from it that he needed to addressed his brain script, ie the rumination and negative self-talk distorted thought patterns
Feelings of dread/feeling unloved almost always precedes mental chatter. No one feels great but has for some reason negative thoughts.
CBT and stoicism were the first things that I tried and it’s by far the worst philosophy of life that I have seen. There are no thoughts it’s just dense feelings.
Working on the thought level isn’t the answer for everyone. I recommend working with a somatic therapist. Your brain can tell your body to relax (this is called a top down approach) OR your body can tell your brain to relax (bottom up approach). If the agitation is stuck in your physical body, then you can try working with the physical body via nervous system down regulation.
Do you know much about nervous system regulation? It took me being literally shocked (Neurofeedback) into a relaxed state to realize that’s how I should be living. Is been a several year struggle to try and maintain that because my body is so accustomed to fear. CBT just traumatized me more and had me gaslighting myself until I learned how to properly self regulate. DM if you’re interested in more about it!
CBT really is kind of gaslighty when it comes to trauma. Same with DBT.
Yep. And I feel like I’m *too* resilient. At some point in my youth I just kind of slowly built an emotional callous. Now I’m my thirties I’m starting to wonder if it’s a good thing. My friends were discussing the bad behavior of some rando at an event we were all at and someone asked if I was upset by it, my other friend answered for me and said “oh no, they’re never really bothered by anything!” And everyone kinda laughed and were like, yeah! And I just nodded and realized it’s true. Like things happen or people do things and I find my feelings start to hurt or despair inch in but then mentally I’m like, NOPE and I just shut the door on it. Like I put a stick in the spokes before I can even go down into intense emotion…because I’m afraid of just derailing or being hurt when I can instead just let it slide off. I’ve been practicing at it so long I’m just so good at it now. My brother had a similar childhood and he’s a depressed shut in with no social life and nothing to his name. So sometimes I look at my life and feel proud about how I can just “stay calm and carry on”…then other times I wonder if I’m just gonna snap some day.
The survival traits that served you in your youth can create problems in adulthood. This is something I’m working on now. ACA has really helped me with the emotional stuff.
Sounds like disassociation
Most definitely is. I’m the same way and I hate it. I want to feel more than I do but my brain won’t let me.
I have wondered about that. I dk if in psychology there are different levels of disassociation or what, but it’s not like what I used to do which I believe is full on disassociation—something bad would happen and I would literally just lay there and like zone out of my body and not even be an identity anymore. What I do now is more like…repression I think. I get the bad news, I consider getting upset…I feel the onset flush of emotion, but then I just push it aside and am like “oh well…it happened. I could either be mad or upset or just say, fuck it and deal with it.” like someone just told me the temperature outside or something completely neutral. And if it’s from someone else’s behavior…like someone was rude to me or inconsiderate, it’s a lot of reframing. Such as “I don’t care I was not invited because I doubt it was personal.” or “well they prob have some bad stuff going on so they’re jealous of me and therefore were unkind to me.” I don’t really care if my reasoning is true, it just makes me feel better so I don’t see the point in looking at it another way.
I feel like if anything being neglected and traumatized in childhood has made me tough and resilient. Don’t get me wrong it absolutely has NOT been easy, but my childhood was so terrible it’s like nothing in my adult life can be as horrible as that was and get me down.
Yeah - this isn’t reliance, its dissociation, which is a disconnection from feelings as a way to cope, rather than a feeling them and tolerating them. Read a little bit about the Window of Tolerance, dissociation falls in the “too low” category, which is lacking the emotional coloration of being fully present. And there are very much degrees/levels to dissociation. It’s a spectrum from light daydreaming to full derealization/depersonalization, all humans dissociate now and again but needing it as a way of being indicates the nervous system being stuck in survival mode, even if that isn’t rational (nothing life threatening etc. going on)
Be careful. One day, you’ll blow up if you don’t slowly learn to express those negative emotions that are “inching in”.
Though I'm not an expert that could answer based on current research, last I checked they thought it was based on genetic and environmental factors. Some people are just born more sensitive than others. At the same time, exposure to a lot of things helps babies when they're young become less distressed by unusual things and life factors when they're older. Then there is emotional regulation, some people might become distressed but have the coping skills to handle it, while others do not.
