Life is stressful.
That isn’t necessarily a sign that something has gone wrong.
Money, work, relationships, health, children, ageing parents, mortgages, deadlines, uncertainty about the future and the occasional person who makes you want to relocate to a remote Scottish island are all part of being human.
The problem is that we often experience two layers of stress.
The first is the actual difficulty:
“I have a huge workload.”
The second is what our mind adds:
“I’m never going to manage this. I’m falling behind. Everyone else seems to cope better than me. What if I lose my job? I should be able to handle this.”
The workload is real.
The rest is interpretation.
And this distinction is enormously important, because while we cannot control everything that happens in life, we have considerably more influence over how we respond to what happens.
Just how stressed are we?
Very.
Recent UK figures paint a sobering picture.
The Health and Safety Executive estimates that 964,000 workers experienced work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25, with 22.1 million working days lost as a result. Stress, depression and anxiety accounted for more than half of self-reported work-related ill health.
Even more recent research from the Mental Health Foundation suggests that 22% of UK workers, around 7.2 million people, were experiencing poor mental health in 2024. Around one in six workers (17%) said their job caused them stress or unhappiness most of the time. Financial pressure is tangled into the picture too: 43% of workers reported dissatisfaction with their income by 2023/24.
The pressures aren’t confined to work.
A large UK Mental Health Foundation survey found that 74% of people had experienced stress during the previous year that left them feeling overwhelmed or unable to cope. Health problems, debt, housing, body image and social comparison all featured among the pressures people described. Among those who had experienced stress, 61% reported anxiety and 51% reported feeling depressed.
Money deserves particular mention. In a UK poll of 5,000 adults, 31% said their financial situation had made them anxious during the previous month, 27% felt stressed and 9% felt hopeless.
So if life feels demanding, you’re certainly not alone.
But perhaps we need to reconsider what coping actually means.
Stop trying to control the uncontrollable
One of the most useful psychological distinctions we can make is between:
What can I control?
and
What can’t I control?
You cannot completely control:
- what other people think about you
- whether somebody likes you
- other people’s behaviour
- the economy
- whether your company restructures
- whether somebody leaves
- everything that happens to your health
- what happened in your past
- whether your children make sensible decisions
- whether someone replies to your message
- whether something unexpected happens tomorrow
Yet we can expend astonishing amounts of mental energy trying to control precisely these things.
Worry often masquerades as action.
It says:
“Keep thinking. We haven’t solved this yet.”
So we run the scenario again.
And again.
And again.
Unfortunately, repeatedly thinking about something we cannot control doesn’t give us control.
It usually gives us more anxiety.
What can you control?
Your sphere of control is much smaller.
But it is also much more powerful.
You can influence:
What you choose to focus on.
How you respond to your thoughts.
What you say.
What you do next.
Whether you approach or avoid.
Whether you ask for help.
Whether you set a boundary.
Whether you take one useful action today.
You cannot always control the first thought that pops into your head.
But you do not have to give that thought a chair, a coffee and the rest of your afternoon.
Your brain isn’t always telling you the truth
This is one of the central ideas in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
Thoughts are not facts.
Our minds constantly generate interpretations, predictions and assumptions. Some are useful.
Others are spectacularly unhelpful.
When we’re under pressure, thinking can become even more distorted.
Catastrophising
“If I make a mistake, everything will fall apart.”
Perhaps.
But probably not.
Ask:
What is the most likely outcome, rather than the worst imaginable outcome?
Mind reading
“She thinks I’m incompetent.”
Do you know that?
Or has your brain filled an information gap with the most threatening explanation available?
Fortune telling
“I know this is going to go badly.”
You don’t know.
You’re predicting.
Prediction and fact are not the same thing.
Rigid thinking
“I should be coping better.”
“I must get everything done.”
“I can’t let anybody down.”
Words such as should, must, always and never often turn preferences into psychological demands.
Try:
“I’d prefer to get everything done, but I may need to prioritise.”
That’s not lowering your standards.
It’s replacing rigidity with flexibility.
Self-criticism
Something goes wrong and suddenly you’re both the defendant and the prosecution.
“I’m useless.”
“Why can’t I cope like everybody else?”
“I always mess things up.”
Ask yourself:
Would I speak to somebody I cared about like this?
Self-criticism is often mistaken for motivation.
Usually it’s just another source of threat.
Assumptions
“If I say no, they’ll be angry.”
“If I ask for help, people will think I’m weak.”
