Psychological stressors include

External environmental stress events, individual internal cognition and personality traits, social relationships and role expectations. However, there has been controversy in the clinical psychology community as to whether internal factors are stressors, and there is no absolutely unified classification standard.

The earliest stress studies actually only counted objectively occurring external events as stressors. For example, the life events scale compiled by Holmes and Reich in 1967 ranked quantifiable events such as widowhood, unemployment, and moving according to stress value. You have most likely had a similar experience: the day you suddenly received a notice of layoffs, your heart rate suddenly spiked to 120, and the elderly family member was unable to swallow food the week he was suddenly hospitalized. This sudden acute stress, or chronic environmental pressures such as year-round 996 and long-term noise pollution in the place of residence are sources of stress that everyone can clearly perceive, and there is almost no controversy.

But you must have encountered this unexplainable situation: colleagues in the same project team, seeing that there are still three days until the deadline, some people are supposed to order milk tea, but they will pack their bags to get off work when the time comes, and some people start to have insomnia a week in advance, and even watching short videos feels like they are choked up. This completely different stress response under the same external situation also made later researchers begin to turn their perspective to the people themselves. Scholars of the cognitive-behavioral school generally believe that individual cognitive patterns and personality traits should also be included in the category of stressors - such as natural high sensitivity, or the habit of catastrophizing thinking of the worst in small things, or the perfectionist tendency to achieve 100% in everything, which may keep you in a state of stress when there is no actual external threat. I received a visitor before, but the boss just didn’t reply to his work WeChat message. He sat at his work station and thought about it for two hours, "Did I do something wrong and I will be fired?". When he got home from work, he was still looking through the previous chat history to find problems. At this time, the source of stress was essentially his cognitive bias, not the fact that the boss did not reply to the message. However, there have always been objections to this classification. Many psychoanalytically oriented scholars believe that cognitive biases are essentially the result of long-term stress. It is unreasonable to classify it as a stress source. Instead, it will put all the responsibility for stress on the individual's "bad mentality."

In addition to these two categories, what has been increasingly discussed by academic circles in the past two decades is the pressure brought about by social relationships and role expectations. In the past, most of this type of pressure was attributed to the external environment. Later, everyone discovered that this type of pressure, which accounts for a very high proportion in collectivist cultures, actually has a completely different operating logic. Last year, I received a visit from a stay-at-home mother. Her husband had a stable income, there was no financial pressure on the family, and her children were in elementary school. Others thought she was living a very comfortable life, but she just couldn't sleep well every day and always felt tired. It took us four or five conversations to figure out that her pressure all came from the "role requirements" of people around her: her mother-in-law felt that she should keep the house spotless when she was not at work, her husband felt that she should take care of her children's studies and not let herself worry about them, and even her own mother felt that she was "hypocritical to complain about being tired while resting at home." These invisible expectations accumulated so much that it was more stressful than working overtime for three months. The 2023 Domestic National Mental Health Development Report also mentioned that among young people aged 18-35, 42% of stress comes from interpersonal relationships at home and in the workplace, which is a higher proportion than the stress caused by work tasks themselves.

To be honest, in the five years I have been working as a consultant, I have seen too many people who cannot figure out the source of stress. They either regard the emotional reaction caused by stress as the source and always say "I am stressed because I am too anxious." I blame my poor ability to withstand pressure. It is obviously a big environmental problem that the entire industry is reducing recruitment, but I still force myself to work harder to get the offer. As a result, the original pressure is not resolved, and there is an additional layer of self-attack of "Why am I so useless?", and the pressure is piling up.

Of course, in the final analysis, these classifications are just frameworks created by scholars to facilitate research. Pressure in reality is never classified according to classification. It is often the background of the cold winter in the industry that first gives you a sap, and then your family urges you to get married and have children. You can't help but think to yourself, "Why am I doing so poorly?" When these forces come together, it becomes the straw that breaks your heart. If you really want to find your own source of stress, there is no point in categorizing it. It is better to sit in a deserted place for half an hour and write down the things that have upset you recently on paper. Which ones are external troubles that you can hide from, which ones are ideas that can be adjusted, and which ones are relationship conflicts that you can sit down and talk about. It is much more useful to sort them out one by one than to fuss over academic definitions.