Want to know how to handle stress? Make yourself unstressable

There’s no escaping stress in today’s world. Stressors are everywhere. Some are large, and some are small. Some are predictable, and some come totally out of the blue when you least expect them. Some happen to you, and some you generate to torture your own self.

Instead of counting every single possible stress, it helps to recognize four über-categories of it. That way, they become easier to deal with, either removed or minimized.

Some stress can be external – life events that are applied to you from outside. Other stressors are internal – caused by your own thoughts, emotions, physical pains, and misalignments.

Wherever they originate, externally or internally, stressors can be high in their intensity— we will call those macro stressors – or small and bearable – we will call those micro stressors. Smaller stressors get their power from their numbers. Together, tens, sometimes hundreds, of them on a daily basis. Regardless of how strong we are, every one of us is bound to break if the load is high enough. 

Let's take a look at these four categories. 

Trauma – external macro stressors

Trauma-triggering stressors are the type of major external events that blindside us on a quiet Sunday and flip our lives upside down. No matter how prepared we think we are, we have no control over what might hit us. A loved one’s cancer diagnosis, the death of someone dear, an accident that keeps you bedbound, a lover who cheats, or the end of a marriage that you thought would last forever. Those traumas not only stress us, they shake our faith in life itself.

‘Everyone, sooner or later, faces a trauma-triggering event. It is just part of the process of being alive. There is nothing you can do to ensure they never happen, but you can surely learn how to deal with them when they hit you.’

Everyone, sooner or later, faces a trauma-triggering event. It is just part of the process of being alive. There is nothing you can do to ensure they never happen, but you can surely learn how to deal with them when they hit you.

While traumas – even PTSD-inducing traumas, which are the most extreme – disrupt our lives to the very core, an astounding ninety-one percent of all who suffer a PTSD-triggering event bounce back. It’s not the time when we are struggling with a traumatic event that gets us. The biggest negative impact the harshness of life brings is found in the years we spend fearing it and the years we spend allowing it to linger. With the right mindset and practice, you can save yourself those years.

Obsessions – internal macro stressors

Obsessions are as intense and damaging as the traumatic events that sometimes obstruct our paths, but they are not acts of life. They are acts of our minds and emotions. Obsessive thoughts are not something that occur in our world; they come from within us, and even if they sometimes seem to be a reasonable reaction to the external events that triggered them, they get exaggerated till they are way bigger than the true magnitude of the event.

Thoughts running on continual repeat every single day, for years, grow in their own capacity to create as much stress, fear, and worry as external trauma. External traumatic events are limited to the harshness of the event itself. Obsession-triggered stress is limited only by our own imagination. It can grow into imaginary monsters that are much scarier than the truth.

Nuisances – external micro stressers

It’s important to note that these forces are not always tiny, as the name nuisances may indicate. In this group of external micro stressors, we group all the stressors that are short of a trauma and, accordingly, all the stressors that individually would not break your back. 

Some of those are sizable and quite demanding to deal with, and though they may not individually break you, add a few more smaller ones and things become challenging indeed.

‘Regardless of how resilient you are, there is always a point when one more insignificant stressor is bound to get you.’

Picture the mounting smaller stresses as a house of cards. One by one, a rickety structure is erected. As it gets higher, it gets closer to its inevitable collapse. Eventually, you add just one more, practically weightless card, and it all comes crashing down. Regardless of how resilient you are, there is always a point when one more insignificant stressor is bound to get you.

Noise – internal micro stressors

There is another type of micro stressor, that comes from within you and is virtually limitless in its ability to mount up on top of you. Combined, we call those types of stressors noise.

None of the small negative thoughts we constantly suffer from are big enough to break us or threatening enough for us to obsess about them. Instead, those sassy little mind biters – the micro internal stressors – nibble away at us like termites. They drain us, irritate us, without us even noticing that they are not real events but thoughts and emotions that we create from within us.

‘Noise is made up of all the little negative niggles we hold on to from something that, had we let go of then and there, would have caused us little to no stress at all.’

Noise is made up of all the little negative niggles we hold on to from something that, had we let go of then and there, would have caused us little to no stress at all. It’s highly selective and negatively biased. Remembering the one comment our partner said the day before that upset us while ignoring the twenty other comments they said that were full of love surely is not an objective way to look at our world, but we do it anyway.

Neuroscience, however, indicates that our brains have the capacity to change, grow, and develop new pathways – a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity. New beliefs, new habits, with practice, are within our reach. With Unstressable’s limit, learn, and listen model, you can help make the four major stressors feel manageable and easy.

Find out more in Unstressable

Unstressable applies Mo Gawdat's brilliant engineering mind and Alice Law's psychology and stress-management expertise to the 'stress pandemic'. Mo explains how he made it through the most acutely stressful times in his own life, and the book touches on the idea of post-traumatic growth – both on a personal level and in response to huge events that affected all of us, such as the COVID pandemic and subsequent economic turmoil. Practical exercises will help you build up the skills to manage stress no matter your circumstances, backed up by neuroscience and accessible psychology.