Our Threshold for Stress

In college, I was your typical overachiever. I carried over 16 credits every semester, I was in the Honors Program with three minors, an internship, and a part-time job. (Sometimes I wonder how I survived—I’ve definitely lost a lot of my multi-tasking power in the past three years.) I’ve pretty much always been this way; I’ve worked since I was 16, sometimes more than one job at a time, and always managed to get my schoolwork done. It’s almost like I thrive under pressure—without it, I feel like I’m not doing enough. Stress is easy for me.

This ease, though, caused me to feel frustrated and disconnected from a lot of my peers at the time. In my mind, it was ridiculous for anyone to feel stressed about school if they didn’t have to work, or if they were taking fewer classes, or an easier class load. The complaints of my friends fell on deaf ears (mine). If I could survive, and even prosper, in this high stress lifestyle, why couldn’t they? It didn’t seem fair.

One day during my junior or senior year, I was explaining as much on the phone to my mother. She’s like me—she’s always worked extremely hard, taking on a lot both professionally and personally. Of all the people that I knew, I expected her to sympathize with my frustration.

Instead, I got an eye-opening response.

“You know, Alecia,” she said, “everyone has a different threshold for stress.”

I know that sounds simple, but it kind of blew me away. For the entirety of my 21-or-so years up until that point, I had assumed that every other person had the capability to take on as much as I had and succeed. It was just that they weren’t trying hard enough. However, her statement made sense to me on a logical level. Everyone has different thresholds for pain, too—and what was stress other than a physiological response to a stimulus, just like pain?

Turns out, of course, my mother was right. Thanks to a collection of factors that include emotional history, physiological/genetic predisposition, and available resources, no two people perceive a stressful situation in the same way.

Thinking about the people around me this way has drastically changed the way that I relate to them, and to myself. I’ve tried my best to stop comparing and competing, and as a result, my frustration with classmates lessened significantly. My fiancé tends to get more overwhelmed by social situations or a packed life schedule than I do, but I’ve come to realize that I cannot expected the same things of him that I do of myself. At the same time, I’ve learned not to beat myself up about the fact that I get completely stressed out in situations that don’t even make him flinch, like disagreeing with my family or speaking up for myself professionally. (Sometimes, the people we expect the most from are ourselves.)

It’s helped me at work, too—when I was leaving my last job, and was training the woman who would replace me, remembering this fact helped me from going too quickly or getting frustrated if she wasn’t moving through the training material as fast as I had. Now, too, it helps me recognize when the elementary-age boy I watch gets stressed out with his homework or reading, which is difficult for him. It allows me to acknowledge that he needs a break, even though I may not have.

It’s fruitless, experts say, to attempt to drastically change our own temperaments or the temperaments of others (that’s not to say we can’t get a little better at stress—just that there’s a limit for each of us) . But with more awareness, we can “work around” our stressors by “building up skills that may compensate for certain sensitivities, or structuring our lifestyles to minimize certain stress triggers.” So if you are feeling frustrated with the amount that you, or others, are able to handle, avoid person-to-person comparisons. Remind yourself that our thresholds are varied. Changing our expectations is the first step to better communication and connection with others, and to being a little easier on ourselves.

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You Might Be Interested In: “Why We Cut: Women and Self-Harm,” “10 Ways to Laugh Through Your IUI,” and “I Need An Adult: 25 And Lost.”

Photo of my happy face courtesy of Tom Smith.

Alecia is a logophile and a library bandit wanted in several states. In addition to feminist rants, she also writes essays, short stories, bad poetry, recipes and very detailed to-do lists. She currently resides in a little blue cabin in Woodstock with one fiancé, one Dachshund and one pleasantly plump cat. Find her tweeting @alecialynn. See her portfolio at eberhardtsmith.com.