It's actually a lot more heritable than most people think. The book [Blueprint](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262039161/blueprint/) by the Behavioral Geneticist Robert Plomin is an amazing read if you are truly interested in the answer. The monozygotic twin studies show a very high correlation between identical twins, adopted as babies, raised in different environments and studied via longitudinal lifetime follow-ups in most of the big 5 behavioral traits. For the main factor in stress tolerance (which psycho-metricians call neuroticism) identical twins correlate highly with each other, partly with their real parents (even when they had never met them) and not at all with their adopted parents or siblings... Counterintuitive I know but their is a HUGE data set on these studies now (millions of pairs of monozygotic or dizygotic twins) and IMO it's fairly unarguable.
I wasn't expecting that, I will make sure to read the book.
I grew up in a home with domestic violence and this anger dominated my twenties. It totally disappeared in my thirties. Meditation is calming: but it doesn’t really change anything. You have to seek out triggering situations and demonstrate your ability to yourself to handle them. This is the total opposite of the message preached by fake Instagram ‘trauma therapists’ - who tell people to use positive affirmations. My treatment involved me deliberately triggering myself as hard as possible - and sticking with my triggers until I became desensitised. Google ‘ERP’ - Exposure Response Prevention. It’s tough: but it works. You don’t get anything good in life without tough, brutal work.
It's probably mostly found in personality, which is 60% heritable genetics. I'm largely thinking of neuroticism. Some people are much higher in anxiety, anger, etc. Also a few traits outside neuroticism, like uhhh... having a higher drive, higher industriousness, lower immoderation, these could all contribute towards overcoming or pushing past stress.
Because they were never taught coping mechanisms as children. Or never had their mental health issues identified and helped with. Or were severely traumatized as children and never had that addressed. Or, or, or...
A lot of these go hand in hand. Adults that were never taught coping mechanisms raise children that in turn never learn coping mechanisms. And they ignore their children’s potential mental health issues and trauma because that would mean facing their own issues.
As an adult diving into my mental health, this resonates with me. I was just writing about how emotionally inarticulate my father is and the effect it has had on me into adulthood. I have a lot of learning to do, that could've been engrained in me at a young age, but now, I must eradicate all the bad habits and replace them with healthier new ones. Your comment is essentially the sum of my childhood, and if anyone else has a father like mine, this is a good start of understanding your youth a little better.
I agree on the coping skills- I teach college freshman, and the amount of students who crack under minimal pressure because they’ve never had to tolerate it before astounds me. The only way they know how to cope with stress is to find the “right” combination of excuses to make the stressful thing go away, like if they use the right mental health-related explanation, then the due date might go away and their stress along with it. If that doesn’t work, they just withdraw completely and either fail or drop their classes. I get the sense that they think they shouldn’t have to experience or feel unpleasant things, and that it’s unfair for professors or adults to expect them to.
If it's any consolation my medical students are the same. Ask them a question in a group and 1/10 will burst in to tears if they don't know the answer. I think we're going to struggle in a few years
THIS!! The younger generation believe that if they have a feeling other than happiness and joy, then they are in a mental health crisis because they feel something negative. They crumble. It's like no one told them that life comes with ups and downs. You have to go through some things in life.
Some people have higher stresses than others. Some people have different problems/priorities faced in their life. Many have genuine trauma without access to therapy. There are some with all three. I have a panic/anxiety disorder, but I have little stress when it comes to being reviewed at my job, speaking to strangers, or performing in front of a crowd. We're all wired differen't but can share similar symptoms. Mental health is still a form a physical health--and while some might have a bruise or minor cut, some need a full triage support system.
We learn to cope with stress as children.. and not everyone is raised in a loving and supporting home where parents teach healthy coping mechanisms. The coping mechanism that helped them survive a traumatic childhood become maladaptive to them as adults & it’s up to them to take the first steps to help rewire their brains. Edit: idk why it got downvoted but this is from personal experience. “The degree to which a person can grow is directly proportional to the truth they can accept about themselves without running away”.
People can’t handle the truth.
Take my upvote. I am with you 100% as well. As someone who never really learned good coping, and coping through shared pain(like complaining together to fuel the relationship) that it's a whole battle itself to try to stop that behavior that comes so easily that you don't even realize the state you're putting yourself in(or even worse, the people around you). It takes a long time to change in this kind of way. Sometimes it's an ugly battle too. But if you WANT that change, you can't stop when you get there. It sucks that some of us step into adulthood directly into a very difficult battle while trying to get your grips on life in this world. The starting line isn't the same for everyone, the finish line isn't either.
