Stressors Quotes

To fully thrive, we must not only eliminate the stressors but also actively seek joyful, loving, fulfilling lives that stimulate growth processes ~ Bruce H. Lipton

We are not designed to deal with the many stress-inducing situations of the twenty-first century. For most of human history, the stressors we faced were mainly physical, like running away from wild animals. Now they are almost entirely psychological. When was the last time you were frightened by a lion? The things that cause us stress in our modern world are the ones that go inside our heads. ~ Jed Diamond

Pressure and stress is the common cold of the psyche. ~ Andrew Denton

It may seem paradoxical to claim that stress, a physiological mechanism vital to life, is a cause of illness. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must differentiate between acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the immediate, short-term body response to threat. Chronic stress is activation of the stress mechanisms over long periods of time when a person is exposed to stressors that cannot be escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no control over them. Discharges of nervous system, hormonal output and immune changes constitute the flight-or-fight reactions that help us survive immediate danger. These biological responses are adaptive in the emergencies for which nature designed them. But the same stress responses, triggered chronically and without resolution, produce harm and even permanent damage. Chronically high cortisol levels destroy tissue. Chronically elevated adrenalin levels raise the blood pressure and damage the heart. There is extensive documentation of the inhibiting effect of chronic stress on the immune system.

In one study, the activity of immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells were compared in two groups: spousal caregivers of people with Alzheimer's disease, and age- and health-matched controls. NK cells are front-line troops in the fight against infections and against cancer, having the capacity to attack invading micro-organisms and to destroy cells with malignant mutations. The NK cell fun ~ Gabor Mate

Money removes many stressors, but it has not changed my level of happiness, nor who I am. It changes how I spend my time. Right ~ Megyn Kelly

Soul work is the 'more' that we need to do to heal our souls.

Soul retrieval is one more step toward balance and wholeness. The trauma of major illness, death, financial devastation, abuse, terror, and other stressors in our lives will not cease while we live and breathe. But, knowing they can rob us of our soul allows us to address those loses before or as they occur, so that we do not have to struggle to survive without that which makes us who we are. ~ Barbara Lieberman

But the larger point is that we can now see that depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not necessarily a good thing, and can be downright harmful. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Look closer at the stress in your own life and you can identify that negative emotions are always built on counterfactual statements. ~ Andrew J. Bernstein

The hippocampus is the structure where memory is supposedly controlled. It is the most plastic part of the brain; it is also the part that is assumed to absorb all the damage from repeated insults like the chronic stress we experience daily from small doses of negative feelings - as opposed to the invigorating "good stress" of the tiger popping up occasionally in your living room. You can rationalize all you want; the hippocampus takes the insult of chronic stress seriously, incurring irreversible atrophy. Contrary to popular belief, these small, seemingly harmless stressors do not strengthen you; they can amputate part of your self. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Stress is never a given. There are people who get divorced amicably. There are people who pack up and move with no emotional toll. There is no stressor 'out there' in the world. We experience stress - or we don't - depending on what we believe. ~ Andrew J. Bernstein

Stress is the negative whirlwind of emotions that gets imposed on top of our stimulation and engagement. ~ Andrew J. Bernstein

I learned there that the key was first to prioritize all the individual stressors and then act. I break it all down into the little things I can manage. The stressors that I can't affect, I don't worry about. The ones I can affect, I simply deal with one at a time. ~ Mark Owen

Stressful conditions from outside school are much more likely to intrude into the classroom in high poverty schools. Every one of ten stressors is two to three times more common in high poverty schools
Student hunger, unstable housing, lack of medical and dental care, caring for family members, immigration issues, community violence and safety issues. ~ Robert D. Putnam

Scientists and shamans alike know that all of life is woven into a web of infinite connections, contributing to the larger whole in a system that is complex beyond our imagining. When we sit quietly at the edge of a lake, or hike through a wildflower-strewn meadow, or walk through a cool, dark forest, we quickly become aware of our unity with the natural world. We fall back into natural rhythms--rhythms we are no longer in synch with as a result of living by the clock and spending much of our time in man-made spaces lit by electricity. Nature has a way of recalibrating us and helping us gain a new perspective on our stressors so that they seem less overwhelming. ~ Carl Greer

Mental tensions, frustrations, insecurity, aimlessness are among the most damaging stressors, and psychosomatic studies have shown how often they cause migraine headache, peptic ulcers, heart attacks, hypertension, mental disease, suicide, or just hopeless unhappiness. ~ Hans Selye

A women under stress is not immediately concerned with finding solutions to her problems but rather seeks relief by expressing herself and being understood. ~ John Gray

Fear of a bully, fear of a volcano; the power within you does not distinguish. It does not recognize degree. ~ N.K. Jemisin

The truth is that stress doesn't come from your boss, your kids, your spouse, traffic jams, health challenges, or other circumstances. It comes from your thoughts about these circumstances. ~ Andrew J. Bernstein

