What are the sources of psychological stress?

Sudden or continuous objective events from the outside world, individuals’ own cognitive evaluation patterns, and implicit social and cultural constraints that are easily overlooked.

The easiest thing to perceive is the pressure caused by external events. Last month, I received a visitor from the Internet industry. For three weeks in a row, he rushed to plan the 618 big promotion. He worked across departments to make changes back and forth, and stayed up until two o'clock in the morning every day before getting off work. During that time, he felt tight in his chest even when eating. This is a typical "pressure of things" and a stress reaction directly caused by the rigid requirements of the external environment.

But what many people don’t pay attention to is that when the same thing happens to different people, the difference in stress may be huge. Take the 35-year-old career node as an example. He has also not been promoted to a management position. Some people think that they can just delve into the technical field and become a senior expert, and feel comfortable without so many management worries. However, some people regard this as an early warning that "the workplace is about to be eliminated."

There is also more hidden pressure, which you are not even aware of. It is pushed to you by the entire social and cultural environment subtly. A stay-at-home mother came to me for consultation before. The family's financial situation is sufficient to support the expenses, and her husband has made it clear that she does not need to go out to work, but she can't help but blame herself. She always feels that she is "out of touch with society" and "has no contribution to the family" because she is not working. In essence, it is the entire society's default evaluation system of "income = personal value", which is quietly putting pressure on her. This kind of discipline is usually invisible and intangible, but it wraps around you like air, slowly building up pressure.

There have been different voices in the academic community regarding the source of stress. Researchers who prefer evolutionary psychology have also proposed the "instinctive stress theory", which believes that some stress reactions are survival instincts engraved in human genes. For example, being nervous when speaking in public and fearing being criticized by leaders are essentially evolved from the instinct of humans in ancient times to fear being rejected by the group and losing survival resources. This type of stress does not require acquired learning to occur. However, researchers with a sociological background do not agree with this statement. They believe that all feelings of stress are shaped by society. Primitive humans do not have the anxiety of not being able to complete KPIs, nor do they feel failure because they do not buy a house. The so-called "instinct" is just the default evaluation system of a specific social stage as nature. At present, the two views have not yet reached a completely unified conclusion.

Speaking of stress, it's actually a bit like being caught in the rain. A sudden heavy rain is the pressure of an external event. You obviously brought an umbrella but you still blame yourself for not going out earlier to avoid getting caught in the rain. This is the additional pressure brought by cognition. People passing by you will point at you and say, "Being caught in the rain means you don't have the ability to read the weather forecast in advance." This is the added pressure imposed on you by society and culture. I have met visitors who had three kinds of pressures at the same time before. A young girl from 985 who just graduated joined a leading Internet company. While she had to catch up on the quarterly OKR she just received, she secretly made up her mind that "graduates from prestigious schools must be in the top 10% of the department." During the break, while browsing short videos, I always came across the comment that "if you graduate from 985 without an annual salary of 300,000 yuan in three years, you will be a failure." The combination of these three kinds of pressures forced me to survive the sleep disorder, and it took me half a year to adjust and slowly recover.