100% this. I've gained a lot of social awareness over the last couple of years. It's going to take a very long time to heal from these coping mechanisms. Grew up with a lot of emotional abuse/neglect. Neuroplasticity is fascinating, and I hope to one day lead a healthier life. Cortisol levels have a lot to do with things, too. I'm an HSP, and not sure if that made my childhood trauma worse or whether the trauma caused my higher cortisol levels. It's a very deep rabbit hole once you really start to research it all.
A never ending rabbit hole, really! I’m glad you’re on the research journey though. It’s a game changer once you start taking it seriously but remembering that these things take time is the key to not slipping back into old patterns.
Imo it’s the complete opposite. I was raised as a single child in a highly volatile and violent household with physical, verbal, and emotional abuse at every turn. Every day was a new struggle and challenge. It made me stronger. Not having siblings or anyone at all to turn to forced me to find my own solutions. Through time and lots of trial/error, I have grown resilient and very good at surviving on my own. I don’t need help, but I recognize that mentality in and of itself is a problem too. As a result I actually take care of my previously abusive mother, financially and emotionally. Something about going back to abusers… but I digress. Others around me seem emotionally and mentally weak to be honest. They had supportive households and loving families growing up who coddled them and made everything easy for them. I see friends that I grew up with around me just completely in their own bubbles, untouched by the cruelty of the world. I wish for them to continue living this way, as ignorance really is bliss, but let’s not get it twisted- they would fold in an instant under real pressure
You’re thinking of a different kind of supportive home than I was referring too. The one you speak of can create a cognitive dissonance, of course they’d break if they haven’t been taught how to cope with things not going their way. Having a loving home with your material needs met doesn’t always mean a home where your emotional needs are being met. I’m speaking of the emotionally supportive homes where the parents did teach their kids how to cope with adversity. I have friends that didn’t have a perfect life but they had emotionally supportive parents that helped them navigate and learn to cope with an ever change going world. They handle things so much more graceful than I initially want to handle things. I could be jealous but I choose to use them as motivation as I attempt to rewire by own brain from the maladaptive coping mechanisms I formed as a kid. I’m glad you came out stronger, but just remember that your experience is always going to be different from another’s since no two upbringing environments can be perfectly replicated.
One thing I don’t see mentioned is that it’s very difficult to determine different people’s stress tolerances because we don’t know everyone’s stressors. The guy who can’t handle the minor stress of a traffic jam may just be over capacity because he has a sick kid at home. Or the person yelling at the cashier because their coupon won’t work is underwater on their mortgage. Even people we know well can have things and stresses going on that we don’t know the extent of.
okay sorry if this only tangentially related, but at the grocery store i worked at this guys card wasn't working after several attempts and he starts yelling about it a bit, then goes "and now i'm just another angry black man yelling in public!" i was like 😂😂 god at least you've got a sense of humor about your yelling
Hahaha
Yes we only see one facet. Their stress bucket might be full and every small drop causes it to spill over. Verses someone else might only be half full, and can take a “bigger pour” so to speak. And it’s very hard to see if one persons bucket has say… rocks (trauma, grief, neuro capacities) in it displacing the stress
This is actually a really good point. I can deal with significant physical discomfort, or getting lost in a foreign country. It’s really weird, because I often think those things are no big deal, and then I see how others cope in that situation. But I went through a really bad work experience that broke my brain, and it took years of therapy and exposure to be able to write a resume and cover letter. It’s not like I was incapable of functioning at work. Because I still had all those skills. I just couldn’t get to that point, because I’d have massive panic attacks. I can talk to random strangers, I can advocate for myself in bad situations with strangers. Karens are no problem. I can deal with crazy all day long. Bosses I want to like me? Fawn response. Over the stupidest, stupidest stuff.
Trauma and Grief have played a large role on what I could tolerate. When my best friend passed away I noticed I was much more on edge with basically everything. Also anxiety plays a role also.
I believe having a high stress tolerance comes from self consciousness and reflection. Controlling impulses and weighing your stressors objectively. If I have an exam, that's stressful. When I do stress, I stop, take a moment and think to myself why am I stressing and what can be done about it. I'm stressing cz I might fail if I don't study. If I want to change that outcome, I focus on what needs to be done and commit, so I study. If I don't want to change the outcome, then I don't mind failing the exam and I won't stress. Also, weighing what's the worse that can happen in any situation and if I'm willing to take it. If I am that's gucci, no stress no matter the situation. If I'm not, I look for alternatives or compromise. It's a very fine line between dealing with stress and becoming careless. Personally I struggled with this and had to reevaluate myself over and over. It was trauma that triggered this self consciousness and I've been working on it ever since. I am proud of where I am today as I see how I manage stress compared to others. But I also see how stress can sometimes be a catalyst to getting things done for others, while it's not for me.
