Everything You Believe About Stress Is Backwards

Here’s a study most people have never heard of, and it’s going to reorganize your understanding of the last few years.

Author’s Note

Before anything else, the disclosure.

This is a sales pitch. At the bottom there’s a button, and I want you to press it, and it costs $227 a year.

I’m putting that at the top instead of the bottom for a specific reason. This piece is about how interpretation gets slipped into your head after an event, and how you usually don’t notice it happening. I can’t make that case honestly while running the same play on you.

So…read the rest knowing exactly what I want from you. If it still lands…it lands for the right reason. And…if you’d rather not be sold to today…close it now…with my blessing. I’d rather lose the sale than get it sideways. Either way, you’re about to learn something that’s critically important.

Everything You Believe About Stress Is Backwards

Here’s a study most people have never heard of, and it’s going to reorganize your understanding of the last few years.

University College London. Researchers hooked people up and told them they might get an electric shock. They didn’t ask how stressed anybody felt…people lie about that, mostly to themselves. They measured it directly. Pupils. Sweat. The body doesn’t have a PR department.

Stress did not max out when the odds of getting shocked hit 100%.

It maxed out at 50%.

Let that sit there a second.

The people who knew for a fact they were about to get hurt were calmer than the people who didn’t know.

Not a little calmer. Measurably calmer. Physiologically calmer.

Certainty about something bad was easier on the human nervous system than not knowing.

Which means…and pay attention here…because this is the whole ballgame…

The thing grinding you down is not the news. It’s the fog.

Forty Open Tabs

You pick up your phone. Something happened. And you have no idea whether it’s noise or whether it’s the thing.

Again. Third time this week.

And that question doesn’t close. It doesn’t resolve. It just sits there running in the background…eating processing power.

A researcher named Zeigarnik proved this back in the 1920s with restaurant waiters. They remembered unpaid orders perfectly…and forgot them the instant the check cleared. Unfinished business occupies the mind. Finished business doesn’t.

Every unresolved headline is an unpaid check.

You’re not exhausted from the news. You’re exhausted from carrying forty tabs of I don’t know what that meant.

Now Here’s The Part That Should Genuinely Bother You

Elizabeth Loftus spent forty years proving something people hate hearing.

Your memory is not a recording. It’s a reconstruction. And it can be edited after the fact.

Her famous experiment: show people footage of a car wreck. Ask one group how fast the cars were going when they hit. Ask another group how fast when they smashed.

The “smashed” group gave higher speeds. And…a week later…they were more likely to remember broken glass at the scene.

There was no broken glass.

One word. Delivered after the event. Changed what people remembered seeing.

She called it the misinformation effect and demonstrated it every way you can think of.

Now…apply it to your own life.

Something happens. Within ninety seconds…somebody tells you what it meant. A push alert. A headline written by a stranger optimizing for your thumb. Some guy on your feed with a take and a grievance.

And…that framing doesn’t sit politely on top of the facts. It goes into the file. It edits what you remember happening.

So understand your actual situation:

You are not choosing between “informed” and “uninformed.” Something is going to frame every event for you. That…is not optional.

The only question on the table…is whether you picked who does it…or…whether it got picked for you by whoever’s algorithm got there first.

And since Loftus applies to me too…let me put my cards up: I frame things. I have a point of view. Every writer does. The ones who swear they don’t are the ones you should watch hardest.

Difference is, I just told you.

Why Smart People Cut Exactly The Wrong Thing

Two behavioral economists, Mullainathan and Shafir, studied what pressure does to thinking.

Their finding: scarcity hijacks your attention whether you like it or not. It narrows the beam. They call it tunneling.

And tunneling isn’t random. It has a direction.

Under pressure…your attention collapses onto what’s urgent…and drops what’s important.

Read it again: “…and drops what’s important.”

Which is precisely why…when money gets tight…people cancel the thing that would have helped them…and keep the thing that comforts them Tuesday night.

Not because they’re dumb. Because that’s what a loaded-up mind does. Every time. Predictably.

Then stack Kahneman and Tversky on top: losses feel roughly twice as heavy as equivalent gains. So $227 leaving your account lands about twice as hard as $227 of value arriving.

Your math isn’t broken. Your weighting is. And…it’s broken in one specific direction that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the thing is worth the money.

That’s not a character defect. That’s a factory setting. But you can only correct for a setting you know is running.

Now Let Me Say What Nobody Else Selling You Anything Will Say

Cut.

Cut hard. Cut this week. I’m serious.

Software you never open. Subscriptions you scroll past. Memberships that have produced exactly nothing you can point at. Kill all of it. Today. Before you finish this page if you want.

