Member-only story

Fifteen tiny ideas that quickly drain stress from your life

Alex Mathers
3 min readJan 18, 2025

--

Rates of stress are seemingly going up for large numbers of people at an alarming rate.

But what is ‘stress’ really?

It’s a label.

Beneath the label, what are we looking at?

Is my stress the same as your stress? How would we know?

Stress can absolutely be felt as a negative experience, and it can and does have physical and health implications.

But at the heart of it all, we’re still dealing with our relationship with thoughts.

It may not seem like it, but stress is always emphasised at the level of perception.

Here are some ideas that, when absorbed, will directly influence the amount of stress you allow in:

  • Stress is the feeling of tightness experienced in response to a stressful thought, not anything that happened ‘out there’ in your environment.
  • Things that happen in your reality — whether a difficult family member or a frightening deadline — are all neutral concepts before we apply meaning to them via our thinking.
  • We experience less stress when we see things exactly for what they are, without the labels we apply to them.
  • Our thoughts directly influence our

--

--

Alex Mathers
Alex Mathers

Written by Alex Mathers

Master writing for resilience and brand growth. Triple your productivity today using my checklist when you subscribe: https://alexmathers.co/

Responses (4)