We see things differently, and that's fine. Let's just leave it there, then.

There is no "avoidance". Negative emotions don't occur in a wise man because he has gotten rid of all the judgments that cause them; he is free of them (apatheia).

Romanticising the what if is so much easier then working on the what is.

Reading stoic texts, something like Seneca or Marcus or even Viktor Frankl Man's Search For Meaning helps get me out of my head and put things into a bit of perspective.

Reflection through journalling, focusing on gratitude I also find powerful.

Good luck on your journey

"Stress", as in the ability to feel stressed, is never negative - stress is nothing but you experiencing the compulsion to end a situation that is beyond your capacity to cope.

Even in the terminology of modern psychology, there are two types of stress - "distress" which is what happens to fail to end a situation beyond your control, and "eustress" which compels to undertake the process that successfully ends the situation. Stress itself is neutral - it is merely the experience of being pressured, and it becomes one or the other based on what you do with it.

Stress has a purpose. When we were cavemen and stepped outside to see a sabertooth our fight-flight-freeze response would trigger, release all kinds of stress hormones and enable us to run away. But afterwards, when we were out of danger, the stress would subside. For many people nowadays this doesn‘t happen. They are under constant stress, which definitely is not healthy to the body. High bloodpressure, anxiety, depression. Many of these things are stress related or may have stress as a root cause. So short term stress is not a big deal. Even if it may be a life or death situation, for example jumping off the street to avoid getting hit by a car. So thats positive stress. Without this stress response you would die. But the long term stress, even if its just a thing in the back of your mind, that is dangerous. And always negative.

I don’t personally see stress as a negative at all, but idk if it’s the exact stoic way of looking at it. It’s true that stress can negatively impact us, be it our health or simply by leading us to more negative emotions. The way I see it, even if those stressors are artificial or society induced, it alerts us to what’s important to us. By forcing us to recognize what’s important and dwell on it, it forces us to either action or reflection. For example, if I’m stressed about a presentation, it will be on my mind constantly and, in turn, I’m far more likely to prepare more than if I weren’t stressed about it. Or, say I said something to someone and later on realized how it could have came off wrong. If I stressed about it, I’m far more likely to analyze the whole situation and what I should have done differently which could help me in the future. Obviously these are simple and dumbed down examples but you get the point.

Idk, I guess I just see stress as a part of our journey through this life and kind of a natural alert in order to keep us sharp and alert to what’s important and what we need to be focusing on, no matter how petty. I just try to make every emotion (especially the negative ones) a learning experience for me.

Edit: grammar and there is some stress that is only negative. Stressing over something we can’t do anything or learn anything about. Regardless, I feel it is an important and necessary tool in our journey.

I feel like that's kinda splitting hairs on terminology here, eustress is things like getting excited, playing sport and quite clearly not what the post is actually asking about

I can respect that that's your experience in life. I used to think that way, too. I couldn't see the other side of it because I simply didn't have the experience. That was my normal, likely the way it is for you now.
Emotional dynamics are so, so much more complex than that. What you're suggesting is very black and white thinking and centered in avoidance. It's not either-or; but rather a balance of both. If we weren't meant to have negative emotions, we wouldn't have them. That thinking is a product emotionally unhealthy dynamics that are taught to us via our parents, our culture, or both. Most of the imbalances that we think around emotion comes from dysregulation or trauma. Not emotion itself. And if you've never learned the capacity to work with negative emotions, this alone explains your experience why negative emotions are so... Unsafe for you to feel.

Thats not quite right either. There is eustress vs distress. Eustress is still stress but positive and gets you going and there is the stress you described which is mentally taxing.

No. Stress is a force, and a signal.

It can be a signal to stop and do less, or stop and fix something, or change something, or do more.

It's important to listen to stress as a signal and see what's going on. I've been on the wrong side of that warning a few times, taking time off injured because I ignored that stress signal or missing work because of burnout by not realising I needed to do less and stand my ground on that were not fun experiences.

"Rationality isn't the absence of emotion." It most certainly is the absence of negative emotion, because a happy life isn't a miserable life.

I think I lean more towards your view. I can see stress being effective for someone who has been putting work off, but if the discipline is already there then stress would only make things worse I suppose.