I am not going to stand here and tell you that trimming expenses is bad for you. It isn’t. That’s a lie…and you’d be right to distrust anyone who tells it to you. Having slack in your finances is one of the most reliable things we know about how people actually feel about money.

But there’s a difference between cutting with a knife…and cutting with a lawnmower.

The lawnmower is what wrecks you. And here’s the mechanism.

Your Nervous System Is Watching You

When you cut everything indiscriminately, you’re not deciding. You’re bracing.

And you’re watching yourself do it.

Daryl Bem demonstrated in the 1960s that people infer their beliefs from their behavior…not the reverse. You watch yourself act and you reason backward: I guess I’m the kind of person who thinks this.

Behave like someone with no moves left…and you will conclude you have no moves left. The passivity quits being a response to the situation and becomes the situation.

Cutting three things to fund one thing is the opposite signal entirely.

That’s judgment. And judgment…means your hands are still on the wheel.

The Study Whose Own Authors Reversed It

Seligman and Maier ran the original learned helplessness experiments in the sixties.

You know the summary: expose a creature to stress it can’t control…and it stops trying.

What almost nobody knows is that in 2016…after fifty years and a pile of neuroscience, they went back and reversed their own conclusion.

Giving up isn’t learned.

Giving up is the default.

What has to be learned is control. And they found the wiring: your prefrontal cortex scans for evidence…that your actions change outcomes. When it finds that evidence…it reaches down and shuts off the stress response at the brainstem.

Read that one more time.

Your brain does not calm down when things get better. Your brain calms down…when it detects that what you do matters.

So Here’s What You’re Actually Buying

Every few days something happens that you have to make sense of by yourself.

A ruling. A firing. A norm breaking quietly while everybody’s arguing about something else.

And…you’ve got about four seconds…the length of a scroll…to decide whether it’s noise or whether it’s the thing.

Jack Hopkins Now is what turns that guess into a read.

That’s the product. That’s all of it.

I’m not going to tell you what’s coming. Nobody honest can…and anybody claiming otherwise is selling you certainty out of an empty warehouse.

What I’ll tell you is what you’re looking at.

James Pennebaker spent his career showing that putting coherent structure on a difficult experience measurably reduces distress, and does it…even when the experience itself doesn’t change one inch. Naming a thing accurately is regulating…all by itself.

That’s the job. Several times a week. Calm, clear, and without the adrenaline surcharge every other outlet is quietly billing you for.

$227 A Year

Sixty-two cents a day.

I’m not going to insult you with the coffee comparison. You’re an adult, and you can do division.

The Only Question That Matters

Do not ask yourself whether you can afford it.

That’s the tunneling talking…and Mullainathan and Shafir will tell you that question answers itself before you’ve finished asking it.

Ask this instead:

Over the next twelve months…do I want to be making sense of all this by myself…or not?

If the answer is by yourself…close the tab. I mean it. I’d rather lose the sale than take money from somebody who’s going to resent it every month.

But if you’ve been hauling around forty open tabs of I don’t know what that meant…and you’re tired…and you’d like somebody to close a few of them every week without screaming at you first…

You already know what to do with the sixty-two cents.

Scratch that. If you've read this far, you've earned fifty-five. $199 for the year.

[Become a paid subscriber →]

No hard sell. You’ve got the facts and the button.

-Jack

Jack Hopkins

P.S. If you scrolled straight down here, the short version: research on stress shows uncertainty is harder on your nervous system than bad news. That's why you're tired. This newsletter closes the gap between something happening and you knowing what it was, several times a week. $199 for the year. Fifty-five cents a day.

P.P.S. If you're hesitating, it probably isn't the money. It's that you've subscribed to things before and never read them. Fair. So here's my actual promise: I'm not going to fill your inbox to justify the price. You'll get pieces worth your time, and nothing else. If that's not how it goes, you know where the cancel button is, and I won't make you hunt for it.

Sources

de Berker, A. O., et al. (2016). “Computations of uncertainty mediate acute stress responses in humans.” Nature Communications, 7, 10996. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10996 (free, full text)

Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). “Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory.” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 585–589. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80011-3

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1914185 — free copy on Kahneman’s Princeton page: https://kahneman.scholar.princeton.edu/document/11

Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2016). “Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience.” Psychological Review, 123(4), 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000033 — also listed at Penn’s Positive Psychology Center: https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/research/learned-helplessness

Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Times Books.

Zeigarnik, B. (1927). “Das Behalten erledigter und unerledigter Handlungen.” Psychologische Forschung, 9, 1–85.

Bem, D. J. (1967). “Self-perception: An alternative interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena.” Psychological Review, 74(3), 183–200.

Pennebaker, J. W. Expressive writing and health outcomes; see Opening Up by Writing It Down (Pennebaker & Smyth, 3rd ed., 2016) for the accessible summary of this body of work.