Where does psychological pressure come from?

Psychological stress is never the product of a single factor, but the result of the interaction of external environmental stimulation, individual cognitive evaluation and internal physiological characteristics. No single factor can be solely responsible for stress.

There is a lot of quarrel online now about the sources of pressure. One group of people say it is all caused by external forces, such as 996, high housing prices, peer involvement, and as long as the environment is unfriendly, ordinary people cannot escape the pressure.； Another group of people think that they are all too sensitive and think too much. In the same environment, why are you anxious when others are fine? The essence is that you have poor resistance to stress. Each of the visitors I contacted had supporters of these two views, but no one could convince the other.

I just received a girl who works in operations at a leading Internet company last week. The first thing she said when she came in was, "I'm so stressed that I'm about to collapse. It's all because of the company." After careful questioning, I found out that half of the team members were gone from the optimization team last month. She took on the work of three projects by herself. She stayed up until two o'clock in the morning every day for three consecutive weeks, and she also had to keep an eye on group messages on weekends. But what’s interesting is that a male colleague in the same group as her was in a very relaxed state, and even took the initiative to apply to the leader to take over a new product line. He said that the team was short of people anyway, and it was a good time to accumulate project experience and brush up his resume. He was a little tired, but he didn’t feel it was “pressure” at all, and he worked vigorously.

You see, in the exact same external environment, the pressure felt by two people is completely different. This is the role of cognitive evaluation - whether you judge the thing in front of you as "a burden that will crush you" or "an opportunity that can be reached by jumping", the feelings are completely different. Of course, we can't say that the girl just "thinks too much". I did a physiological scale on her. Her amygdala activity is 30% higher than that of ordinary people, and she is naturally more sensitive to negative signals. The boss didn't reply for half an hour, and her colleagues turned around and forgot. She could think over and over again for two hours, wondering whether she had written a wrong report and needed to be scolded. This physiological trait is innate, so I can't blame her.

To put it bluntly, the process of generating pressure is like boiling water, the external event is the firewood placed underneath, your cognitive threshold is the boiling point of the water, and the physiological characteristic is the thermal conductivity of the pot. If the firewood is too strong, the boiling point is too low, and the pot conducts heat too easily, if there are two of them, the water will easily boil out. It makes no sense to blame either one alone.

I once met a visitor who resigned from a gap at home. I originally thought that quitting a high-paying job and going home to rest for half a year would relieve the pressure, right? As a result, she started to feel anxious after staying at home for less than a month. She checked the recruitment software until early in the morning every day. She was afraid that she would not be able to find a good job for a long time. She was afraid that her previous colleagues had been promoted and she was still resting. There was obviously no external pressure on her, so she put more pressure on herself than when she was at work. This is the typical external stimulus gone, but the cognitive and physiological motivations are still there, and stress still comes to the door.

I have been doing psychological counseling for almost ten years, and I have seen too many people who either scold the outside world, change their jobs, or change cities, but they are still anxious.； Either he is too fragile because of internal friction, and refuses to adjust his expectations until he collapses. In fact, he does not understand where his pressure comes from. For external problems, adjust the environment. For cognitive problems, slowly adjust your own judgment standards. For physiological sensitivity, learn to do relaxation training. Finding the right root cause is much more effective than just shouting "decompression".