Psychological stress can be expressed by the functional relationship of which three variables

The current mainstream psychological stress function model in the field of clinical and health psychology has three core variables: the objective impact intensity of stressful events, the total amount of internal and external coping resources that an individual can mobilize, and the individual's tendency to cognitively evaluate stressful events. This can be roughly simplified as stress level ≈ intensity of stressful events/(coping resources × degree of positive cognition). That is to say, the more sufficient coping resources and the more positive the cognition of the event, the more obvious the stress will be buffered.

When I was doing EAP on-site psychological counseling at an Internet company last year, I encountered something that just matched this formula. During the wave of industry optimization at that time, two male employees in their 30s in the same department received optimization warnings from the department, which meant that the intensity of the stressful events they faced was exactly the same. But the condition was extremely bad: I had insomnia for two consecutive weeks. When I came for consultation, my eye sockets were all blue. I said my heart tightened when I thought about being laid off. ； The other one got off work on time every day, even signed up for an offline advanced product operation class, and didn't panic at all.

Later, after reading the interview records of the two people, I understood that the difference lies in the other two variables. The one in poor condition had just bought a house in a school district and had a monthly mortgage payment of 22,000 yuan. His wife had just resigned from her job while pregnant with her second child. She had only enough savings to survive for three months. He had no contacts in the industry and could not even find a friend who could help with referrals. More importantly, he recognized that "being optimized means that I am not capable. I will never be able to find such a high-paying job in the future, and the whole family will drink from the northwest wind." The more he thought about it, the more he went down a dead end. ； The other one has no mortgage or car loan, and has enough savings to last more than two years. He is a technician and has several patents. He has been approached by three headhunters before. He himself feels that "now he is tired of doing repetitive work every day. If he is laid off and gets N+1, he can still rest for half a month, so he can try a different track." Naturally, he doesn't feel any pressure.

Of course, not everyone agrees with this variable division. When I participated in an industry salon before, a teacher who specializes in social support research proposed that social support should be separated from coping resources as the third core variable. After all, many times the resources that individuals can mobilize are controllable, but the external support provided by family, friends, and public services is relatively independent, and the buffering effect on stress is sometimes stronger than personal resources.； There are also teams doing positive psychology research that believe that the sense of meaning should be separated from cognitive evaluation. Even if your current cognition of this matter is negative, as long as you can find the long-term significance of this matter, such as "staying up late now to work on the project is to save experience for taking on the project in the future", it can also significantly reduce the feeling of stress. These models are currently supported by empirical data, and there is no absolute right or wrong.

For those of us who provide front-line services, we don’t actually need to worry about which model is more authoritative. It is enough to help visitors find ways to make adjustments in the direction of these variables, which can actually relieve the pressure.