“If I don’t check, something will go wrong.”
Perhaps.
But have you tested that?
This is where psychology becomes much more interesting.
Because eventually we need to stop thinking and do something.
Less thinking. More doing.
People sometimes imagine CBT as sitting around analysing thoughts.
It isn’t.
Some of the most useful CBT work happens out in the world.
If you spend three hours wondering:
“Could I cope with going to that event alone?”
you’ll probably still be uncertain at the end.
Go for 30 minutes and you have data.
If you repeatedly think:
“I couldn’t handle it if I made a mistake at work,”
make a small, recoverable mistake or allow something to be imperfect and observe what happens.
If you believe:
“Nobody will talk to me if I go alone,”
go somewhere alone and test it.
Thinking creates theories.
Behaviour creates evidence.
And our brains learn extraordinarily well from experience.
Behavioural experiments: become a scientist in your own life
In CBT we use behavioural experiments to test predictions.
Suppose you believe:
“If I speak up in the meeting and don’t prepare every word beforehand, I’ll embarrass myself.”
Rather than debating this for another six weeks, create an experiment.
Prediction:
If I speak without rehearsing, I’ll stumble and people will think I’m incompetent.
Experiment:
Make one contribution without rehearsing it word-for-word.
What happened?
Perhaps you hesitated slightly. Perhaps nobody cared. Perhaps somebody agreed with you.
Then ask:
What did I learn?
The result doesn’t have to be:
“Everything went perfectly.”
In fact, sometimes the most useful experiment is one where things don’t go perfectly.
Because you discover:
“I made a mistake and dealt with it.”
That is confidence.
Research on CBT supports both cognitive and behavioural methods. A meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials across anxiety-related disorders found CBT produced meaningful improvements in symptoms, while research on exposure-based methods suggests that approaching feared situations and discovering that expected outcomes either do not occur or are manageable is an important learning process.
Stop protecting yourself from every uncomfortable feeling
Another important CBT concept is the safety behaviour.
Safety behaviours are the little things we do to prevent our fears coming true.
You might:
rehearse everything before speaking,
seek reassurance,
check repeatedly,
Google symptoms,
take somebody with you,
avoid eye contact,
over-prepare,
constantly monitor how you’re coming across,
or keep an escape route available.
They make sense.
And they often reduce anxiety immediately.
The problem is what your brain learns afterwards.
Imagine you’re frightened of attending an event alone, so you persuade a friend to come.
Everything goes well.
You could learn:
“Actually, I can handle social situations.”
But anxiety may instead say:
“Thank goodness Sarah came. I couldn’t have done that alone.”
Your safety behaviour has stolen the credit.
A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis found support for the role of safety behaviours in anxiety-related problems and concluded that reducing them may help reduce symptoms, although the authors also emphasised that more research is needed.
This doesn’t mean ripping away every coping strategy overnight.
It means gradually asking:
“What am I doing because I believe I couldn’t cope without it?”
Then test that belief.
Avoidance makes your world smaller
Avoidance is wonderfully effective.
That’s the problem.
You’re anxious about driving on the motorway.
You avoid it.
Anxiety drops.
Your brain concludes:
“Excellent. Motorway avoided. Disaster prevented.”
Next time the motorway feels even more threatening.
Soon you avoid dual carriageways.
Then unfamiliar routes.
Then driving alone.
The immediate reduction in anxiety has reinforced the behaviour.
This is how life can quietly shrink.
The alternative is gradual approach.
Not:
“I’m terrified of flying, so tomorrow I’m booking a solo trip to Australia.”
That’s not courage. That’s psychological skydiving.
Instead:
Think steps, not leaps.
Choose something uncomfortable but manageable.
Approach it.
Stay long enough to gather information.
Reduce unnecessary safety behaviours where appropriate.
Notice what happens.
Then repeat.
Exposure and approach-based techniques are well-established components of CBT for anxiety. Modern inhibitory-learning approaches emphasise learning that feared outcomes may not happen, or that if something uncomfortable does happen, it can be tolerated and managed.
Yes, this may make you MORE stressed initially
This is the bit people don’t always want to hear.
Good coping doesn’t necessarily mean feeling better immediately.
Avoiding the difficult conversation feels better.
Having it may feel worse.
Calling the person feels worse than putting it off.
Going to the gym feels harder than staying on the sofa.
Setting a boundary can feel more uncomfortable than saying yes.
Attending the social event may initially feel worse than cancelling.
