Comments

1. Jared says

   February 22, 2016 at 5:52 pm

   This whole approach seems like semantics to me.

   Sure, you can react productively to a stressful situation but that doesn’t mean there was no stress involved.

   One example explored in the podcast was that of traffic. I completely disagree with the idea that traffic is not a stressor. Traffic IS a stressor. I don’t care who you are, if you drive for 3 hours in traffic vs driving for 3 hours without traffic, you WILL have less energy after the traffic experience. The stress is real. It requires more cognition and attention to drive in traffic. Also, the threat is real. This is not a false-positive stressor. Without increased attention and cognition, you would certainly get in an accident and possibly injure yourself. I agree that it does not require swearing and self righteousness, but it does require more attention. It is inherently a more stressful situation than if there were no traffic.

   Generally, I think human beings make many more Type I errors than Type II errors–that is we overreact, lose perspective, and expend more effort than we need to dealing with things. Reducing the number of Type I errors we make without increasing Type II errors is a great thing to focus on, and if pretending like stressors don’t exist is a good way to do this for our monkey brains, sure. Personally, it just seems a little dishonest, but again, maybe it’s justified.

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   • Squatchy says

     February 23, 2016 at 12:52 pm

     But if you don’t view traffic as stressful at all, say you’re a person that doesn’t get bothered by traffic at all and totally expect it to happen, then does being in traffic really cause stress?

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     • HeartX says

       February 23, 2016 at 4:09 pm

       In short yes. All things equal, all sensory inputs are “stress”.

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