N.U.T.S: 4 Primary reasons of Human Stress

Published at: Jan, 14 2025

Dang, I knew this was gonna happen, It’s been exactly 1 year since I last published anything in this blog. Last year there are many topics that I thought I want to write a blog post on but then suddenly it’s been one year :). Reflecting on this, I concluded that the reason why it is so is because I’m spending too many times on what I want to write, mulling things over without writing anything. So in order for that to happen again I decided I will write anything I can think of at the moment, not specifically a technical blog.

N.U.T.S

Human Stress is one of most researched studies currently, mainly because it was something everyone experiences everyday from light stress to very heavy / toxic stress. The side effect of stress is also varies from person to person ranging from loss of productivity, mood swings to dangerous symptom such as psychosomatic pain or even suicidal thoughts. That’s why along with the rapid development of media and communication technologies, the awareness of mental health issues such as stress is being spread like wildfires.

Chronic stress can be very harmful, especially for children and adolescent, as it may leave permanent scar on their emotional regulation system and hinder brain development. It’s like growing a plant in too small pot, which causes the plant to grow weak and prone to disesases and pest. Sonia Lupien from Centre for Studies on Human Stress summarized 4 primary causes of Human stress to acronym of N.U.T.S: Novelty, Unpredictability, Threat to the Ego, and Sense of Control (quoted from The Self-Driven Child book). In the book, it was more emphasized that losing Sense of Control is the biggest factor for most human stress, especially for a child.

Novelty means something we never experienced or know before. It can be small and simple things like fixing bicycle chain for the first time. Some new experience can be very stressful, like changing schools and have to adapt and get new friends in new school.

Unpredictability mean something that we have no way knowing when or where it occurs. Like natural disaster, even thought the technology is being developed to be able detect them faster there are many cases where it is not enough like the recent L.A wildfires incident, this event is very stressful for everyone impacted directly or indirectly. Some people may try to reduce the possibility of unpredictable things by making a very detailed plan for their day, and they are very amazing people. But sometimes, we will never know what life will give us.

Threat to the Ego, I think we all know this, of course we will mad if our ego is being flicked by others. There are many things we can do to help minimalize the impact to our stress levels. Most of the time we can’t change how other people act towards us, so it’s up to us how we respond to external stimuli.

Sense of Control is something that we may never know that it is primary reason for our stress. In reality, it is most stressful thing in the universe. Being stuck in traffic for example, a common occurence in Indonesia cities now and is very emotionally exhausting because we can’t do anything about it, you can sound the horn million times the traffic jam won’t go anywhere, another driver may curse you though. Having low sense of control in situation rise our stress levels.

We never know what life will bring to us, all of the NUTS things above may happen one at a time or all ot once. As we can’t control what we will receive from external situations / things we must develop a resilient mind to help us stay sane. One of the first steps on developing resilient mind are by knowing the reasons of Human Stress which is I briefly described in this blog :)