Quotes about stress

Stress: the word comes up often in the study of rage murders. The problem is that even in spite of the awful effects of stress- from mental and physical health ailments to provoking massacres- we, the ones who suffer stress, are ourselves loath to describe our own stressed condition with language that might match the suffering it produces, for fear of sounding melodramatic, whiny- of not being able to tough it out. A little light goes on in most "normal" people's heads warning them not to complain about cracking under stress and risk being marked as a loser.

People always like to hear that they’re under stress, makes them feel better. You can imagine what they’d feel if they were told they weren’t under stress.

I was running from one problem or place to another, with no time left to study, or sleep, or just breathe. I felt pulled in all directions, fighting to keep all these obligations circling in the air above me. It was only a matter of time before something fell.

How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long – the care of cares – the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the radiance of Heaven – and straight you find a new stratum there.

Stress is an alarm clock that lets you know you’ve attached to something not true for you.

There are no new stressful thoughts. They’re all recycled.

Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list that you dumped: zero. It's all present tense in there. ...[A]s soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it... in your short-term memory... part of you... thinks that you should be doing it all the time. ...[Y]ou've created instant and automatic stress and failure ...

Lack of flexibility manifests itself as stress. ...stress will occur when one or more variables of the system are pushed to their extreme values, which induces increased rigidity throughout the system.

Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

The mind can go either direction under stress — toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.