Stress Influence Tendency

Have you ever asked yourself if your stress is a real thing?

I’ve been a doctor for over 30 years, and I’ve never seen stress appear on a blood test or under a microscope because it has no physical form. You can’t weigh it, scan it, or generally prescribe something to take it away.

Stress is a nominalisation, a verb that’s been turned into a noun. Because stress is something you do, something you’re feeling and generating inside yourself, in response to the world around you.

I’m not saying it doesn’t exist; it just may not be what you have always thought. People talk about stress as if it has a physical form, as if some lump of dread has been dropped on them from high above, something external they’re forced to carry on their back.

That’s the problem, and it’s why so many people can’t get rid of their stress. They’re waiting for someone to remove something that isn’t a removable object that has no physical form. But you can change a process, and you can change how your stress response runs in your head.

What Stress Actually Is

Stress is defined as a feeling of being under too much mental or emotional pressure. The keyword is feeling. Not carrying. Not suffering. Feeling. Which means it’s happening inside you, which means it’s something you have more influence over than most people realise.

Stress is a byproduct of how you’re reacting to the pressure around you. How you’re perceiving the situation you’re in. Two people can face identical circumstances, and one will be stressed while the other isn’t. The circumstances didn’t change. Their reaction did. That’s not a character flaw in the first person or exceptional resilience in the second. It’s a difference in how their internal process is running.

Lazarus and Folkman’s foundational research on stress and coping established this clearly: stress is not a property of events; it’s a property of your appraisal of events. Specifically, whether you perceive the demands of a situation as exceeding your resources to handle it. Change the appraisal, and you change the stress response, even if the external situation stays exactly the same.

The cure for stress is not positive thinking; it’s about what you are doing internally, and understanding this mechanism is the first step toward handling stress. Knowing it’s a process means you can intervene in that process.

Good Stress vs Bad Stress

Not all stress is the enemy; this is one of the most important things to understand and one of the most commonly missed.

There’s a distinction in psychology between eustress and distress. Eustress is the good kind of stress, the stress that pushes you to perform better, trains you, motivates you, gets you out of bed in the morning. The nervous tension before a presentation you’ve prepared well for, the pressure of a deadline that focuses your attention, the physical stress of a hard training session that makes you stronger. This kind of stress is not only tolerable but also beneficial, and it’s necessary for you to grow and lead a successful life.

Distress is the bad kind of stress. The chronic, grinding pressure that depletes rather than builds. The anxiety that cycles without resolution. The load that accumulates faster than it can be processed. Hans Selye, who first introduced these terms, was emphatic that the goal was never to eliminate stress entirely but to understand the difference between the kinds that serve you and the kinds that don’t.

The problem is that most people treat all stress as distress and try to eliminate it entirely. That’s an impossible goal, and chasing it tends to make things worse. The people who avoid all stress eventually back away from life itself. They stop pushing, stop risking, stop growing. Because growth requires a degree of eustress, and you can’t have one without the other. You need to find the line between eustress and distress. The more ambitious the life you want, the more distress you’ll need to be willing to tolerate on the way to it. That’s not a punishment. That’s the deal.

What Happens Under Distress

When you’re genuinely distressed, when the stress response has been running too hard for too long, things start to break down in predictable ways.

Your nervous system goes into overdrive, and the primitive parts of your brain interpret chronic stress as a threat and respond accordingly. Your reactions become quicker and more extreme. You become anxious, irritable, and prone to emotional outbursts that surprise even you. Your patience shortens, your thinking narrows.

Robert Sapolsky’s research on stress physiology showed that chronic stress specifically impairs the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for rational thought, planning, and impulse control, while simultaneously hyperactivating the amygdala, which processes threat and drives reactive behaviour. You’re quite literally becoming less able to think and more likely to react.

And critically, your decision-making speeds up and deteriorates simultaneously. Under distress you make faster decisions, but worse ones. You become more susceptible to your unconscious biases, more likely to react from habit and instinct rather than thought, more likely to do the thing that relieves the pressure in the moment rather than the thing that actually solves the problem.