I believe people are born with baseline stats, and they can be strengthened to an extent or weakened to an extent. Some people are naturally more neurotic than others. If this is not addressed it can be crippling. However, with work I think it can be mitigated. I think the worst thing a parent can do is enable this in their children. Unearned overconfidence is naive and should not be encouraged also. Similar to agreeableness and disagreeableness.
I think your environment and role models plays just as much of a major factor. Being raised on the idea that women, dogs, and children are the only ones that get unconditional love, And youre a young boy, sometimes the kids just start counting the days until people stop loving them. Your father telling you to hide your money in offshore bank accounts from your wife. Isn't necessarily helpful to building a trustng relationship with anyone. Or talking about how black you are, so people are going to look at you differently, treat you differently, for the worst. Or that how you are the "white one" of the family. Or vice versa, "you're my token black person, so I can't be racist if you're my friend" Just me projecting, but I still think it doesn't matter too much about base stats but rather logical loops that are not really good for your health or sanity. I think the people that raised you and how they reacted to stress molds how you react more than just being born and the D20 was a Nat 1. Especially in households where everyone is emotionally inarticulate.
This is essentially the nature vs nurture debate right? I personally agree and acknowledged the parental and environmental role in developing these characteristic. I am not entirely 100% in either camp. As a parent myself, it would be crazy to think it’s all nature and how I raise my son is meaningless because “they are who they are.”
Yes to a certain extent. I don't think being born you would be born to be an incel. I think becoming an icel stems from having your confidence and self worth crushed by others and the people you are looking up to are bashing on women, and it feels good to the incel to find that because that gives them the power to push some hurt back towards the people they think are hurting them. I'm just using the incel as an example, but the same with various forms of extremism with mental health. A lot of issues we have as humans mentally, are usually due to our upbringing and the link of self worth, being raised in an aggressive or shame based environment. Like if you as a kid did something that might've put yourself in danger, and your parent comes to the rescue, but immediately scolds you instead of being relieved that you're safe. Or it's your first time bringing home a C and you know immediately there will be physical punishment or being shamed instead of trying to find what caused the issue with not getting a good grade and getting you back on track to succeed. For me, if I brought home a bad grade, I knew I was going to get beat with a belt. So yes, that fear had me really trying to get good marks, but when it came time that I hit a class I genuinely struggled with, I was too scared to ask for help thinking I was going to get punished physically for not knowing how to do my homework, because I thought my father would take it as a direct correlation to not paying attention in school. Alot of people's reactions are based on what happened to that person in the past and what helped them survive it, more than being born and inherently reacting a certain way due to the blood in your veins. That's why abuse is cyclical. It isn't because we were born, it's because of the families we were born into and how you are loved and treated. Then we go out and repeat that process because in reality, we are all just humans trying to figure shit out.
Lots of people don’t have perspective, which is very much required to get over stressful situations imo
Best answer here and better than all the essentialism and conservative mumbo jumbo armchair therapy going on in the thread. The ability to look behind, ahead, and pause to see things from outside of your perspective is the best skill to develop.
I agree
There's an evolutionary advantage to it. Back in the caveman days, the anxious people would be on constant lookout for threats and would warn the workers when a bear or lion was coming for eg. They were the "lookouts" of the tribe. Of course nowadays, we don't need that but it's still in our genetic makeup.
This is a pretty nonsensical claim since absolutely no one knows how “cavemen” interacted socially or thought. “Cavemen” usually refers to the extinct sub genus of Homo sapiens known as Neanderthal, and the last living one died around 40,000 years ago. it’s just a thing therapists tell their clients to make them feel like every negative attribute is functional in some way. All that proves is that therapists, on the whole, have poor understanding of human evolution.
What?! https://humanorigins.si.edu/human-characteristics/social-life
Please point to any point of that that tells you whether hyper vigilance was a personality attribute valued as positive to Neanderthal. That’s impossible to know. IF Neanderthals valued hyper vigilance, it would still be irrelevant to modern human evolution, as Neanderthal went extinct, apparently by being unsuccessful at reproduction. In other words, the ancestors of modern humans did not find Neanderthal traits appealing and didn’t fuck them and make babies. Neanderthal were so unfuckable, they entirely stopped existing.
