A person's capacity for stress is a finite space.

A person will take whatever volume of stress they have and fill that capacity to the brim.

People are able to deal with extraordinary levels of distress. When we see people live through illness, through bereavement, through war, through famine, we celebrate their ability to compress and contain those horrors within the confines of that space reserved for stress.

People are capable of accommodating extremes of experience, of normalising and processing what previously must be unimaginable, with staggering dignity. At the other end of this spectrum, a life lead around comparatively minuscule problems will see those issues inflated and distorted to fill that very same space.

I see this behaviour in myself, and it is difficult to control, difficult to maintain the necessary perspective. Some examples close to my memory include such tedium as an insurance company renewing a policy without consent, a quarrel with a school about absence, a forced and yet pathetically minor change in lifestyle. All blown out to fill the stress place. At times where I have absolutely no discernible problems I can always rely on my own mortality to fill the ballast of fear.

Yet, relative to these I have dealt with larger issues, as do we all, and the space remains equally as full.

I guess the trick is to occupy the space with issues worthy of the drain.