So stress is – after everything, what we have learned so far - a physical reaction, based on necessity, which is mostly no longer the case today. Unfortunately, we do not only react with stress in existentially threatening situations, but also with other problems, that we find distressing. As far as we know, this reaction cannot be switched off.
So what we as humans need to learn, is to deal appropriately with the physical reaction to stress and to circumvent or utilize its psychological effects in the most effective way possible. Unfortunately, this is usually not easy due to the nature of stress.
Let's look at an example from everyday life. A man and a woman live together as a married couple and have the works, that occur daily, distributed in a certain way. Now it comes to one of the two - let's assume, the man – to a stressful situation, for example because an invoice comes in the mail, which is unexpected and which he cannot readily pay for.
He falls into an unpleasant psychological crisis, which closed him, for example, upset or irritable.
The woman recognizes her husband's behavior, which seems strange to her – she doesn't know anything about the bill yet – and speaks to him about it. Depending on, how intense his stress response is, he will react differently; maybe he will blame her, blame yourself, expressing self-doubt or something similar.
What these reactions have in common, that they externalize the stress - they carry it to the outside, when the man says, that he no longer knows, how to proceed or something similar.
Perhaps the woman will now try to calm him down: she points it out to him, that they will be able to raise enough money in the foreseeable future, to settle the bill, or that the crisis, that he feels, is not so inevitable, as it appears to him at the moment.
The stress reaction may subside – the encouragement from his wife calms the man down and helps him, to think. In everyday life, however, we often come across a different reaction: a human, which is pointed out, that his stress is not an inevitable necessity, reacts with anger and will take the view, that the problem is really that big, how he feels. Perhaps our husband will tell his wife, that she doesn't know about the financial situation - in order to deny her competence, to calm him down.
What we can observe with such a reaction, which is also not atypical, is an effect, known from systems theory and which is based on the evolutionary roots of stress. The man's body, who is in a stress response, will try to some extent, to receive these, because he is convinced of the necessity of the reaction - the man's bodily system tries, to get his predetermined response.
This is based on the perception of a human being, which is still the most important source of information for him. When a human sees a tiger, but not another, so will he, who sees the tiger, hardly be reassured by his counterpart - even if the probability, that indeed a tiger is present, no matter how small it may be. We depend on it, that we trust our perceptions, and do so to some extent in the stress response, which is almost always based on some kind of perception.
So please pay attention to it in your daily life, that they realize, that stress is a psychological situation, which is not firmly connected to the outside world. You can break out in stress, when they see their account balance, as well as when they almost get into a fight or when they see the basement, which they have had to clean up for a long time - there are no fixed triggers for stress, so there is hardly any need for stress.
Let us help you, when someone speaks to you in a stressful phase! Nobody wants anything from them, it is typically only an offer of help - even if it is not always easy to process emotionally.