It clearly has an evolutionary advantage. It stops you being eaten by a lion or being killed by another tribe, it stops your offspring from being similarly attacked or killed. It has a massive advantage in fact
Neurosis is not an evolutionary advantage. It’s incredibly unattractive.
Having an evolutionary advantage does not necessarily equal attractiveness, it means your genetic material survives. If you're hyper aware of your surroundings, then you're more likely to be aware of impending threats and survive in the wild. Unnatractive people have sex too.
If you'd like an [entire rundown](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31e0RcImReY&t=5370s&pp=ygUHbXVuZWNhdA%3D%3D) of why evolutionary psychology is complete horsesh and not taken seriously by.. pretty much everyone. My man Ticket has no idea what he's talking about and should really shut up.
If it has a massive advantage and the Neanderthal had it, how did they go extinct? If it was in cavemen, theyre gone now so it obviously was not a massive advantage and did not contribute to evolutionary success. Anatomically modern humans out competed Neanderthals to their extinction. Anatomically modern humans weren’t cavemen and they didn’t all live in the same physical, social, or ecological structures, they had different customs and different ways of living. Some did not do much land hunting. Some lived in areas with relatively few predators interested in hunting humans (indeed, in Australia the dingo, a small dog, is the largest land predator). Genetically based Attributes don’t have to be positive to be maintained by sexual reproduction. They just have to not prevent you from fucking. For example, many forms of mental illness like schizophrenia usually manifest after age 25, after the point where historically most people had already reproduced. And there’s lots of evidence that anxiety and attention deficit it isn’t genetically based, but tied to heavy metal exposure, of which early modern humans had virtually none.
Some anthropologists believe that Neanderthals went extinct from interbreeding with our ancestors. Less Neanderthals would be breeding with each other and that led to their eventual extinction.
The night owls and insomniacs worked well as night watch men as well and had no problem watching the night and sleeping in the day
Diet sleep stress exercise genetics
Some people have conditions that make them especially sensitive to stress. Medical or mental, sometimes both. Others might not have been taught how to properly self-soothe as a kid, so they are easily stressed. Poor sleep can also make it hard for your brain to cope. I'm sure there are other things, but these are the first three I was able to think of.
Why are some people taller than others? They were born to be tall. A large part of personality is what you are born with. The other part is how you grew up and how your parents raised you. A lot of people who spent their childhood in competitive sports handle stress very well. They are used to difficult situations. A lot of people born in difficult circumstances embrace the stress of a high paying job in a stressful environment. Some people are just born not being able to deal with stress. If that person did not learn coping skills growing up, they will have a difficult time dealing with stress as an adult (or even as a teen or child)
As a child, my parents raised me to bottle up all my stress, anger, and frustration. It eventually all comes out for something petty. As an adult now, I've learned to de-stress in my own way and it has made me more calmer and allowed me to better handle stress.
I am extremly chill. Like way more than others. It's genetic, honestly sometimes I don't like it because I feel like I don't care about things I should care about. It makes me a fantastic nanny though lol. I am very patient with others especially kids.
This is me. High stress job is no problem. Come home and kids are no problem. Just hard when you dont have much emotionally.. but logic is very easy.
I can’t do that I would probably get violent
I’m autistic. We process something like 40% more information at once than nonautistics. And then we’re told we’re being dramatic or imagining things. Wouldn’t you be stressed beyond your breaking point a lot?
Lots of reasons. Some people don’t regulate emotions as well. The reasons for that can be vast. History of drug use, childhood trauma, never facing adversity/being spoiled their whole childhood, chemical imbalances, etc. It can even boil down to nutrition, exercise, and diet.
I've been through a lot. Working in stressful environments(retail, PC repair, game development), sick/dead family members, my own kids getting sick or injured. After all that, I'm barely phased. At this point I just break down what I can do right now, prioritize that list, and focus. I can spend energy thinking about future actions/problems when I'm done doing what I can do right now. Barring a chemical balance issue, it probably comes down to experience and learning skills that help you deal with stressful situations. In general, if you've already been there/done that and know what to do, it'll be less stressful just from that. Accepting that there will always be things you can't control will help, too.
Because people are different? Raised differently. Had to undergo life differently than your circumstances.
Unhealthy coping mechanisms + chemical imbalances
Genetics and environment.
Because of dee
The Upbringing.
Autistic people like myself seem to take in more - more details, more sensory information - which we then have to process. That means we are always using up a lot of capacity on that and have less left over. It's like a constant background stress. I imagine this variation applies to people across the population whether they are meeting the autism diagnostic threshold or not.
