Do you get stressed over small things?

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Am paraphrasing big time, so as to keep this brief(er).

In Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling in Happiness", author suggests that major life crises trigger defense/coping mechanisms, emergency systems that play out over long haul & people do adjust to major alterations in circumstance (not instantly, but with time & practice). Minor incidents aren't serious enough to cause this protective/adaptive machinery to kick in, so they actually hit people harder in the moment (but are often quickly forgotten once the disturbance has passed/ceased). Hence the seeming paradox of intense reaction in present to "small" temporary problems-and lesser/muted response to "significant" or chronic stressors.

For example, people may bemoan a big change in life, yet ask them about it many years later & they'll say "I'm surprised to realize this severe troubling incident/event (such as health crisis or accident) actually was a good thing, in retrospect-it's made me better person". Yet if one's not in that place, hasn't lived through that experience, one might think this was untrue or delusional, beyond one's current ability to imagine (having "positive" reaction to what seems a disaster). Can be tough for anyone to predict how they'd deal with something unlike what one's been through so far.

I could say "If Z happens, that's it, end of the world, end of my life"-and I mean it. Yet it's possible that if Z did befall me, I'd think negatively/catastrophically for awhile but eventually get used to it-and even be glad I stuck with staying alive through that hard time. Maybe I'd say (after the fact) that it was, unforseeably, event that produced "growth" to my "character" & personality and greater complexity/range to my experiences. Of course, if one's survived something, one may haze over how bad it was at the time, and it's not like one would willingly go back & endure such suffering again.

Doesn't mean this applies absolutely, 'tis just a thought to share...

Here's something stupid that I get stressed/anxious over!:

GETTING OUT OF BED.

No.. seriously. It's really hard for me to do that, what with my GAD (Generalised Anxiety Disorder) and Major Depressive Disorder. Getting out of bed is one of the big (if not the biggest) hurdle in my day.

Yet I'm not stressed over this weekend, which is a convention in London with over 15,000 people.. I have to use the tube to get there and everything.. Now, why doesn't that scare me?

I'm confused!

Yes.

One of the biggest stressors of my life is life itself.

Everything I do seem to cause some degree of stress, whether it be small or large.
Sometimes just eating dinner causes me stress because the food nauseates me. Sometimes finding a seating position thats comfy is stressful because I have to move around lots and by the time i've done that, the couch is messed up and my mother tells me to stand up and tidy it again. Sometimes simply getting out of bed is stressful because as soon as I wake up in the morning I anticipate that there will be never ending stress during the day or night, depending when I wake up.

It may sound pathetic, but it's the truth.

Absolutely. But my life is pretty high-stress as it is, with a large family and what-not. So its no surprise that a tiff with the wife, a sudden change of plans, or something else would send me to a meltdown quickly. This past weekend was Mother's Day. I'm horrible at giving gifts, making days special, etc. but I do try. Well, one argument over something completely unrelated threw off all of my plans for that day, and I found myself rocking in a dark, locked bathroom many times that day, just having given up on it all (yet hurting that things were turning out the way they were). When I get like that, I turn into a big baby and its like I'm on auto-pilot, I can't stop my behavior nomatter how wrong I know it is or how much I want to.

Yet my work day can be stressful, and it doesn't do nearly as much damage as feeling like a failure by someone I love.

lately i have been going through the oasis list of stressing things and do notice that i get less stressed over things if not under florescent lights so maybe this is one of those things that my brain sees things even though i dont know it

i am also noticing that i tend to only eat the same list of foods and get stressed if someone tries to get me to eat something else and wont take no for an answer

i will post more as i learn things but the oasis book helps to look at things that would never think to look at some things i find dont get me stressed but so far i have found a couple things

i have also been taking this list against my memory of what the places are like from the jobs i couldnt handle to try to narrow down a job i might be able to do

i found that once i started having times of being confused that the things that worked for managing my stress dont really work anymore so now that my doctors started calling what i have aspergers i started reading about my condition mainly as a stress management book to find the things that do stress me out and new ways of dealing with them

i thought to try some of the things listed as coping with aspergers that other people do since i believe that this will get me closer to realistic solutions than a book on stress since the things that stress me out are not covered in the typical stress book and realized that i used to actually do some of them so trying the things that i remember worked in the past but stopped doing

maybe if i can go back in my memory and start over with the things that worked before and experiment with new ideas then i can find things that work for me

maybe this confusion changed me in the same way a stroke changes a typical person in the way they need to cope with life