Do you have a feeling life is moving faster than you can react to it? How about feeling completely exhausted to the point sleeping just makes you more tired and you have to use some sort of stimulation to get out of bed and be functional in the first place? Sudden bursts of anger? Anxiety for no reason? It's all due to stress.
Stress is an evolved response to physical, mortal danger. Our ancestors lived surrounded with mortal danger, such as snakes, lions and bears. These beasts were deadly in the truest sense of the word as they pounced the hapless human to end life on the spot. We evolved a stress response to react fast enough to these dangers; only those who freaked at the slightest sign of danger lived to produce offspring. So, if you heard rustling of the leaves behind you, your body would immediately tense up and pump adrenaline, allowing you to achieve superhuman strength and speed to run away or fight off the danger. This is the fabled "flight or fight" response.
Note that this stress response was meant to last a short time and then be followed by recovery, usually involving endorphins, feelgood chemicals, because hey, you made it out alive by either being the strongest, smartest or fastest man in the tribe. Now you can share a cool story for all the cavegirls by carving it to the wall-gram. What we have in modern times is a constant stress response even though there's no snakes, lions or bears in the urban jungle, meaning there's never the endorphin closure that is meant to end stress.
What prolonged stress does is that it thoroughly exhausts the body, making it incapable of relaxation and subtle functioning. Simply put, the body is constantly in survival mode, feeling threatened at all times and expecting a danger that never shows up, meaning you can't fight it or flee from it. Stress also allows us to ignore pain and discomfort for a short period of time, again in order to fight or flee from danger, which means that prolonged stress makes you liable to ignore comfort and expose yourself to all sorts of unpleasant situations, such as sitting incorrectly, which hurts the spine.
In short, the body secretes adrenaline and cortisol to prepare itself for stress. When constantly secreted, these two chemicals shorten the lifespan and change the way organs work at a fundamental level. According to a 2007 University of California study "Stress, eating and the reward system" by Tanja C. Adam and Elissa S. Epel, stress also upends the entire carefully calibrated hunger/satiation mechanism, causing you to gorge on palatable foods. Why? When you're under so much nondescript stress, there's no real resolution and your body never releases endorphins to close the loop, forcing you to look outside for a source of stimulation that would result in the release of feelgood chemicals. Possible sources includes soda, cookies, sugary treats, candy but also alcohol, entertainment, porn etc. This does have some interesting implications.
If I were a conspiracy-minded individual, which I'm not, at this point I'd suggest that there's a concerted effort by the media, food, entertainment, pharmaceutical and other companies to create an environment of constant stress that keeps ramping up. In this conspiracy-minded theory, which I am certainly not supporting, these companies would collude behind the scenes and intentionally strive to slowly increase the amount of stress everyone experiences to increase overall consumption and hence profits.
In addition to this bizarre theory, I might imagine that immigrants could also be funded, directed and allowed to pour in through the borders as to increase the consumer base and put additional stress on both the immigrants and natives, which would again increase consumption. If those immigrants were of a certain genetic origin susceptible to diet-based health problems, say blacks and Latinos, both of which just so happen to have an increased risk of diabetes, this absurd conspiracy theory would state that they're intentionally allowed to immigrate as to create more consumers for the food and pharmaceutical industry and also burden the taxpayers by being patients, who now again feel increased stress.
Since I'm not into conspiracies, I most certainly don't believe that the most powerful people on the planet, including politicians, educators and technologists, gather behind closed doors at the so-called Bilderberg meetings. There is no evidence these meetings are held yearly in various exotic locations. I'd imagine it's completely preposterous to propose that they'd be syncing up their control mechanisms to induce appropriate amounts of stress around the globe, so as to increase consumption but avoid creating a mass psychosis in their populations. The very notion that mass murders are done by people who snapped under this gradually increasing stress is laughable and I feel ashamed for bringing it up at all.
Even if Bilderberg meetings were real, I am sure the powerful people attending them would have our best interests in mind and respect our free will. They most certainly wouldn't consider us biological machines to be poked and prodded to do their bidding; "lumbering machines", as Richard Dawkins put it. Any scientists attending Bilderberg meetings would certainly not feel any scorn for the humanity and any expressed disdain for common folk would surely be just a fluke. I am sure these infinitely powerful people believe in our creative genius and that we're capable of achieving everything if we're simply inspired rather than biologically manipulated.