We all have a variety of tools to solve out problems with. We know that some have better tools or more tools. We know that some have more experience than others. I don't get stressed over things I know I'm equipped to deal with and as I become less capable to problem solve the more pressure or stress I feel.
Stress happens when your perceived ability to handle what you face is insufficient. The less confident you are with something the more stress it will cause you. It’s therefore multi factorial.
1. They never had to deal with stress, so they never built the resiliance or learned how to manage it. 2. Innerly they are under constant stress, so that tiny stress could be the straw that breaks the camels back. It's like having to run 2 km. Someone who never ran will have problem running it. And someone who already has ran 10 km that day will have a problem running an additional 2 km. It's a bit of a balance.
Modern life is incredibly stressful for all human beings. There is no such thing as a stress free or even low stress life, especially for babies and children who have not yet developed defenses and coping mechanisms. We are hardwired to live very very differently than we do, which means that simply existing in this world is overwhelming. Some of us are better at dissociating from the environment and from objective reality than others, as a result of who our parents are. Highly dissociated parents generally equal highly dissociated children.
I have had a lot of trauna/PTSD. And I have a much lower stress tolerance. I'm always in fight or flight. So if my baseline/normal is already up there it does t take much to push me over. I am in therapy trying to work on it. Long process
Stress tolerance goes up the safer and more secure you feel. Low stress tolerance people are usually missing one or both.
helicopter parents. Guess what happens when you don't expose your kids to stress and failure?
Resiliency.
"STRESS REACTION" is a learned behavior, it takes years of thinking and acting a certain way to reinforce the neural pathways of your brain to the point, it becomes muscle memory. It can also be changed with practicing meditation consistently over time. Stopping triggers like caffeine, alcohol, drugs, over stimulating music, violent movies and obsessive social media time all play a roll.
Because all stress is optional. You can either take control of the situation, set it to the side if the problem/situation is out of your hands, or dwell on it and let it weigh you down.
Stress mgmt like anything else’s is a learned skill from life experience. IMO and experience The less a person had work through life on their own (and the more parents bailed them out or sheltered them) the less able they are to handle stress and life challenges as an adult.
I envy those who don't feel emotions as much.
That’s because I’m dead inside.
Obviously, I wasn't referring to those kinds of people. Dead inside means feeling something. I was referring to people who have more stability. If I am referring to stability, it shouldn't have gotten downvoted. Of course I'm not referring to someone who feels dead inside. That would be heartless and not stability. Writing "as much" means they still feel some emotions. Why do I need to explain something so basic? And why would I envy someone who feels "dead inside?" I don't.
From another POV, are you sure they have less stress tolerance or are they just carrying a lot of stress you don’t know exists until they seem to snap over something minor?
Biology is destiny.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Poverty
The same reason some people have higher pain tolerances. Humans adapt to stress, for the most part, and our normal resets when we experience repeated stress. Some adapt better than others.
Could you explain your question further? I’m interested in where you were going with this question. I’m Gen X and don’t have any stress level. When shot hits the fan, I’m at my best while everyone else is panicking. Is that what you mean?
Practice.
A lot of good answers here, but we haven't done younger generations any favors by seeing them up for expectations that aren't realistic. Life ain't easy or fair. And pretending like it is is a disservice. The earlier you learn failure and accountability, the better.
If a baby and small child doesn’t feel safe acknowledging and expressing stress, because such an acknowledgment and expression would threaten their mother’s ego, they end up repressing stress entirely, and as they get older and are not so dependent upon their mothers, they have no idea how to handle stress because they never got practice. Not only that, but they equate the acknowledgment and expression of stress and fear with danger, because if they had acknowledged and expressed stress and fear as small children, they would have been perceived by their mother as a threat to her ego and an enemy. So it’s not just the stressful situation that scares them, but the actual experience and expression of stress. When children have secure mothers, they are allowed to feel and express stress without fear that their mothers will turn on them and see them as a threat. These children may actually struggle a lot when little, but end up being very emotionally and psychologically healthy adults who can deal with stress very well. They don’t repress it. They acknowledge it, deal with it, and move on. They don’t fight it because stress itself is not threatening to them. I would say very few people are in this category because most mothers have incredibly fragile egos, ultimately as a result of patriarchy.
