On stress

I am an extremely stressed person. Mundane events that most people get around easily can have a particularly strong psychological load on me. I have learned to internalize those situations and to keep a straight posture at all time, in complete disregard of the intensity of the information I’m confronted by. However, that inner feeling persisting deep down aggregates itself and if the amount of stressful situations rises, it becomes harder to cope with it. It’s natural, and everyone gets through those moments, but I just think that I tend to experience that feeling more intensely and more often. Exercising helps a lot, seeing friends does too, to a certain extent. But no matter how much distraction I can plan in my weeks, the level of stress remains high. Stupidly high. On one hand, I know that the best way to deal with this is to fall into some kind of routine, which creates expertise in regards to what my daily tasks are and reduces the amount of unexpected, possibly stressful events. On the other hand, I hate routines. Every year in my life, every month, I want to break free from routines, just like a teenager going through puberty revoking his parents’ directives. Except I’m not a teenager anymore.

This inner contradiction hurts me. I am positive that I need a more spontaneous and fluid environment in which to grow but I also always end up suffering from extremely high stress levels during those. The long term effects are good in the sense that memories forged in such situations tend to be more enriching. But as this sort of psychological training of increased exposure to stress should improve my stress management and/or perception, it does not. I continuously feel exposed and despite my best efforts to face the situation in a calm and rational way, the unconscious takes the edge and my heart starts racing. It might mean that the situation at hand is not sought naturally by my personality, or it might mean something I can’t interpret at this point.

It is deeply frustrating that this biological weakness is affecting me. I want to trust that I can counter it with practice and discipline but even if it turns out to be inherited from my education and parental socialization, it is something that remains biological in the way that it triggers strong physical reactions that I can’t control the way I want. I also know that it is somewhat hereditary. My parents are stressed but they excel in dissimulating it. How many generations, how long does it take to finally get over this scenario and to finally bring a change to this? In the meantime, I can only hope that it will not impact my health; hearts are fragile.