On Stress
“Take for example you are sitting in a coffee shop with a friend and this woman comes in wearing the most hideous sweater you guys have ever seen. It looks old, frumpy, poorly cut… basically everything you would never want in a sweater. So you’re there, snickering to yourselves about the fashion police, except that the woman wearing the sweater thinks she’s all that. So she’s strutting away with her coffee, casually checking out her reflection in the window because she believes she’s looking that good. A while later in walks this other woman, wearing those over-the-knee boots that are in this season (you know what I’m talking about, they are so hot) and you give a nod to your friend in her direction and ask each other where she might’ve gotten those because you definitely want a pair just like that. But the woman with the boots, she’s feeling pretty gross, slinking up to the counter to get her coffee, trying to hide herself. In her mind she believes that nothing is going right with her outfit, that she’s not really pulling these boots off at all. Now who would you rather be? The woman with the sweater feeling fantastic, am I right?
“Stress is completely about your perception of the situation. It has nothing to do with the situation itself. There are three steps to how we perceive each situation: primary appraisal, categorizing whether it’s irrelevant, benign/positive, or stressful to us; secondary appraisal, where we evaluate what we can do about it; and reappraisal, which is returning and making a new primary appraisal based on new information. I wish I could remember the source for this, but they say 90% of what we stress about turn out to be nothing by the time we reach reappraisal!”
(Prof. Madsen telling us what we all needed to hear and making it crystal clear with an elaborate example. Thank you!)