Applying for the job creates more immediate anxiety than deciding you probably wouldn’t get it anyway.
Growth often involves choosing useful discomfort over comfortable avoidance.
The important question isn’t:
“Which option makes me least anxious right now?”
It’s:
“Which response helps me become more capable in the long term?”
Confidence isn’t the absence of things going wrong
I think we’ve slightly misunderstood confidence.
We imagine confidence means:
“I know this will go well.”
But that’s certainty, and life doesn’t offer much of it.
Real confidence is closer to:
“I don’t know exactly what will happen, but I trust myself to respond.”
That’s a much more robust form of confidence because it doesn’t depend on everything going according to plan.
You went on the date and there was no chemistry.
You coped.
You gave the presentation and forgot a sentence.
You recovered.
Someone didn’t like you.
You survived.
You applied for something and were rejected.
You tried again.
You set a boundary and somebody became annoyed.
You tolerated their annoyance.
These aren’t failed behavioural experiments.
They’re evidence that things can go wrong without you falling apart.
Stress tolerance can grow
If your strategy for managing stress is always to remove whatever makes you uncomfortable, your tolerance for discomfort may never get much opportunity to develop.
Instead, imagine gradually expanding your psychological carrying capacity.
Today you tolerate a difficult phone call.
Next week you tolerate uncertainty without checking.
Then you attend something alone.
Then you say no without writing a 400-word apology.
Each experience teaches:
“I can handle more than anxiety tells me I can.”
The aim isn’t to pile endless pressure onto yourself. Chronic stress genuinely matters. Rest, sleep, social connection, exercise, boundaries and practical problem-solving are important, and sometimes the healthiest response to an unreasonable situation is to change it rather than become better at enduring it. The Mental Health Foundation notes that prolonged stress can affect concentration, sleep, mood, eating and physical health.
Resilience should never become an excuse for tolerating intolerable circumstances.
But neither should self-care become another name for avoiding anything difficult.
We need both:
Recovery and challenge.
Rest and action.
Self-compassion and courage.
Try the Control Test
When you’re overwhelmed, take a piece of paper and divide it in two.
On one side write:
OUTSIDE MY CONTROL
What someone thinks of me.
Whether the economy improves.
Whether my application is accepted.
Whether my partner is in a bad mood.
Whether my test result is normal.
Whether everything goes according to plan.
Then:
WITHIN MY CONTROL
How I respond.
Whether I ask the question.
Whether I prepare appropriately.
Whether I challenge my catastrophic thinking.
Whether I set a boundary.
Whether I take care of myself today.
Whether I avoid or approach.
Whether I take the next useful step.
Then put your energy into the second column.
That’s where your power lives.
Don’t believe everything you think
Perhaps one of the most valuable psychological skills we can develop is learning to put a small gap between having a thought and believing it.
Your brain says:
“I can’t cope.”
Pause.
Is that true?
“This will be a disaster.”
Prediction or fact?
“They think I’m ridiculous.”
Evidence?
“I should have handled this better.”
Helpful? Fair? Realistic?
You don’t need to replace every negative thought with:
“Everything is wonderful!”
Life isn’t wonderful all the time.
Sometimes things are genuinely difficult.
Try something more believable:
“This is difficult, but I’ve dealt with difficult things before.”
“I don’t know what will happen yet.”
“I can only deal with the part that is in front of me.”
“I don’t need to solve tomorrow today.”
“If something goes wrong, I will respond then.”
A psychologically stronger way to live
Perhaps coping with the pressures of life isn’t about creating a perfectly calm life.
That life probably doesn’t exist.
There will always be another bill, deadline, disagreement, uncertainty, disappointment or unexpected plot twist.
The goal is to stop treating every uncomfortable thought as an instruction and every uncomfortable emotion as something that must be escaped.
Filter what your brain tells you.
Question catastrophising.
Challenge assumptions.
Loosen rigid rules.
Stop attacking yourself.
Problem-solve what you can control.
Let go of what you cannot.
And then, importantly:
Do something.
Take the small risk.
Have the conversation.
Send the application.
Go to the event.
Reduce the safety behaviour.
Allow something to be imperfect.
See what happens.
Yes, you may experience more anxiety initially.
But the alternative is a life increasingly organised around avoiding discomfort.
And every time you approach something difficult and discover that you can deal with what happens, you build something far more useful than temporary reassurance.
You build evidence.
Not that life will always go well, but that when it doesn’t, you can cope.
