The only thing we need to stress about is stress itself

My senior class, who are now in their second year with me, were telling me today how stressed they were about their midterm in my class. I got uppity about that and told them not to let the stress they're feeling about everything else in their lives bleed over into my test.

The word of the year seems to be stress. I'm trying to think back to when stress was invented. I think it was in late 1990's, with the coming of the new millennium. We all needed a new mental state to carry us through the next 1000 years and the powers that be seem to have settled on stress.

When people tell me they're stressed out, I always mean to ask them what they're talking about. Mind you, I don't ever ask, because if I did they might mistake what I'm asking and start telling me about their lives, but I don't really know what they mean when they say that.

Here's my hypothesis: Stress was invented because people needed a new excuse when "I'm tired" ceased to be believed. Saying that you're stressed is a way of deflecting the blame for you getting yourself into the mess you're in. In nearly all cases I encounter, people claim stress because of outside stuff that's going on. It's never their inability to deal with it. For a while, what people would say when you asked them how they were would be the euphemistic "Too busy." But now they just come right out and say"Stressed out." It's the default reaction to any outside stimulus.

The problem  and the reason it's nothing but and excuse is that the outside forces themselves are not inherently stressful. They are just there. A test is not under any stress whatsoever, nor does it contain any stress among its pages. Nor does an IRS audit or a performance review or a budget meeting or college admissions notifications. None of those entities experience any stress. One hundred percent of the stress comes from us and the way we handle ourselves. We're the stressful things, the only stressful things.

And there's a problem with spending so much time and effort learning to deal with stress. The danger is that we're treating the symptoms and ignoring the disease. The world has changed rapidly in the last 10 years and we are not adapting well. We've lost homeostasis and we won't really feel okay until we understand why, no matter what techniques we use.

I'm aware that mine is not the prevailing opinion, and I don't presume to have the answer for anyone else. There are so many books about how we got ourselves into this position that we clearly have no clue, (it's well known that the number of books on a topic is inversely proportional to how well we understand it). That's why I'm not reading any of them. When there's only one book I'll read that. Keep me posted.

I'm not suggesting that there aren't stressful things in the world. But to paraphrase "Born Yesterday," if a building burns down, who are you going to blame, the fire? I think we owe ourselves a good hard look in the mirror and a good round of "What the hell am I doing? What is my life such that I feel so bad? Why am I doing this to myself? What changes should I make?" before we start blaming the world for the fact that we're not able to calmly deal with the world.