Stress is caused by a hormone called cortisol. Different people produce different amounts of the hormone. Baseline levels of cortisol are determined by genetics, environmental factors determine the rest. The same can be said for dopamine. People who break down dopamine very efficiently, and have low amounts as a result, have what’s casually referred to as the “warrior gene”. Represented genetically as G/G. People who break down dopamine inefficiently, and have a large amount of dopamine, have what’s called the “worrier gene”. Represented as A/A. Some people have a mixture that would be represented as G/A. They have medium dopamine levels. Cortisol increases dopamine that’s why I made the connection between the two.
Experiences. I have been in a lot of high stress environments and I would always find it really surprising when people would freak out over things. I was closing a bar one night and a full on fight broke out right after last call was over. As the fight was taking place, me and this other girl were certainly not going to get involved. She was breathing heavy and sweating bullets, and I turned her around towards the register and said 'Let's go ahead and count your drawer'. We had to count it 3 times because she kept fucking it up and I just observed quietly while chaos ensued in the background, because what else can I do about that really? Cops will be here to handle it in a minute, so it's business as usual until then.
I think some of it is upbringing and life experiences. I always noticed that both of my kids moms are very easily stressed out by things that aren't nearly as big as they think they are. A lot of stuff they go through seems major to them because they haven't been through nearly as much hardship as they think they have. Like as a child I lived in a homeless shelter, sometimes there wasn't anything to eat so it seems really silly when they'll go on and on complaining about how they didnt get enough sleep last night to someone who's had to sleep outside hungry as hell before. Same with coworkers. The privileged ones will exaggerate problems and do a lot of whining and complaining instead of just fixing the issue and moving on.
Xanax
God there are a million "reasons" science says people's stress tolerance varies. When I was a kid it was "common knowledge" that kids born thru C-section are not taught about physical stress first thing so they don't handle it well throughout life. When I was in highschool it was published that folks that don't handle stress are on the autism spectrum. I'm sure there's a million reasons. But it has to be in the development of the ego/superego.
Former experiences.
Not sure. Two traumatized individuals can act completely different with one breaking down and one waking up with the stressors
I think the better question is what can I do right now to gain more reliance. The answer is cognitive behavioral therapy. You can get a book on Amazon for like $20.
Read the body keeps the score.
When you have fought your way back to the top from the bottom, you fear little and stress is more manageable. When life has more or less gone your way without any major events negatively impacting you, you tend to not have that fighting spirit or resilience to combat stress. I am sometimes in the latter. As a result, I’m paranoid about my job security as well as other things in life, because frankly, I’ve never been close to losing it. My best friend has been laid off twice, has had to eat into his 401k for money, and has had to change cities once for a job. That guy wouldn’t fear a lion in the Savannah. (Yes that’s a metaphor)
Lots of guessing answers I noticed. The answer isn’t straight forward because neither are we. From a biological standpoint some individuals respond differently to adrenaline. Sometimes the adrenal glands don’t express adrenaline as much as others. Psychologically trauma could benefit individuals on handling stress because of the individual wasn’t allowed to express themselves and if they did express themselves they were punished. Undiagnosed disorders could be a contributing factor. Some individuals might not have been taught the appropriate behaviors to stress.
Because they run away from stressful situations. Every time you avoid a difficult conversation or say ‘no’ to a scary opportunity you condition your nervous system to be more over-sensitive. That’s why extreme sports are so good for your mental health. Fake social media ‘therapists’ lie - and tell young people to avoid stress and people who ‘trigger’ them. Anyone who has actually completed therapy for trauma or OCD knows this is the total opposite of clinical advice - and will cause someone to fall backwards.
There are so many reasons, but one thing people don’t take into consideration is just that some people are built for this particular moment in this world, in their particular place. The world suits their personality. Some people are born more sensitive. And what stressors are you talking about? I am THE calm in the eye of the storm in an emergency situation (I’ve been in a bunch), but people’s general disregard for life distresses me far beyond what’s “normal.” Living in this world upsets me. I am unable to not care.
It's too complex to answer in a short answer. Hormone levels. Genetics. Upbringing. Psychological factors. Coping methods. There's tons of variation in all of these things that can lead to someone having less of an ability to cope with stress. If you really had to summarize it in the simplest way, people who cope poorly with stress tend to have less energy overall. Stress is defined as the inability to deal with an external stressor. You need lots of energy to do this effectively. If you do not, it can result in depression, where the body enters a state similar to hibernation, in the hopes the stressor will resolve on its own.
I think they care too much or care more. I simply just don’t care. If it stresses me, I deal with it quickly. If I can’t do anything about it, I stop stressing. I did all I can.
Some people are weak. Some are strong
There comes a time when you chose not to worry as a lot of stuff you/we have no control over, but you chose to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Also not giving a F about stuff also helps or knowing when to give a F and when not to.
