Revenge, a common thing that happens. If using a very minor and carefree example. If someone knows you can’t handle chili and then puts chili in your food when you aren’t looking. You eat it, get somewhat stressed, decide you will pay them back with their own medicine and do it to their own meal, as they also can’t handle chili.
Sure enough you may feel satisfied seeing them suffer. This however only works when you succeed. That means you will feel conflicted until it succeeds, unable to continue with most of what you would normally do otherwise. Particularly in a more extreme example, you will be engaging risks to acquire revenge, perhaps painstakingly long amounts of effort just to see someone else’s suffering so you can feel schadenfreude. From a non-moral perspective it is highly inefficient and carries many risks. Morally, clearly it is the wrong thing to do. In even more extreme examples, achieving revenge is unlikely to make up for any of the losses and simply puts you in the same position as the person you likely despise in the first place.
There are a lot of ways to avoid being stressed, that don’t involve harm or risks but may not exactly be right. There are ways that are right but not perhaps most effective. For example you can decide to turn the stress into something positive that may equally so be a bit condescending. Using the earlier example, when you ate food with the added chili in it, you could have told yourself something silly like
sample A
‘This person is really awkward, they admire me so much that they don’t know what to do to get my attention but put chili in my food.’
When you think of it like this, you can hardly feel stressed or think about seeking revenge and this is a very much mild example. You would start laughing at them when they are causing you stress if you make yourself believe they have different intentions, after-all you don’t know their actual intentions.
The more ‘core’ point, is that you will feel very different, all depending on what you think about the situation. When a stressful situation is present, you can talk yourself into making it neutral or positive.
Aside from this, it is possible to get better control of your feelings to avoid overreacting in the moment through training or to inhibit your feelings when stressful things are mentioned. Equally so, it is possible to let out some of your stress through exercise. From my experience, particularly when your long-term retention is good, the only thing that really ‘fixes’ the stress given that it is not resolved, would be to actually overwrite it.
I have heard many people say that they forget stressful events over time but this never works for me. Personally, I simply resolve them, if I can’t, then I overwrite them, otherwise, if I recall them and in some cases even if I do not, they will continue to bother me.
