Were you a gazelle frolicking through the savanna, munching on grass and doing gazelle things, you’d be far less stressed than your average human. Sure the chances of being mauled and torn to bits by a hungry huge cat are always there while you’re chilling, but that’s just the way it is. Nature doesn’t pass value or moralistic judgements on the hungry and afraid, on prey and predator. The gazelle will be stressed beyond belief running for her life, literally. Every second counts and every muscle burns with life affirming acid build up while fleeing from certain death.

The body is amazing at keeping us alive and is master of triage when certain foul things hit the fan. It will mobilize the dormant energy from your reserves and increase your heart rate to be able to faster dispatch glucose and oxygen to the muscles you need to get out out of this situation. It will suppress digestion, BTW this is why your mouth gets dry when you’re nervous, since saliva is the first step in digestion and mouth is the entry point for the GI tract. It will supress any growth and repair efforts and focus on just surviving. Reproduction will become temporarily irrelevant and sex hormones vanish from the blood stream, because you can’t reproduce if you’re dead. Sperm production and ovulation will be postponed to until you’re back in relative safety. You may be injured so the immune system will bulk up to keep you from getting infected by some foreign stuff, and you’ll get a sharper mind, be more alert, become stronger, more agile, have an enhanced response to stimuli and enhanced dopaminergic pathway aka you’re more susceptible to pleasure as well. And this is all good, adrenaline will make you survive. But the thing is this stress response was created for a short term state, a boost to help you survive, fight, flee or manage any way you know how to not get whipped out of the gene pool. Wild animals lead objectively far more stressful and dangerous lives and it would be logical that they would be more stressed and develop stress related diseases as we do. But they don’t. Why? Because a gazelle will calm down once it has successfully dodged death. All bodily functions resume. Short term extreme stress is not bad for the body. It was made to handle it and even thrive. The problem arises once the stress becomes chronic.

Our human lives are plagued by our past and imagined futures which activate the stress response and keep it turned on so you might react as a scared gazelle to your decades long debt, blind date, public speaking engagement, job search or social and emotional stress of a bad relationship. It does not last a few minutes or hours but can become a state in which you’re always fearful, anxious, paranoid and oversensitive. Although nothing is directly threatening our life, this is the curse of those who have the cognitive capacity to live in al timelines simultaneously. What makes us the most adaptable and versatile species – imagination – is also our downfall. A gazelle will not get an ulcer, but you will. Its end will not be a heart attack from the chronically stressed constantly cortisol flooded body. You will most likely have the luxury of not dying while being eaten alive by a beast, but will rather slowly decay and get walloped by a stress related disorder or disease, because you’ve had time to be stressed long term. We live in the safest era human history has ever seen and our societies and challenges are more complex than they’ve ever been. There are various things to fear now of course and this is not a problem – if you manage to find some vent, to release and calm down and return your body chemistry into resting state. The world changed but we’re still operating on old software designed to just survive. This confuses long-term inconvenience or challenge for a life threatening thing and keeps us in a perpetual state of alertness and panic. Learn to rationalize, calm down, breathe and just be. Chances that you have enough data or capacity to accurately assess (not guess) the outcome of any given multifactor situation are slim to zero.

Some stress is unavoidable but becoming it’s slave and sacrificing your metal and physical wellbeing to cater to it can be avoided. Control your mind or it will control you. The next thing you’re obsessing about will most likely not kill you, it may be hard but every gazelle in a vicinity of a hungry cat has had a worse day than you and you don’t see it whining about it. Take some time to chill and just graze. Influence what you can and make it better, let go of what is not under your control. You’re still here. Majority of the worst case scenarios you’ve imagined so far never happened nor will ever happen. Chill and breathe, you’ve got this.