[Onward2wards]

I hear that people have a tendency to get "stressed out" and have some negative behavioral changes after having to juggle a lot of demands or adjust to sudden new circumstances/information. I've experienced this myself.

In order to learn, or adjust to new things, we need to free up all the short term memory we can. To do this, logically more and more decisions and behaviors have to fall back on old, automatic responses that don't require careful thinking (increased attention and decision making). Could it be that stress is actually our brains running out of processing capacity and relying on more and more old, primitive, and fear based responses? Could it be that "cumulative daily stress" is simply being overwhelmed by understandable reliance on old personal scripts we learned earlier for emotional and physical survival?

Under enough sustained stress, it seems almost anyone can start acting more like a cranky, scared or needy child than a fully functioning adult - especially if we have enough old fears also being triggered by new and rapidly changing circumstances. This would be logical, given that those fear triggers would tend to activate personally meaningful learned responses, while our conscious attention is elsewhere.

I asked myself, if this is a valid theory, how would anyone overcome the tendency? What occurred to me is imagining a better set of responses than the typical ones, and rehearsing those head of time enough that they become new responses we don't have to think about when our attention is divided.

Do you have any thoughts or experiences based on this?

Edit:
I notice that as I practice mindfulness more - simply being aware of what my thoughts, feelings and behaviors are moment to moment, no longer letting my mind automatically respond without any conscious attention - I find it easier to catch myself self-criticizing, self-censoring, or otherwise reacting without having to think, and some of these automated responses are extremely unhelpful. I also get this sense of "deja-vu", as if these responses are learned, and have been mindlessly repeating for a long time.

[CANDC]

Hi onwards. Stress is one of the biggest problem in modern life. There are many ways of coping with stress.

Mindfulness works for me also counting the breaths one on the inhale and two on the exhale up to 10 or until I lose count. The counting takes me away from preoccupations and actually gives me a mini vacation.