Quotes About Stressors

Strenuous exercise can retrain your body's reaction to stressors. Exposing yourself to predictable, incremental physical stressors in the gym or the playing field increases your capacity to be calm and clear-headed in stressful real-world situations.

The number of stressors has multiplied exponentially: traffic, money, success, work/life balance, the economy, the environment, parenting, family conflict, relationships, disease. As the nature of human life has become far more complicated, our ancient stress response hasn't been able to keep up.

I just can't operate with any direct awareness of the pressures I might be under.

in general, major stressors make people of both genders more risk taking. But moderate stressors bias men toward, and women away from, risk taking. In the absence of stress, men tend toward more risk taking than women; thus

We readily think of stressors as consisting of various unpleasant things that can be done to an organism. Sometimes a stressor can be the failure to provide something essential, and the absence of touch is seemingly one of the most marked developmental stressors that we can suffer.

Stressful conditions from outside school are much more likely to intrude into the classroom in high poverty schools. Every one of ten stressors is two to three times more common in high poverty schools-- Student hunger, unstable housing, lack of medical and dental care, caring for family members, immigration issues, community violence and safety issues.

The worst stressors—exposure to violence, trauma, abuse, and mental illness—are shaped by a surprising factor: the level of income inequality in a region. For example, countries with the biggest gap between their richest citizens and their poorest have the worst health and the most violence.

The number of stressors has multiplied exponentially: traffic, money, success, work/life balance, the economy, the environment, parenting, family conflict, relationships, disease. As the nature of human life has become far more complicated, our ancient stress response hasn't been able to keep up.

The personality, in effect, is made up of one's coping repertoire and ability to adapt and therefore creates immunity to invading stressors or, in keeping with the analogy, bacteria. Throughout development, one faces crises and challenges. As development occurs, the system learns to respond, shift, adapt, and cope. However, if the system is overwhelmed by stressors insurmountable to the existing coping system, the system cannot effectively manage.

define calm as creating perspective and mindfulness while managing emotional reactivity. Calm is a superpower because it is the balm that heals one of the most prevalent workplace stressors: anxiety.

Dr. Perry: I think that's true. Even though we live in an amazing country filled with good people, I believe that collectively we're less resilient. Our ability as a people to tolerate stressors is diminishing because our connectedness is diminishing.

Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them.

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.

The very idea of exercise is to gain from antifragility to workout stressors—as we saw, all kinds of exercise are just exploitations of convexity effects.

But the larger point is that we can now see that depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not necessarily a good thing, and can be downright harmful.

Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse.

Our aversion to variability and desire for order, and our acting on those feelings, have helped precipitate severe crises. Making something artificially bigger (instead of letting it die early if it cannot survive stressors) makes it more and more vulnerable to a very severe collapse-as I showed with the Black Swan vulnerability associated with an increase in size.

Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.

We are fragilizing social and economic systems by denying them stressors and randomness, putting them in the Procrustean bed of cushy and comfortable—but ultimately harmful—modernity.

Frano Barovi? reading this chapter wrote to me: "Machines: use it and lose it; organisms: use it or lose it." Also note that everything alive needs stressors, but not all machines need to be left alone—a point we will visit in our discussion of annealing. But

In fact, the most interesting aspect of evolution is that it only works because of its antifragility; it is in love with stressors, randomness, uncertainty, and disorder—while individual organisms are relatively fragile, the gene pool takes advantage of shocks to enhance its fitness.

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

I have an enormous faith in Time and History as eventual debunkers of fragility. Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse.

separating some people from their fortune would simplify their lives and bring great benefits in the form of healthy stressors.