What Philosophers Tell Us About Stress

What philosophers tell us about stress is revealing.  Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher, is reported to have said, “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of those things.”  We would do well to remember this piece of sage wisdom when confronting the seemingly stressful realities of everyday life. How often do your views distort your circumstances and introduce needless stress into your life?

Circumstances may indeed be fixed and out of your control, but your views are yours for the changing. Sometimes simply taking a different perspective in thought can cause an immediate relief in feeling. An ample illustration of this fact can be seen in how two similar events can produce two vastly different reactions. Take, for instance, an event familiar to us all: driving around downtown and encountering one red traffic light after another.

Even on those occasions when you are not in a hurry to be anywhere in particular, is it not true that such an insignificant chain of events can infuriate you to the point where you are cursing the gods and bemoaning your fate? And yet at other times  you drive around in a relaxed daze, impervious to the onslaught of red. Indeed, who does not enjoy sitting around on the couch doing sweet nothing? Revealing is  the fact that a car is pretty much a mobile couch!

What Philosophers Tell Us About Stress States

Epictetus divided the nature of reality into two categories: things we can control and things we cannot control. The former he termed pro-heretic things; the latter he termed apron-heretic things. Examples of pro-heretic things include your thoughts, your values, your beliefs, your morals, your opinions, your desires, and your emotions. Examples of apron-heretic things include food served cold, late parcel deliveries, slow trains, long lines, noisy lawnmowers,
and red lights. Although you might not be able to achieve the Stoic goal of complete detachment from apron-heretic reality (after all, being mugged in a dark alley is not simply an inconvenient   occurrence!), if you are honest with yourself, you will no doubt appreciate how much you tend to overreact to the most inconsequential of happenings, thereby introducing stress into what could otherwise be a blissful existence — at least until the next bill arrives.

What Philosophers Tell Us About Stress Management

The simple fact is that stress does not exist in the events around you. Stress is a product of your own mind. If stress existed in events themselves, then everyone would react to so-called stressful events with the same level of stress. Yet surely you know from your own experience that different people have different stress thresholds, different stress fuses, as it were. Some people grin their way through a tornado, whereas other people grate their way through a lottery win “What am I supposed to do with all this money? What if I do not manage it properly? Why did this happen to me?

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