To help us take ownership of our stress - as no one’s but our own to solve - there’s the following consolation: when we’re blown off course, the ultimate blame lays not at our door, but with stress itself. Along with its progeny - fear, jealousy and possessiveness etc. - stress is the fella at fault, not us. That being said, stress can confuse us through the illusion that we and it are fused. This ruse, Johnny Cash mused about in The Beast In Me, a song about an intruder that “tries to kid me that it’s just a teddy bear”, while being one who “everybody knows... they’ve seen him out dressed in my clothes”.

Our everyday sayings help blow the lid on this trick… like when we say we’re “beside ourselves” with rage (/ anger); “scared out of our wits” (due to fear); or “driven out of our mind” with compulsive desire. “Stress forces” are no more the real us than jealousy (so aptly named by Shakespeare as the “green-eyed monster”) was the real Othello; or, for that matter, power lust was the real Macbeth. In each case, fear & Co. introduce themselves into our thoughts, conduct and mood, and make us assume that they and we share the same identity.

Yes, stress poses as us, but it’s a stray we take in on false pretences. Alas, once they’ve made their way past our heart’s defences, “stress forces” put their feet up and have us slave away as their servants.

What’s worse, their deft hiring us as serfs happens through stealth, and in our unconscious. Ultimately, stress is the culprit-in-chief for squeezing our creativity and triggering so many of our maladies, not us. So maybe we need to take things a little more gently when it comes to judging stressed people (whether they be someone else or our own self). This perspective helps us see how “stress forces” steal our self-identity, while actually, fear etc. will always be entirely separate from a free human being.

Think of a time a motorist swerves into our path while we’re driving, leaving us with no choice but to jam on the brakes. Here, any expletives streaming from our lips are ours, aren’t they? As in, truly ours? Or, in reality, do these steal into our speech thanks to lairy anger, a little beast that actually has nothing to do with the true, real us?

“Stress forces” like anger might masquerade as us, but their claim to our identity is illusory. Might this way of seeing things put the record straight on things like road rage? And lend a little perspective? Road rage etc. might overtake our senses, but are not, in truth, us, nor have they ever been. A “homework task”, here, is to see us – our mind and self (as well as community) – as sovereign, with “stress forces” like fear and anger pretenders that need to be evicted... with a little help from the heart, and from our consciousness, compassion and calm.