High psychological stress

High psychological stress is neither a character flaw nor hypocrisy. It is a normal stress response of the human body when faced with overloaded demands. More than 60% of people aged 18-35 in my country have experienced this state. Most of them do not require drug intervention and can quickly fall back after finding an appropriate adjustment method. There is absolutely no need to blame yourself for this.

The operation girl who was born in 1996 and was sitting in my clinic last week. The first thing she said when she walked in was "Doctor, am I so useless? I can't bear this pressure." She only slept 3 hours a day for three weeks in a row, carried two boxes of mints in her bag all year round, and chewed the inside of her mouth without noticing. Last month, she ranked second to last in the department's semi-annual assessment. Her biological mother called her the next day and urged her to go on a blind date. The two things collided. When she was making coffee in the tea room last week, she suddenly burst into tears, and she didn't know why. The measured salivary cortisol level was 42% higher than the normal reference value, which is typical of high psychological stress.

Regarding the causes of this state, the academic community has not yet reached a unified conclusion. Most scholars of the cognitive behavioral school think that the problem lies in "evaluation bias" - you magnify the severity of the thing you have to deal with ten times, and reduce the resources you can mobilize by half, and naturally you feel that you can't handle it. Just like this girl, she always felt that "I must be optimized this time around", but I talked to her department leader in private. The industry as a whole shrank this year. Only two people in the entire department completed the KPI, and there was no mention of layoffs at all. Consultants from the psychodynamic school are more likely to believe that the sudden burst of stress is probably due to the triggering of old inner traumas: She has always been compared to "other people's children" by her mother since she was a child, and she was said to be "unsatisfactory" if she didn't get into the top three. This time she was at the bottom of the exam and her mother urged her to get married, which essentially brought out the self-denial of "I'm not good enough" that she had suppressed for more than 20 years.

I have been doing clinical consulting for 6 years, but I feel that there is no need to worry about which school's conclusion is right, as long as it can solve the problem. Don’t believe the nonsense on the Internet that “the five stress-reducing tips will work immediately”. If they were that effective, our clinic would have been closed down long ago. I saw a client who was a programmer. The stress was so high that he had a headache all night long. He tried mindfulness meditation and couldn't sit still for 5 minutes. Later, he signed up for a kickboxing class. He fought twice a week. After a month of training, his cortisol dropped by 38% and he felt relaxed. ； There are also teachers from key middle schools who have to supervise 60 children every day. They don’t even have the energy to speak after get off work, and they don’t want to do any exercise. They just park the car and sit in the car for 15 minutes every day, watching silly and earthy short videos. After half a month, they can sleep for the better. What works for others may not work for you. There is no need to force yourself to be "positive". Being paralyzed is also a good method if you feel comfortable.

The 2023 National Mental Health Report of the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences states that among young people aged 18-35, the detection rate of high psychological stress is 62.7%. To put it bluntly, two out of every three people are experiencing it. You are really not special. The top three sources of stress for everyone are career development, intimate relationships and family responsibilities. Any one of them will be enough for you to drink a pot, and two of them will basically reach the warning line. It really does not depend on your "poor ability to withstand stress".

But don’t take it seriously. If you can’t sleep well for more than a month in a row, can’t eat or overeat, and now you don’t want to touch the drama you have been obsessed with before or the hobby you have loved for several years, then it is best to talk to a professional or go for a psychological evaluation. It’s really not something to be ashamed of. It’s just like taking a chest X-ray if you have a cough in two weeks. It’s just a routine checkup. Don’t go there until you can’t bear it anymore.

Oh, yes, the operations girl last time sent me a message yesterday, saying that this week she had broken down the big KPI into a few small things to do every day, and sent her mother a long message saying, "I won't go home during the National Day if I continue to push for marriage." This week, I was able to fall asleep before 12 o'clock. Yesterday, I went to see a talk show with my friends, and laughed until my stomach hurt. You see, the sky is not falling, so let’s take a breath first.