Psychological Stress: When What Is Required Exceeds What Is Possible

I am the human ant. The nervous system learned to guess in order to act in time; stress begins when it predicts it will not be enough. Emotion prepared an action, but the system appraises that no available action—alone or combined with others—will produce the required change in time and leave it capable of acting again.

Failure need not have happened yet. A prediction that I will not know how to act, or will lack sufficient water, time, control, help and possible actions, is enough.

Psychological stress is not an additional emotion, pain, an open cycle or excess salt. It is the prediction that the regulation gap will not close by available means—not the prediction error itself and not a measure of the amount of salt.