This is really interesting. It helps me understand how I process my own stress. I know I'm actually stressed when my mind shuts down and is unable to process information and make good decisions (i.e. I start panicking). I've experienced this in many different scenarios, from the time I was volunteering in high school for a big school performance event, the first time I was working a cash register and tried to return the correct change to a person, first big tech foul-up that majorly impacted a client, and various crisis-level incidents managing tech at the 2010 Olympics.
As I've gone through life and experienced more and more difficult things, I've realized that stress very relative. But when I was experiencing those things at the time for the first time, they were very stressful. When I look back at my high school self trying to find an extra chair for a ticket holder at that performance event, I find it absurd that I panicked so much. Same for when I was trying to calculate the correct amount of change in my head for a retail customer. Ludicrous. But I can't deny the stress I felt back then.
But as my experiences with stress became bigger, I realized something that changed the way I thought about things. I was still alive, things were still happening. So what if the Mexican consulate lost all of their visa records and applications because I did some shoddy sysadmin work? Well, yeah, a very big number of people were impacted. But I lived through it. I was shellacked, but I lived through it. Olympic crisis incidents? I experienced several during both training scenarios and the real thing. I was shellacked, but I lived through it. And current startup stuff? Well, nothing huge yet, but perhaps that's only because I haven't reached a level of success where I am exposed to that type of risk yet.
The point is that every time I experienced something bigger and survived, I realized that actually life goes on, and because I can survive, I am quite capable of handling whatever life throws at me. With that perspective, basically I have learned to have perspective. Realize that whatever I may be experiencing right now, no matter how difficult and stressful it may be, there will be a tomorrow. Even if I am reduced to absolutely nothing and lose everything, I still would be alive and would be able to start again.
And that perspective suddenly makes it easy to deal with all the crappy stressful stuff that may come by. At the end of the day, they're all just small things that don't kill me. I hope that if I ever experience something truly terrible, like a fight with terminal cancer, I can keep the same perspective. Whatever, I am still alive, and I can go on.