Trigger (Un)Happy

The machine is the term Pink Floyd used to describe how the modern world shapes us. How it molds us and how it forces us into corners that stress us. The machine of the modern world is a place where we follow aimlessly what we are told to follow.

Our thoughts, beliefs, acts, and desires are sold to us, and we accept them. We spend a lifetime chasing them, never stopping to notice as our lives slip away. Every day, we are worn down a little more, we get stressed a bit more, day after day after day.

Often, the reason we don’t take a stand is because we don’t recognise all the things that cause us stress. We get used to feeling stressed, and so we let the stress slip into our lives unnoticed, starting with the very first stressor, when our aggressive morning alarm jump-starts the day in a hostile fashion. Instead of taking a stop to prevent that the next morning, we simply roll over, snooze it, so it attacks again a few minutes later, and we accept the repeated hostility as our normal unpleasant start to the day.

One minute into the day, we eagerly rush to look at the morning head- lines for our assured daily injection of negativity and fear, setting the day up with the perfect start for the stress to continue every step of the way until we are back home, exhausted, to argue with our partner or plug our minds into the violence, deception, and horror of a long series to binge- watch before we go to sleep.

A lot of what’s causing you stress is preventable if you choose to reject its presence in your life. The first step you need to take to prevent it is to recognise it when it pops up in your life. The stressors we suffer every day are plenty. There are so many, as a matter of fact, that we have coined a term to describe them. We call them...

A TONN of Stress

Unless you are smugly reading this off the grid from a white-sand beach somewhere, sitting underneath your very own palm tree that drops fresh dates on demand, while you sip your piña colada with no annoying people, noise, deadlines, and distractions around you, then you’re likely surrounded by reasons to be stressed.

There’s no escaping stress in today’s world. Stressors are everywhere. Some are large, and some are small. Some are predictable, and some come totally out of the blue when you least expect them. Some happen to you, and some you generate to torture your own self.

Instead of counting every single possible stress, it helps to recognise four über-categories of it. That way, they become easier to deal with, either removed or minimised.

Some stress can be external - life events that are applied to you from outside. Other stressors are internal - caused by your own thoughts, emotions, physical pains, and misalignments.

Wherever they originate, externally or internally, stressors can be high in their intensity - we will call those macro stressors - or small and bearable - we will call those micro stressors.

With those four varieties in mind, you can visualise that all the different types of stress can fit neatly into four quadrants shown here in the stress quadrants diagram.

One dimension to observe is the intensity of the trigger that stresses you. One major event that exceeds your ability to handle is known here as Trauma.

One or a few internal thoughts or emotions can take you down and can linger. We will call them Obsessions.

Any other external stressor that does not break you on its own because it resides within your tolerance level fits within what we call Nuisances, and all other internal thoughts and emotions that pass within you but are not big enough for you to obsess about will be called Noise. Put those all together and they become a TONN.