Why We Can’t Tolerate Stress

After receiving many requests, I will be releasing a book on all of the topics covered in this blog. Add your email here to be notified when it’s released and get access to the signed early copies.

I think that we (young adults) are less able to handle stress. It’s possible that we are a softer generation than previous ones. I’ll quickly detail my personal beliefs, based on my personal experience, here.

I think instantaneous access to digital stimulation and distraction have deprived us of the ability to handle stressors in life. We are one click away from an outlet for stress, rarely forced to confront it head on. We find ourselves continuously warmed by a layer of additional artificial stimulation.

Might reliance on this stimulation explain why we constantly seek to find new ways to integrate stimulation into our lives, like listening to music in the gym and while running through the creation of headphones, like the creation of small portable speakers to use in showers, and the development of cheap mobile instant messaging?

I think we often use digital media to feel less lonely so to reduce stress, but in reality, using digital media can make us feel lonelier, with less ability to draw companionship and company from the self, as well as separating us from other people physically. It provides only superficial comfort and superficial alleviation of loneliness and stress, that can actually over time heighten loneliness and stress from depriving you of your relationship to your inner self as well as physical, real relationships with others, illustrating the oxymoronic nature of our interaction with digital media.

We need to reduce stress by comforting ourselves from within through solitude and without from real relationships with other people. If we’ve lost the ability to do that because of how we have decided to use digital media as an artificial means of comforting ourselves, we’ve lost the best ways to alleviate stress. I think we then find it harder to tolerate stress: only able to temporarily, superficially alleviate it with digital media.

If you need an instantly accessible means of alleviating stress, correlations suggest reading, nature, meditation, and even just deep breathing are better alternatives. Unlike highly stimulating digital media, those natural means of relaxing don’t just temporarily withdraw us from the self, but rather give us mental separation while simultaneously allowing us to engage with and repair the self.

Meditation means focusing on your physical existence in the present. This requires resisting mental distractions drawing you out of your focus on your physical existence in the present (thoughts, music, images). The mental effort we need to exert to resist those distractions prevents us from falling asleep when meditating.

Meditation is hard, especially for people in our generation, who tend to have environmental ADHD and continuous partial attention (thoughts moving around everywhere) from interaction with our devices. Through meditation, we reduce stress like we do with digital media, the key difference being that we don’t have to flood ourselves with artificial stimulation and dopamine. Instead of overloading our minds to temporarily reduce stress, with meditation we reduce stress by separating from mental activity. This gives the mind space to subconsciously process stress while also opening new space for other mental activity throughout the day for work or school. With meditation, we often leave more able to mentally engage with the world, and we are peppered with insights because of the space we gave the subconscious to process the world in the background.

Digital media may seem to reduce stress, but what most reduces stress is real relationships with others, as well as ourselves. It’s worth investing more in this in the short term for the greater long term benefit. While digital media is more easily accessible in the short term, it’s less effective in the long term. We can’t forget that.

After receiving many requests, I will be releasing a book on all of the topics covered in this blog. Add your email here to be notified when it’s released and get access to the signed early copies.

Why We Can’t Tolerate Stress was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.