Stress can be hidden in areas that you do not acknowledge. This can be called ignorant stress or unconscious stress.
Take an example:
Jim has a Vacuum and a Vacuum closet. The Vacuum is extremely noisy and every time the Vacuum closet opens the hose falls down and bashes the floor and the doorway. Jim's wife gets angry at him for not vacuuming as often as he should. Jim and his wife conclude that the vacuuming is a stressful activity because vacuuming itself is stressful. Him and his wife think that the process of vacuuming itself is the reason why Jim doesn't vacuum as often as he should.
The real reason Jim does not vacuum is because he hates the noise that the vacuum makes and he hates pulling it out of the closet fearing that a noisy hose will fall out and smash the closet door or dent the floor, interrupting his peaceful day. His wife or friends may continue to harp on the fact that Jim is lazy and is too lazy to do vacuuming - when in fact the real root of Jim's stress and the real reason Jim isn't vacuuming is because of hidden stresses that aren't immediately acknowledged.
The process of vacuuming itself is not bad - sucking up dirt is actually fun since you feel satisfied once the dirt is gone. Moving a hose around isn't that difficult. The real problem and the real stress behind vacuuming is the loud noise and the tangled angry hose that jumps out of the closet and bites you, while denting or scratching your nice floor - and of course also the cord which can strangle and kill you, in addition to tripping you and breaking your two legs after you are already dead.
To remove the stress, one must not focus on the fact that vacuuming itself is stressful - since it is not. One must remove the real stress. A solution in modern times where we have certain technologies to help us is:
- A small powerful plug-in vacuum (hand held) for small jobs. These are quieter. Don't bother with the battery powered ones since they usually aren't powerful enough. Go for the 700Watt or more hand-held plug-in vacuums.
- Central vacuuming - quieter, although the hose is extremely long and can be stressful - but probably better than a loud corded vacuum. A central vacuum is expensive and the expense can be stressful though, so a small powerful handheld vacuum may be your only option.
The above is just one example of hidden stress. Humans tend to focus on the process or activity being stressful rather than the actual annoyances which can many times be removed from the process or activity. If the process or activity can be done separately from the stresses, you have successfully removed the unconscious stress from your problem case.
Removing hidden stresses requires critical analysis of your activities instead of making simple assumptions such as the "must be just laziness" judgment.
A similar obnoxious stress could be pointed out by requiring a human to enter their car from the passenger side each time instead of the driver side. Although it does not take much energy to enter the passenger side of a vehicle and move over to the driver side, the reality is that it is less stressful if we just enter the driver side of the car. This obnoxious stress of having to enter the passenger door each time before driving the vehicle is an obvious and easy to point out stress that can be cured fairly easily. The vacuum stress however, is not so apparent and is much harder to critically recognize - since the process of vacuuming dirt itself is not stressful - only the side effects from having to pull out and using certain types of vacuums is stressful.
In the vacuum case, the hidden or unconscious stress are the noises and hoses, while the incorrectly assumed stress is the process of vacuuming.
In the car case, the visible or known stress is opening the passenger door and moving over to the driver side, and the assumed stress is not the process of driving - since we already know the real stress.
If in the car case a person stated that "they didn't like driving at all" or that "they were too lazy to drive to work", or "driving was stressful", then the person may be hiding the actual stress - such as when their car is continually breaking down, or if their driver side door is jammed shut, or if traffic is bad. The fact that their car is continually breaking down does not make driving itself stressful, nor does traffic if they remap the route and take different roads. If their door is jammed shut, this is not driving which is stressful. It may seem very apparent to you that if a door is jammed shut then driving itself is not stressful, just the process of opening door is stressful - however in many cases it is not so obvious as this and I give this example only to prove the point.
Finding the real stress or the hidden stress requires looking at the activity from a critical perspective and analyzing why the activity is stressful instead of just making an assumption and declaring the bottom line activity itself stressful.
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