The Effects of Stress

- I accept the biological model of human potential, but not biological determinism. It is important to minimize the sources of chronic stress in life, including the internal(ized) ones, and how it can affect other people around you. Chronic stress leads to an over-stimulated hypothalmic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis system, which leads to a weakened body. Science has only just become aware of the difference between chronic and acute forms of stress, and the ability for similar 'stress profiles' to be passed on between generations. If worldviews, communication styles, and problem-solving strategies are all part of peoples' coping mechanisms, then in learning and being socialized, we are also acquiring certain stress-responses that embody and signify our ability to achieve things.
- You don't even have to be constantly active or coerced to be stressed. It's stressful just to sit around and do nothing all day: you are wasting your ability to do things, to learn new things. TV watchers: if you're not going to at least watch a show with a friend, or have it be relevant to some sort of human connection, do you honestly watch TV because you enjoy it, or because you have nothing left in your boring, fatiguing, unfulfilling life?
- Never be content with processing information about the world. Experience should always be significant and always create resonance between people. Affect and imagination are intrinsic to the human conditions, in which we are ecstatically projecting the new against the background of what we already know about ourselves. Self-knowledge is only the starting point, and very provisional: if you tried to get all the 'data' about yourself in view, you'd end up fitting it into one or perhaps two very small boxes (paradigms, models, etc.) that only reveal certain aspects of your life. You are an ensemble of social relations: as long as you're part of that, affect and imagination will always be with you, because society isn't a closed network of information. But if you alienate yourself from your social creativity, boredom will hit you.
- I showed some autonomy. Oh, I'm so sorry it put you in a manic state!... In the future, I will immediately make myself docile and incapable, so that I don't make you uncomfortable. Because I know you care about me that much. Seriously, can I be more than just your object of concern? If you can only understand me in your terms, and make no effort to imagine me beyond the scope of your conception, you aren't doing what is best for me, aren't allowing me to become all that I could. What is most frustrating is that the category you use to understand yourself implies you are perfect at this, and always have good intentions, but neither of those things is always there. This isn't a criticism, it's just a statement of fact. But your ego prevents you from seeing that you betray your good intentions. You say things are going well, because you want them to be, while you hide the reality: this normalizes a pathological state. What if relating to you in your terms inherently limits my potential? If you see the world as a depressed/stressed person would, not fulfilling your full potential, and you agree that is not the ideal way for people to develop, then wouldn't the authority you have over me just be reproducing that same condition?