I’ve noticed several people lately that inflict stress on themselves in such a way that I now refer to this syndrome as self-inflicted stress. My thinking is that these people — for some unknown reason — want or need stress in their lives, so they manufacture it.
As one example, a friend wrote me a “sky is falling” email about situations related to her relatives. My first thought was “These problems have nothing to do with you, why are you stressing about them?”, and — knowing the situations she was writing about — my second thought was, “Nothing has changed since yesterday (or even five days ago), why are you so wound up today?”
As another example, one of my nieces got married recently, and in the days leading up to the wedding I observed several people who are only loosely connected to the wedding itself taking on the stress of the wedding as though they were getting married themselves. Personally I tried to enjoy the moment(s); I haven’t been around a wedding in a long time and I wanted to enjoy it, so I thought how unusual it was that these people would bring/invite stress onto themselves.
Note: At the last moment I was asked to be the videographer for the wedding. Way back when I was married, my wedding pictures were messed up by a relative who my wife’s family had asked to be our photographer, so this was an unpleasant thought for me; I didn’t want my niece to think of me as I think of him. But I took the job — and then the video camera they gave me quickly died. The wedding ceremony was about to conclude, so thinking fast, I took out my phone and began recording the end of the ceremony on it. Then it filled up and I grabbed someone else’s phone, and recorded the rest of the wedding and reception on it. I certainly had stress at this time, but at least it was the stress of trying to do a good job.
I’m not 100% sure what the right term is for this phenomenon, but a term like “self-inflicted stress” or “manufactured stress” seems 98% appropriate.
