Stress Is Just Consequences in a Trench Coat
- Griffin Oakley
- 17 hours ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 8 hours ago
Let me say something that might annoy you: most of what you're calling stress isn't stress. It's consequences. And there's a difference.
Here's a quick test. Think about the last time you felt "stressed." Now ask yourself honestly — did any of it actually catch you off guard? The bill you knew was coming. The conversation you'd been putting off. The sleep you skipped three nights in a row. Were you surprised? Or were you just finally looking at something you'd been carefully not looking at?
I ask clients this all the time, and the answer is almost always the same: not much surprised them. They saw it coming. They just didn't want to deal with it.
Which is strange, when you think about it — because we treat stress like it ambushed us. Like something jumped out. So let's talk about surprise.
Surprises Aren't Actually Fun
We have a cultural story that surprises are delightful. Spontaneity is romantic. Going with the flow is a personality trait we aspire to.
But here's what actually happens when you throw your partner a surprise party.
They walk in and their hair isn't done. Their outfit isn't right. They don't know who's going to be there, what the food is, or how long this is going to last. They have no idea if that person they've been avoiding is in the room. And they have to perform happiness — in front of everyone — in real time.
That's not fun. That's activating.
We think we love surprises. We don't. We love the idea of them. In practice, being caught off guard is one of the most uncomfortable experiences a human can have. Which is worth sitting with — because stress has less in common with anxiety or overwhelm than we assume, and more in common with that.
That's not a coincidence. Chronic stress keeps you braced — jumpy at the ordinary, waiting for the next thing. Not one jolt, but the jolt that never switches off. And we spend enormous energy manufacturing reasons to feel startled by things we already knew were coming.
Which is where the backlog comes in.
It's Not Stress, It's a Backlog
If you don't sleep, you feel like garbage. That's not stress — that's biology. If you call out of work too many times, you run short on money. That's not stress — that's math. If you avoid a hard conversation long enough, it becomes a harder conversation. Also not stress. Also math.
In one study of nearly 600 university students, experiential avoidance — turning away from uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, or situations — tracked with higher perceived stress, while self-compassion and mindfulness tracked with less (Martínez-Rubio et al., 2023). And it runs both ways: put people under acute stress in a lab, and they become measurably more likely to pick the low-effort option and dodge the demanding one (Picciotto & Fabio, 2024). In other words, the avoidance isn't protecting you from the stress. It is the stress, compounding quietly in the background.
What we tend to call stress is usually a backlog. It's what happens when consequences have been accumulating while we've been looking the other way, and eventually the pile gets tall enough that we can't ignore it anymore. We throw our hands up and say I'm so stressed — and then we avoid that too, hoping it magically dissipates on its own.
It doesn't.
The ND Wrinkle
Here's something worth naming directly, because I see it constantly: some people have genuinely come to depend on stress as a motivational system.
If you're neurodivergent — particularly if you have ADHD — your brain may have a harder time initiating tasks without a sense of urgency. In the model ADHD specialist William Dodson describes, the ADHD brain runs on interest, novelty, challenge, and urgency rather than importance — so a low-stakes task can stay effectively invisible until a deadline makes it urgent (Dodson, 2022). Deadlines work. Crises work. The adrenaline hits and suddenly things get done.
The problem is that urgency-as-strategy is exhausting over time. It works. It also costs you — in sleep, in recovery, in the low-grade activation your body starts treating as normal. If you've ever thought I actually work better under pressure, that may be true. It may also be a pattern to look at, not just live with. And if running on pressure has quietly become how you measure your own worth — that's a whole other conversation.
This isn't only an ADHD thing. Plenty of people without it run the same play — no fuel until the deadline turns into a threat.
Stress isn't the same as motivation. Sometimes it borrows its clothes.
What Actually Helps
The antidote to most stress isn't a bath or a breathing exercise. Those aren't bad — but they're downstream of the real problem. The real problem is usually that something needs your attention and isn't getting it.
So the actual intervention is simpler and less fun: get curious.
What is actually happening? Not the catastrophized version, not the minimized version. The real one.
What's in my control? Usually more than it feels like, sometimes less than you want.
What do I need to do next? Not the whole thing. The next thing.
That's it. That's the whole protocol. Look at the thing. Figure out what's real. Take one step.
Here's what that looks like on something real. Say it's the bill you've been not-opening for two weeks.
What's actually happening? You owe money. A specific amount, by a specific date. Not "my finances are a disaster" — that's the catastrophized version. Not "it's probably fine" — that's the minimized one. Open it. Read the number.
What's in my control? Maybe you can pay it. Maybe you can pay part of it. Maybe you can call and ask for an extension, which — annoyingly — usually works and almost never occurs to us while we're busy avoiding. What's not in your control is that the bill exists at all. So skip that part.
What's the next thing? Not "fix my whole financial life." Open the envelope. That's the next thing. Then the one after that.
Notice what happened to the stress somewhere in there. It didn't get solved. It got specific. And specific is survivable in a way that "I'm so stressed" never is.
And then — this part matters — ask for help if you need it. Carrying everything yourself isn't noble. Martyrdom isn't sexy. It's just heavy, and you're doing it to yourself.
A Last Thought About Stress
Stress isn't something that descends on you from the outside like weather. It's mostly the experience of being caught unprepared for something you could have seen coming, compounded by the avoidance of doing anything about it. The moment you stop treating it as an external force and start treating it as information — something needs my attention here — it becomes a lot less overwhelming.
You don't need to manage your stress. You need to stop creating conditions for it.
Start there.
Griffin Oakley, MSCP, NCC, LMHC, LPC
Founder & Therapist, Curious Mind Counseling
📞 971-365-3642
About the Author
Griffin is a licensed telehealth therapist and the founder of Curious Mind Counseling, serving Oregon and Florida. His work focuses on complex trauma, attachment, and identity — and on the ordinary, avoidable ways stress piles up when we keep looking away from what we already know is coming. He helps adults untangle anxiety and chronic stress and figure out what actually needs their attention.
References
Dodson, W. (2022). How ADHD shapes your perceptions, emotions & motivation. Presentation. https://adhd.dk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/05/Dodson-How-ADHD-Shapes-Your-Perceptions-Emotions-.pdf
Martínez-Rubio, D., Colomer-Carbonell, A., Sanabria-Mazo, J. P., Pérez-Aranda, A., Navarrete, J., Martínez-Brotóns, C., Escamilla, C., Muro, A., Montero-Marín, J., Luciano, J. V., & Feliu-Soler, A. (2023). How mindfulness, self-compassion, and experiential avoidance are related to perceived stress in a sample of university students. PLOS ONE, 18(2), e0280791. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280791
Picciotto, G., & Fabio, R. A. (2024). Does stress induction affect cognitive performance or avoidance of cognitive effort? Stress and Health, 40(1), e3280. https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.3280