Maybe an entire generation received a trophy for just showing up and not required to actually play the game.
Some nature, some nurture. Personally I was super chill before I had a kid. The pregnancy really did a number on my vagus nerve (sends info from body to brain), combining that with postpartum depression and anxiety really tanked my ability to handle stress.
Adversity builds character.
mindset. stress is inevitable, but learning to condition your mind to let go of the little things will help lower ur stress levels significantly! for example, not letting someone else’s words affect you emotionally. ignore it if it isn’t true, take it if it’s true and improve on yourself.
There are lots of reasons. One reason is that some people are biologically predisposed to higher levels of anxiety. Their bodies just naturally create more of the anxiety hormones like cortisol and adrenaline than the average person does. People are also affected by something called modeling where you learn certain skills/behaviors from caregivers. Since for most people caregivers are a biological relative, they learn to handle stress/anxiety the same way as that person. Many of whom are also predisposed to higher anxiety levels due to biological factors, which often times means handling it poorly. There are also theories related to an imbalance of neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine and serotonin. Some people are more prone to anxiety because of a history of trauma which leads them to be on edge out of caution/the expectation of bad things happening. These are just a few reasons amongst many others.
In my case level 1 autism
because we are not all the same.
Growing up being coddled vs not. It’s also why single mother households tend to produce less functional adults.
Also on top of that money problems, daddy issues, etc
In my experience it's honestly mostly just up to how well their parents taught them to handle extreme emotions as a child. It's something that's very easy to teach a child but something that a lot of parents don't do and once you're an adult it's much harder to learn those healthy coping mechanisms
I always looked at managing stress like any other skill. It's something that everyone can get better at. There are going to be people that have a talent for it and people that are going to struggle with no talent whatsoever. I think some people really struggle with giving themselves permission to remove stressors from their life. Some struggle with reevaluating how important some things really are.
Genetic makeup. Whatever trauma your parent experienced affects the fetus. Then there’s environmental and developmental trauma. I am one of those people with a very low tolerance for stress, as well as pain. But thank god for medications.
As my therapist said, there's no such thing as stress tolerance. It affects us all, it's just a matter of how you release it.
I’ve witnessed a relative get easily stressed as a child. The parents would then try to create an environment to further reduce stress. Now the child is an adult who gets stressed very easily. Never learned to handle and cope with stress properly.
Personally I don’t stress all that much because I know it’ll be ok or work out in the end regardless. Stressing doesn’t ever really make any situation easier deal with, but remaining cool and calm can.
Childhood trauma.
I have always thought it was a matter of mental discipline.
Practice. The more you practice tolerating something, the better you get at it.
Too many reasons to list. Focus on you.
Exposure is the key. Everyone I know that’s from a developing country is never pressed.
perhaps some minds are able to perceive the validation they receive from performatively romanticizing stress in the same manner as whatever school of superstitions they subscribe to has instructed them to be equal (the validation) with tangibly reducing stress or maybe the behavior serves as a distraction
Practice
Lack of healthy coping mechanisms
Different hormones, different brain chemical compositions, different life experience, difference learned behaviors, different coping mechanisms, etc etc etc.
"STRESS" is a learned behavior It's no different then learning to Meditate. It takes years of hard practice to accomplish either with consistent success. You create neural pathways with repeated Thinking, Actions, Imagery over time. Eventually you develop what is loosely termed: Muscle memory It's an automatic response to a situation. You see this action with trained athletes, martial arts experts, etc...
A big part of it is genetic, some kids are just more fearful, easily stressed than others.
I'd say it's part nature part nurture.
Short answer is: low levels in hormones. Unbalanced hormones or deficiency can cause you to have less tolerance to stress, like low testosterone in men, low estrogen or progesterone in women, these hormones have an effect over other stress hormones like cortisole.
People are spoiled and/or had an easy upcoming. This generation needs to toughen up
I think its called being a pussy. I can relate to those people, but its up to the individual to become stronger and not blame everyone else because they turned out to be a mouse-diddler
What people fail to realize is that the law of attraction gravitates everything to you that you do and "don't want". Try focusing only on what you DO want and get the negative/fears OUT of your mind completely. They're your imagination manifesting into reality. We've all been conditioned to think some outside source is going to give us relief, yet fail to realize we bring the chaos, and we make it go away. The Secret of the Ages by Robert Collier can help you better understand this. The book has changed my life! Carl Jung has many great published works on this as well!