Look around at people these days and you'll notice one thing amongst many of them: they're overstressed. The fact of the modern day is that too many people care about too many things. They don't realize that so many things don't matter in life.

We are conditioned from a young age to care about so many things. From test results to not upsetting our parents, we have to care about so many things just to not fall apart mentally.

Ironically, this leads to us falling apart mentally. We spread ourselves too thin and can't hold on.

To stop sinking into the torrent of your mind, you must learn to let go. So many things don't matter in life; here are a few ways to make it easier to let go.

1. Know what you want

Raise your hand if you know what your life goals are. Now, raise your hand if you know how to get there. The modern people who stress out too much can't raise their hands to either of these. 

When you stress out over so many things, it's more about a lack of direction rather than a lack of focus. Unfortunately, this is the state of too many people these days.

They lack direction, not focus. They lack precision, not ambition. They lack incentive, not motivation. The perfect thing to encapsulate this is video games.

Video games are so addictive, especially to men, because they provide all three of these things. 

Video games have direction through progression. They have precision through a black-or-white success pattern; either achieve the win, or you don't.

Finally, they incentivize by giving a sense of accomplishment, whether that be a competitive ranking, the satisfaction of completing an in-game project, or social interaction with other players.

So, how do you do this in real life? Goals.

Set your goals to gain direction, be specific with your goals to gain precision, and then learn to love the work to gain incentive.

Before going any further, yes putting in the work will make it easier to get girls (I know this is a big motivation factor for a lot of men).

By setting your goals and knowing what you want, you narrow down your focus. When your focus becomes more narrow, all the stuff that doesn't matter just falls away.

The first and most important step to eliminating unnecessary stress is to know what your goals are.

2. Limit your inputs

Let's shift gears and go into a more direct method. Why are people so stressed? Because they're worried about too many things. Why are they so worried about so many things? Because they hear about too many things. 

This is the common situation most people find themselves in. They have too much coming in, and as a result, can't process enough out to maintain balance.

Furthermore, a lot of the stuff you hear these days aren't exactly uplifting. In fact, a lot of things you hear these days are very divisive. 

Put together, you get people who are divided amongst each other and are overloaded with information. The result of this is people who are intolerant towards those who disagree with them.

I won't go too specific as to the downsides of living like this, you should already have an excellent idea of how bad this is.

All you need to know is that if you don't limit your inputs, your inputs will limit you. The more information coming in, the less you can think for yourself. And when you can't think for yourself, you can't effectively manage your stress.

To make stress management easier, limit the information that comes in so you aren't being overloaded.

3. Relax, take a deep breath, and slow down

The result of people being overstressed is they rush a lot of things. They go so hard and so fast that they burn out before they even realize it. They're too worried about surviving day to day that they can't stop to smell the roses.

By far the biggest detriment of our technological advancements is information overload. One of the worst effects it brings is "keeping up with the Joneses."

Being constantly bombarded with information gives you FOMO; fear of missing out. People worry that if they don't know the current events, they'll be out of the loop and fall behind.

Relax. Slow down. Your life won't end just because you don't know about the latest news or current events. This has definitely been the case for me.

I don't need to do any research on current events because my parents are so caught up in them. Furthermore, I barely care about any of it because it doesn't affect me.

So, on the rare occasion that I do care, I can just ask my parents to inform me with a brief summary. Now that's a lot of freedom.

The reason why people get so caught up is that the tempo of the modern world is so fast. Once you get caught in that tempo, your mind moves along with it. That tempo is way too fast.

Relax. Slow down. Settle back into the rhythm of your own goals and ambitions rather than the rhythm of everyone saying that the world is burning.

To really stop worrying about things, you must learn to slow down and take each moment as it comes.

A World of attention

The modern-day currency is attention. The more attention one company has, the better they do. This applies also to your mind; the more of your own attention you can keep, the better off you'll be.

To really hold onto your attention, you need to know where you're going in life and what you're doing with it. Only then, you will be able to see that so many things in life don't matter and it's so blissful.

- Karl