Stress is about cheating - by Tove K - Wood From Eden

Summer is approaching. And here, summer means a lot of manual work. Which makes me think of that common psychological response to having too much to do: Stress. 

I do a lot of stupid work (not stupid as in unnecessary but stupid in the sense that I do not need my brain to do it). Which gives me a lot of time to think about work and the mental states related to it. Like the feeling of stress. Why do we get it? What is it good for? How can it be avoided? Should it be avoided? 

After a number of years, I think I have cracked the code: Stress is the feeling one gets when there is so much to do that it can't be done without cheating. For most people, cheating is unpleasant. In order to get the courage to cheat, we need another unpleasant feeling to whip us into it. And that feeling is called stress.

Stress is what we experience when we have too many deadlines to meet too soon. We know that something must go. But we don't know what. So the feeling of stress becomes a perpetual spur to cheat with small things. Maybe work can't be sacrificed. But cooking can. So stressed people eat sandwiches and drink Coke although they know they will feel bad from it in the long term. They avoid double-checking details they know they should be double-checking and hope to get away with it. They know they should be friendly to people around them, but they cheat with that too, because they know they will get away with it, for a while at least.  

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