The biggest cause of stress in my (and most people’s) life is NUTs – Nagging Unfinished Tasks.

That’s why we always want to get organised — not to have everything neat and orderly and easy to find, but rather just to know everything is where it should be and we’ve seen it and nothing has escaped our attention coz otherwise it’ll blow up in our face. And really we have this nagging feeling that we missed out on something, and that something might be THE thing that blows up.

If something blows up, the nagging voices are proved right, making them stronger and more insistent.

And that’s the appeal of various organising methodologies including the current GTD movement. Getting rid of the nagging voices.

So want to be driven completely nuts and feel stressed out — NUTs are your best bet!

- JT

In a way, being cornered is less stressful, since the options are only fight with what you have or die.

My odd brand of stress is that, while huddled in the survival bunker, rather than accepting that this is out of my control and making the best of it with whoever is there, I’d create stress for myself by feeling that I should develop time travel to go back and stop the creator of the zombie army before he began. When, of course, I should choose to reduce my stress and join with the force behind the zombies.

Combine that with doing the same dance with your family and you soon feel huge performance pressure to not only resolve the issues, but to do so without airing your own fears.

(Especially when they switch around what block of time, so I can’t actually plan my time).

And: TIME THIEVES! You know — things that steal your time. The IRS. Medical billing. Telemarketers & spammers. Gratuitous demands for information.

It’s not so much that these are usually stressful themselves, as they become multipliers of stress when time is short.

For instance: I work at a call center and if a customer has a problem that I cannot resolve on that initial call, I must have my supervisor’s approval to take time off the phone and do what is needed to find a solution to the problem and outreach the customer. However, due to recent downsizing through attrition, the call volume has skyrocketed, and my supervisor will no longer approve any time off the phones. This causes me considerable stress. While I would like to provide the good customer service expected by my employer and the customer, I am not given the resources needed to accomplish this effectively.

Stress is obviously not just limited to the workplace, so the same idea of not having the resources to achieve one’s needs can be seen across the board: Your car keeps breaking down but you can’t afford to get a new one, you need health coverage but are denied because of a preexisting condition, your kids don’t know who you are because you must work round the clock to care for them, and so on.

While there is some subjectivity in determining how stressful an event is, I believe that overall, our stress levels are highest when your basic human needs (in other words, the first two levels on Maslow’s hierarchy) are not met. This is where the physical effects on the body, such as hair loss, weight loss, depression and thoughts of suicide, sleep dysfunction, lowered immune system, memory loss, and high blood pressure and risk of heart attack, will begin to manifest.