This pattern has a name. The investor and psychologist Charlie Munger, in his catalogue of the tendencies behind human misjudgement, called it the stress-influence tendency: the documented pattern by which excess stress degrades the quality of your decisions in ways you’re often not aware of while it’s happening. There’s an inverted U-shaped relationship between stress and performance. A moderate amount of pressure improves your focus and speed. Too much collapses both. And when you’re in the collapse zone, you don’t always know it.

When Stressing Becomes a Habit

Here’s something that doesn’t get discussed enough: stressing about stuff can become a default mental pattern. A habit. And like all habits, it runs automatically once it’s established.

Some people stress excessively about things that don’t warrant it. Others are running such a high baseline level of background stress that even minor additional pressure tips them into overload. Either way, the pattern has taken on a life of its own. The original stressor is sometimes long gone, but the stress response keeps firing because that’s what the brain has learned to do.

Bruce McEwen’s research on allostatic load, the cumulative wear that chronic stress places on the body, is sobering. Your cardiovascular, immune, endocrine, and neurological systems all show measurable damage from prolonged stress activation. This isn’t metaphorical. It’s physical. Your body was not designed to run in a permanently stressed state. The same system that keeps you sharp in a genuine emergency will, if left on, gradually damage the very machinery it was designed to protect. The irony is that the stress response exists to help you survive. Chronic activation of it shortens the life it was meant to protect.

Taking Back Control

The first step is ownership. Stress is a process, and you’re running it in your head. That might sound like bad news because it implies responsibility. It’s actually good news, because it implies control.

When you know it’s your process, you can start making choices about how to run it differently. You have more agency over your stress response than you’ve probably been told. Not infinite agency. But real, meaningful influence over how you react to pressure, what you allow to escalate, and when you choose to step back before the stress-influence tendency takes over your decisions.

The practical work is pattern recognition. What triggers your stress response? What situations consistently push you from eustress into distress? When do you make your worst decisions? When do you say things you regret? When does your thinking narrow and your patience disappear? These patterns are consistent, which means they’re predictable, which means you can catch them earlier over time. Mindfulness-based approaches have a solid evidence base here, not because sitting quietly changes the world, but because the practice of noticing your internal state makes you less likely to be ambushed by it.

Reducing the amount of external stressors in your life is also a must. If you’re working too hard, not switching off, not sleeping, if there’s something you need to change, confront, or a decision that needs to be made, make it. No matter how good you are at handling your stress, everyone has a limit, and at some point, no matter what you do to reduce it, you’ll need to address the external stuff.

Mindfulness shows measurable reductions in perceived stress, anxiety, and physical symptoms in chronic stress sufferers through systematic training in present-moment awareness. When you can observe your stress response as it begins rather than only noticing it after it’s fully activated, you have more options. You can choose a different response. You can pause before making a decision when you’re in a depleted state. You can create the gap between stimulus and reaction that determines whether you react on impulse or respond with intention. That gap is available to you, but only if you’ve trained yourself to notice it.

Once you can see the patterns, you can intervene before they fully play out. Notice when you’re about to make a decision from a stressed state and build in a pause. Not every time. Not instantly. But with practice, you progressively get better at catching yourself before the stress-influence tendency makes the choice for you.

What This Means for You

You can’t eliminate stress. You shouldn’t try to. Some of it is what pushes you forward and makes you better. But you can learn to distinguish the stress that serves you from the stress that degrades your thinking and damages your health.

You can develop awareness of your own patterns. You can notice when the stress-influence tendency is about to make a bad decision on your behalf. You can build habits that reduce unnecessary pressure and create recovery time before the load becomes unsustainable.

And most importantly: stop treating stress as an enemy to be defeated and start treating it as a signal to be understood. Because once you understand what your stress is telling you, you can respond to it deliberately rather than just reacting to it automatically.

Stress is something you are doing internally, and letting go is up to you.

This isn’t therapy. If you’re dealing with clinical depression, severe anxiety, or trauma, please see a professional. I say this as a doctor, not as a disclaimer.

Further reading

• Lazarus, R.S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. New York: Springer.
• Selye, H. (1956). The Stress of Life. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Sapolsky, R.M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (3rd ed.). New York: Holt Paperbacks.
• McEwen, B.S. (2007). Physiology and neurobiology of stress and adaptation. Physiological Reviews, 87(3), 873-904.
• McGonigal, K. (2015). The Upside of Stress. New York: Avery.