Being a human and stress seem to just go together. Anxiety, concern—they follow too. There’s always something we’re worried about. If we don’t perform well on this presentation, it could mean we won’t get the promotion. You felt a little tired yesterday, and this morning you have a cough—is it something serious? Oh no, we cannot afford to get sick right now.

We're juggling multiple responsibilities. We're making sure we take care of our physical and mental health, and we're striving to achieve our goals. We have bills to pay and mouths to feed. We are sensitive to the slightest changes in our environment, we are nervous about the slightest clouds on the horizon.

It is a modern affliction, but it has also always been this way. Not that it has to be. “I see my child is ill; that’s what I see, but I don’t see that he’s in any danger,” Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. He was talking about stopping that very human, very natural extrapolation that we do (and extrapolation is the nice word here, because more often than not, it is better described as catastrophizing). His advice to himself—as a leader, a parent, and a philosopher—was to stick with the “first impression, adding no commentary of your own from within.”

Meaning, the cough can just be a cough. The subpar presentation can just be a single datapoint. Falling short today—it does not have to mean that everything is falling apart.

Stop torturing yourself! Be present. Focus primarily on what is front of you. Resist the impulse to add judgment or speculation on top of what you’re dealing with. Dealing with it alone is sufficient. You’ll do better and be less stressed.

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