I am also quite certain that, even if those control mechanisms did exist, they'd be quite impervious to rapid climate change and there would be no amount of butterfly effect that would cause these powerful people to feel stressed out themselves. I think it's laughable to suggest that there's such a thing as karma, wherein people get their comeuppance, in this case Bilderbergians getting stressed out when their control systems start falling apart due to causes outside their influence.
So, how do you resolve stress? Our brain is capable of changing the body physiology through thought patterns, which in the case of stress means realizing that the survival mechanism is useful but there's no real danger to life and limb. By seeing things around us as challenges, we switch over from survival fight-or-flight stress response to a more nuanced, cerebral response that involves constructive thinking and problem resolution. Customer yelling at you? It's not a danger but a challenge. Significant other having a meltdown? Not a danger; just a challenge. Once you start seeing situations as challenges, guess what happens? Challenges can be solved, therefore your brain again starts sputtering out feelgood chemicals that close the stress loop. Still, sometimes you can't do anything but walk away.
I used to be under a lot of stress, my father being a war veteran and all. He brought home his wartime thinking and learned stress responses, infusing our daily life with all sorts of uncomfortable situations. Even 25 years after he returned from war, my father continued with causing himself and others around him a stress response — he expected shells to start falling any moment now, which made our home look like a Spartan academy. It's only after I left his immediate vicinity that I realized my entire body aches because he whipped me into a state of stress that made me ignore discomfort. Once I put some distance between us two, we could finally have a relaxed occasional chat that lasts for a couple minutes, which I use as a constant reminder how good of a decision it was to move out. Some people are stressed out of their minds; you can't do anything to help them unless they start lowering their stress response to the world, so just move on and live your life.
Unless you proactively deal with stress, it's never going to stop. Stress situations tend to pile up and cause a feedback loop where every stressful situation leads to an increased stress response, creating more stressful situations. The cheat code to relieving stress is to use stimulants, such as caffeine or THC, that briefly override the feeling of exhaustion and let you eke out a bit more productivity out of your stressed out body. Unless you start dealing with stress, you're looking at a whole heap of trouble falling on your head once your body adapts to those stimulants, becoming literally incapable of continuing with the same lifestyle.
My approach to stress is what I call "register but don't react". We have a highly evolved set of brain functions that can deal with stressful, non-mortal dangers much better than the primal mechanisms based on adrenaline and cortisol, but it's much slower and isn't reflex-based, looking for unique solutions to each problem. Before you do anything, simply observe what's happening and don't respond or react in any way to it. At its core, this is what meditation is about, as it allows you to track your thoughts and inner responses to their origin, detecting the source of stress and dealing with the problem at its root. Unless you willingly decide you won't be afraid or angry, your body will kick in the stress response and send you into autopilot mode that's been honed for millennia. Once it's time to react, do so and again return to the state of calm.
Once I started observing my behavior, I found plenty of signs of stress. For example, I'd be tensing up my arms, which is a way to prepare for a fight with bears. If the fight doesn't come, the tension in the arms remains, causing stress. Also, I'd be tensing up my legs, which is a preparation for fleeing, and again, if there's no running to release the potential energy, there's only tension that leads to stress. Hunching over is another symptom – it protects the vulnerable stomach from attack by bears, wolves etc. I eventually realized I need to chill and just keep my arms and legs as stretched out as possible at all times. When I look at tribal dances, they seem like a great way to release tension, so just get up from time to time and shake your weight around. I found out doing Tai Chi, slow motion kung fu, helps too.
Stress isn't good or bad, it simply is, just like your thoughts and emotions exist without any moral quality; they simply are. Once you stop judging yourself and accept that stress, thoughts and emotions are useful in their own, narrow ways, you can start using your actual brain, the higher functions of your mind that don't need fear, anger or disgust to spring into action. That's when life becomes stress-free and spontaneous. If you need to believe you're screwing over Mark Zuckerberg or Richard Dawkins by doing so, so be it, but ultimately you'll be doing it for yourself.