Yes. So I am scared

Not at all

Well said.

I once heard that one way to characterize the difference is that stress is chronic, or unrelenting, pressure.

Personally, I don’t believe in stress; it shouldn’t exist and therefore, I always view it as negative.

You can only put in your best efforts to affect the desired end result, but anything beyond that is outside of your control, therefore, any stress would be illogical and simply only serve as a detriment to your health.

To your point that it acts as a motivator, I have never found that to be sufficient. If stress is going to have any impact on your behavior it’s only going to be to negatively impact your performance. When we’re stressed, we’re more likely to make mistakes. But when it comes to motivation, I’ve found Epicureanism to be the perfect complement to stoicism. We do something because we expect some form of pleasure in the future to make the short-term pain worthwhile. For example, a student might study for a university admissions exam instead of going out to a party with friends. In the short-term, from a pleasure point of view, it’s illogical as he would enjoy the party more. But by studying he will score better on the exam and get into his top university choice, thereby pursuing pleasure through delayed gratification.

An answer not really pertaining to philosophy but I feel like this is confusing stress with pressure - stress is medically recognised and has an effect on physical and mental health - yet you can be under pressure healthily without stress, many strive under pressure and seek it out

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Feeling bad is an unhelpful narrative that we've been taught about certain emotions.
Feeling the negative spectrum of emotion is a part of life. How well you respect, make space for, regulate and work with those emotions is directly correlated to your mental and emotional wellbeing, as well as your ability to rationalize well.
Rationality isn't the absence of emotion. Well-regulated emotions simply inform our judgement rather than sway our behavior, as unregulated emotion tends to.
Healthy emotional dynamics doesn't mean you feel good all the time. It simply means you feel the ups and downs as they happen and take the appropriate steps to regulate and work through that emotional overhead while addressing the root causes if appropriate, rather than persist in avoidance, distraction, suppression, substitution. The latter only undermines our rationality because if those emotions aren't dealt with in healthy ways, they stick around and influence us in other ways.

Mans search for meaning

Yes, and correct reasoning may require action to be taken.

If you’ve severely harmed another person, the question to ask is not “how can I stop feeling guilty” but “what recompense can I make, and how can I avoid this error in future”.

Good point. 

Feeling bad is the result of flawed reasoning.

Your post history suggests you tell many variations of the same story - "one person I love abandons me".

I don't believe any of these stories are true. I think you are afraid of people abandoning you and you are essentially trying to pre-prepare yourself for those scenarios by running through them with other people as though they are true.

Does that sound possible?

remind me of milton erickson, theres a video of him saying, dont dump your own feeling

I would even go a step further - people are often vaguely aware that emotions represent data. Even with modern medicine insisting they're some kind of disease and treating them with emotion-suppressing drugs, people know that their emotions arise in response to specific things and are not a disease.

So the real question is "what data does that actually represent?" and the answer is "your emotions are literally your reasoning - they're how you experience your own reasoning process". When you reason that the footsteps behind you at night mean somebody is following you and might have ill-intent, the anxiety you feel isn't caused by your reasoning, it isn't there with your reasoning coincidentally, it is literally how you experience your own judgment that you might be in danger. That feeling is you perceiving your own thinking.

Asking for a feeling to be removed amounts to asking for your consciousness to be selectively edited so that your perception of a specific fact about reality is magically removed. We get a lot of posts on this subreddit with people saying "how can I feel fine about my job where I'm bullied/yelled at/stolen from etc" - these people are asking to have their ability to perceive a terrible job selectively edited out of their consciousness, so that they just persist in their situation like a mindless zombie.

That mindset would be like trying to fix a car being out of fuel not by adding fuel to it, but by asking how to uninstall the fuel gauge. Worse yet, that's literally the model modern medicine adopts - all antidepressants and anxiolytics are emotion-suppressing drugs - as a society we really have adopted the idea that removing the fuel gauge is the right approach in human beings, and as you'd expect rates of illnesses "treated" with emotion-suppressing drugs goes up globally every single year.

Of course if we removed the fuel gauges from cars rates of car running out of fuel would go up too, but modern societies wouldn't dream of doing anything that would so obviously harmful the wellbeing of a car.