Life Is an Ambiguous Stimulus

In a very real sense, life is an ambiguous stimulus. Does survival of a heart attack indicate that death is imminent or that one has been given a new lease on life? Is falling in love an assurance of a lifelong partnership or the first sign of an inevitable heartbreak? Many human situations are complex and their meanings subtle. Thus, to make sense of and gain agency over our experiences, we engage in the process of self-reflection.
Through self-reflection, people come to realize that their lives are filled with uncertainty about their own identities, their relationships with others, and their environmental circumstances. Because living involves adaptation to irregular changes and perturbations from the environment, the process of self-reflection reveals the indefinite nature of life. The uncertainty stemming from threatening stimuli whose nature is unknown or unpredictable evokes stress and a sense of loss of control. In response to uncertainty, we are driven to make meaning of our experiences and in so doing to reduce uncertainty. Indeed, a series of cunning experiments demonstrated that the sense of lacking control promotes illusory pattern perception in ambiguous situations. Hence, people consciously or unconsciously attempt to regain a sense of control by projecting patterns onto the chaos of their lives. This meaning-making process hinged on the appraisal of stressors and their meaningful integration into our autobiographica ~ Todd Kashdan

Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Balance life's stressors with life's pleasures. ~ Norene Moskalski

Therapeutic fasting is not a mystical or magical cure. It works because the body has within it the capacity to heal when the obstacles to healing are removed. Health is the normal state. Most chronic disease is the inevitable consequence of living a life-style that places disease-causing stressors on the human organism. Fasting gives the body an interlude without those stressors so that it can speedily repair or accomplish healing that could not otherwise occur in the feeding state. ~ Joel Fuhrman

Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The 1980's witnessed a new dance genre in New York City and Los Angeles. Slam Dancing was perhaps a way for adolescent males to deal with the stressors of maturation, aggressive personal feelings, and violence in the society at large. Through dancing, the youths expressed raw power and rage while achieving euphoria, enhanced self-concept, and a healthy fatigue. ~ Judith Lynne Hanna

Just as a stressful life can make you depressed, continuing exposure to stressors maintains depression. ~ Jonathan Rottenberg

Keep going on hikes, keep having your friends in your life, keep that downtime sacred as well because as hard as you work in any job, it's really nice to have the relaxing de-stressors. Stress is the worst thing. That's the ultimate demise of any good thing. ~ Dianna Agron

But, in reality, there is no such thing as an exact science. ~ William Stanley Jevons

Poor children face staggering challenges: increased risk of low birth weight, negative impacts on early cognitive development, higher incidents of childhood illnesses such as asthma and obesity, and greatly reduced chances of attending college (only about nine out of every one hundred kids born in poverty will earn a college degree). On top of this, poor children deal with greater degrees of environmental hazards from pollution, noise, and traffic, as well as other stressors harmful to their well-being. In a competitive and global knowledge-based economy, a nation's most valuable resource is its children. And yet we are reckless with this treasure. ~ Cory Booker

So it can be particularly helpful to keep in mind from moment to moment that it is not so much the stressors in our lives but how we see them and what we do with them, how we are in relationship to them, that determines how much we are at their mercy. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

I used alcohol for my panic attacks, to manage stressors. ~ Bill N. Lacy

Sometimes when people are under stress, they hate to think, and it's the time when they most need to think. ~ Bill Clinton

The salient stressors in the lives of most human beings today - at least in the industrialized world - are emotional. Just like laboratory animals unable to escape, people find themselves trapped in lifestyles and emotional patterns inimical to their health. The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities. We no longer sense what is happening in our bodies and cannot therefore act in self-preserving ways. The physiology of stress eats away at our bodies not because it has outlived its usefulness but because we may no longer have the competence to recognize its signals. ~ Gabor Mate

Research to date has shown that, like many other stressors, grief frequently leads to changes in the endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous, and cardiovascular systems; all of these are fundamentally influenced by brain function and neurotransmitters. ~ Joan Didion

Walking is a great stress reliever. First, it helps get your mind off of your stressors. It also helps to lower cortisol levels, which will be especially effective anyone looking to shrink their belly in particular. ~ Susan J. Campbell

Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Drugs, in short, do not make anyone into an addict, any more than food makes a person into a compulsive eater. There has to be a preexisting vulnerability. There also has to be significant stress [...] - but, like drugs, external stressors by themselves, no matter how severe, are not enough. [...] ~ Gabor Mate

Taryn, I know being in a relationship with me comes with an entire set of stressors that normal people never have to deal with. But you cut that away and I'm still me. I'm just a man. ~ Tina Reber

Even if we take Nietzsche figuratively (which he would have much preferred anyway), fifty years of research on stress shows that stressors are generally bad for people,3 contributing to depression, anxiety disorders, and heart disease. ~ Jonathan Haidt

I'm new to money. I spent most of my existence without it. I know how to live frugally. If we were to lose it all tomorrow, we'd change our hours, move out of the city, and make other adjustments, just like my parents did. Money removes many stressors, but it has not changed my level of happiness, nor who I am. It changes how I spend my time. ~ Megyn Kelly