Name: You're More Stressed Than Ever - Let's Change That
Uploaded: 2025-11-19T16:59:22.000Z
Duration: 11 min 58 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

Stress is an ancient superpower that's slowly killing you.

It evolved as one of the most powerful tools for survival, but

has turned into a double edged sword in the modern world.

It grants your wish to rise to a gnarly challenge or to work harder, but

claims a chunk of your life force in return unless you learn how to use it right.

And what can you do to escape its consequences?

All living things strive for homeostasis, a state where their body is in balance.

To maintain this balance, they make adjustments like moving into the sunlight or eating nutrients.

But the world is a cruel place with death lurking behind every corner.

And organisms need a way to react to extreme situations.

This is how stress evolved as a physical response to a stressor which is anything challenging or dangerous.

Stress is a very fast, drastic change of the state of the body that prioritizes survival.

An emergency program that lets the organism push way out of its comfort zone to survive.

To understand how stress works in humans, let's Visit a scene 50,000 years ago.

A group of early Homo sapiens are huddled around a fire when suddenly a desperate and starving saber toothed tiger attacks their camp.

As time slows down, his brain classifies the tiger as a critical stressor and unleashes the stress response.

Adrenal glands pump out adrenaline that rushes through Ur's body, activating fight or flight mode.

His heart starts beating faster and his lungs accelerate, providing an emergency supply of nutrients and oxygen to all critical systems.

Adrenaline dictates that his muscles have energy priority over his other organs and activates them for rapid action.

Pain and fatigue signals are muted while his senses become super sharp and lock in on the threat.

Ur perceives every detail with maximum clarity and realizes the tiger is getting ready to pounce.

Adrenaline forces Ur to make a quick, impulsive decision.

Without thinking about it, he chooses to fight and attacks with full force.

The animal is desperate and will not back down.

Cortisol is the slower, more strategic hormone that manages a longer stress response.

It orders a total shift of all body systems, ramping up the fuel supply while suppressing all non essential functions like resting, disease, defense or digestion.

Finally, Ur the bear Smasher deals the killing blow.

Their bodies shut down, fight or flight and activate, rest and digest.

Wounds begin to hurt and muscles cry in exhaustion.

It's time to recover and heal, bond and tell stories about how they killed the angry tiger God.

Some fall asleep, others eat to replenish.

The tribe relaxes and homeostasis is being restored.

When did this amazing superpower turn into a curse?

The Deadly Email Our world has changed so quickly and profoundly that our biology couldn't keep up.

Stress is still the same it was 50,000 years ago.

Sense a stressor, react immediately and with full force.

Prioritize present moment survival, make sacrifices if necessary.

That works well when you have to jump out of the way of a car.

But most stressors we encounter nowadays are abstract, acute and more numerous, often intangible, persist for much longer, and

usually don't even require physical action.

The tigers of the past are now angry emails, deadlines, online dating, rush hour traffic, or doom scrolling the news and social media.

But our brains are built to take fear very seriously.

So if you experience even a short burst of anxiety over an email or because you scrolled through Twitter, the helping hand of stress springs to action.

You could have dozens of these micro stressors per day, constantly activating your stress response even if you barely notice anymore.

While these micro threats stack up, we also have to deal with bigger stressors like unpaid overtime, angry clients, rising rents, inflation and healthcare or tariffs, and

But the boost we get from stress can also be extremely helpful.

If you have to study for an exam, run a marathon, or complete a big project, it's a proper superpower and can feel exhilarating, even addictive.

Especially if you work in a competitive field, you may keep pushing and challenging yourselves and others, relying on stress to get your best performance possible.

The problem is that stress was only ever intended to be used in short spurts and critical situations.

If it's activated over days, weeks and months with no release, it becomes chronic stress, one of the deadliest conditions for humans.

How Chronic Stress destroys you the price of chronic stress is the slow destruction of every part of your body and brain.

Over and over, adrenaline and cortisol keep flooding your body.

Your fight or flight systems are over activated while your rest and digest functions are constantly suppressed.

Your muscles tense up for a fight that never comes.

Instead, your back, shoulders and neck scream under the tension and you get pounding headaches.

Your digestive tract cramps and suffers either holding things in too long or rushing things out.

Your fat metabolism is disrupted and starts slowing down fat breakdown while increasing fat buildup in your belly area.

Your cells become less responsive to insulin, increasing your risk of metabolic diseases.

Your heart keeps pounding, eager to supply your body with fuel.

But your blood vessels aren't built for this constant overactivation and get destroyed in the process, massively increasing your risk of a heart attack or strok.

Your immune system gets weaker and stronger at the same time in a way that causes maximum damage to you.

The parts that protect you from disease are suppressed because who cares about a cold if you have to fight a tiger?

This increases your risk of infections, cancer and autoimmune diseases.

Meanwhile, cells that cause inflammation for wound healing are massively boosted, inflaming your tissue all over.

Perceiving an ongoing critical emergency, it slows down calm reflection and thinking, inst favoring quick and rapid reactions.

You literally get worse at thinking clearly and lose wisdom points.

You're much more likely to make bad, impulsive decisions like breaking up, eating junk food or using drugs.

You become worse at solving your problems while creating new ones.

Under chronic stress, you're simply a worse version of yourself.

If this persists, your memory and cognitive abilities get worse as you slide into anxiety and depression, so your chances of getting out of a stressful situation in the modern world worsen the longer you're chronically stressed.

If you can't escape it, odds are that you may die earlier and suffer greatly along the way.

How to Use Stress as Intended Stress can be your friend.

In measured doses, acute stress enables you to conquer mountains and push beyond your comfort zone, helps you to improve your skills and grow as a person.

And it can make it feel amazing to perform at your very best.

But to get the good without the bad, it's critical that you properly wind down your fight or flight response and relax.

If you feel stressed, you are stressed, full stop.

There's no universal threshold you have to reach before you're allowed to do something about it.

Next, ask yourself, is your stress response productive in your situation and is there an end in sight?

If you're studying for exams or moving house, stress is a superpower helping you you unlock your full potential.