There are only two fundamental causes of stress. Every other precursor to stress and anxiety can be traced back to these two elementary agents:
Of course, what if it is the case of that rare instance when you are truly late arriving at the airport. Or worse, you are on time, but the flight is canceled and you have to catch a later flight? In this case, the bad thing will happen, but are the consequences of being late truly the end of the world? Could you not reschedule the meeting for later that day or for the following week? Have the other attendees no doubt experienced the same issues with travel, such that their empathy would allow you to reschedule the meeting? Would the special circumstances not allow you to request special consideration from your audience, therefore making your visit stick in their minds? How bad, really, could the consequences be?
My understanding is that people who continuously experience disproportionate levels of stress or suffer anxiety disorders typically make a consistent habit of overestimating probabilities and/or overestimating consequences. A common component of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), used to treat high anxiety individuals, is to exercise "realistic thinking" where one works through the issues to understand the true, more realistic probabilities of something bad happening, and a more realistic view of the potential consequences in the unlikely event something bad does is fact happen.
You may ask: what if the probability of a bad outcome is great and the consequences of that outcome is very bad (for example, you are trapped in a cave with a hungry lion)? Well, in this rather unlikely scenario you should feel stressed! These are the situations where stress needs to occur and works in our favor, overriding our conscious thought to engage our fight or flight mechanism. The problem is that we all too often equate a department meeting with a lion in a cave, and they are just not the same thing. Really.
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- Overestimating probabilities: a tendency to put greater odds than what is realistic on something bad happening.
- Overestimating consequences: projecting graver consequences than is actually warranted if something bad does indeed happen.
Of course, what if it is the case of that rare instance when you are truly late arriving at the airport. Or worse, you are on time, but the flight is canceled and you have to catch a later flight? In this case, the bad thing will happen, but are the consequences of being late truly the end of the world? Could you not reschedule the meeting for later that day or for the following week? Have the other attendees no doubt experienced the same issues with travel, such that their empathy would allow you to reschedule the meeting? Would the special circumstances not allow you to request special consideration from your audience, therefore making your visit stick in their minds? How bad, really, could the consequences be?
My understanding is that people who continuously experience disproportionate levels of stress or suffer anxiety disorders typically make a consistent habit of overestimating probabilities and/or overestimating consequences. A common component of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), used to treat high anxiety individuals, is to exercise "realistic thinking" where one works through the issues to understand the true, more realistic probabilities of something bad happening, and a more realistic view of the potential consequences in the unlikely event something bad does is fact happen.
You may ask: what if the probability of a bad outcome is great and the consequences of that outcome is very bad (for example, you are trapped in a cave with a hungry lion)? Well, in this rather unlikely scenario you should feel stressed! These are the situations where stress needs to occur and works in our favor, overriding our conscious thought to engage our fight or flight mechanism. The problem is that we all too often equate a department meeting with a lion in a cave, and they are just not the same thing. Really.
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