Maybe that's true to a certain extent, but I have to think fear of death is on a whole 'nother level.

This is excellent advice, and quite ancient, too. I first read of the approach in a guide to Stoic Philosophy, and have been attempting it ever since, with good results :)

http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-Stoic/dp/01953...

From the wikipedia entry on The Myth of Sisyphus:

Does the realization of the absurd require suicide? Camus answers: "No. It requires revolt." He then outlines several approaches to the absurd life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus

This is really interesting. It helps me understand how I process my own stress. I know I'm actually stressed when my mind shuts down and is unable to process information and make good decisions (i.e. I start panicking). I've experienced this in many different scenarios, from the time I was volunteering in high school for a big school performance event, the first time I was working a cash register and tried to return the correct change to a person, first big tech foul-up that majorly impacted a client, and various crisis-level incidents managing tech at the 2010 Olympics.

As I've gone through life and experienced more and more difficult things, I've realized that stress very relative. But when I was experiencing those things at the time for the first time, they were very stressful. When I look back at my high school self trying to find an extra chair for a ticket holder at that performance event, I find it absurd that I panicked so much. Same for when I was trying to calculate the correct amount of change in my head for a retail customer. Ludicrous. But I can't deny the stress I felt back then.

But as my experiences with stress became bigger, I realized something that changed the way I thought about things. I was still alive, things were still happening. So what if the Mexican consulate lost all of their visa records and applications because I did some shoddy sysadmin work? Well, yeah, a very big number of people were impacted. But I lived through it. I was shellacked, but I lived through it. Olympic crisis incidents? I experienced several during both training scenarios and the real thing. I was shellacked, but I lived through it. And current startup stuff? Well, nothing huge yet, but perhaps that's only because I haven't reached a level of success where I am exposed to that type of risk yet.

The point is that every time I experienced something bigger and survived, I realized that actually life goes on, and because I can survive, I am quite capable of handling whatever life throws at me. With that perspective, basically I have learned to have perspective. Realize that whatever I may be experiencing right now, no matter how difficult and stressful it may be, there will be a tomorrow. Even if I am reduced to absolutely nothing and lose everything, I still would be alive and would be able to start again.

And that perspective suddenly makes it easy to deal with all the crappy stressful stuff that may come by. At the end of the day, they're all just small things that don't kill me. I hope that if I ever experience something truly terrible, like a fight with terminal cancer, I can keep the same perspective. Whatever, I am still alive, and I can go on.

This insight ha also helped me a lot in dealing with upset kids. Very often, whatever bad think they are experiencing is literally and actually one of the worst things they have ever experienced. Whereas for me, I may well have already experienced my personal worst thing ever.

Telling them there's worse to come doesn't help, especially in the moment. So instead, I try to use my much higher MAX to remain calm and to project calm.

Reminds me of the story of the doctor with terminal cancer who is building his own coffin.

>> It’s pretty much impossible to feel anger at someone for driving too slowly in front of you in traffic when you’ve just come from sanding your own coffin.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/opinion/sunday/ashes-to-as...

>The key is realizing that unfortunately this is your natural tendency, to set you MAX to the most stressful situation you usually encounter and to work against this natural tendency: just image how much worse things could actually be

I have, perhaps unwittingly, done just that, and I've found it to be extremely helpful in my professional life. I'm a full time developer, and volunteer paramedic. This has seriously recalibrated my definition of an 'emergency' (if there's an emergency at work, it means the servers are _literally_ on fire).

I disagree. There are relative psychological scales, and then there are physical ones.

Anything critical under water (in the sky, ...) is life threatening, it doesn't trigger the same things in me (and I believe in anybody) at all.

A life changing event that will make you and the people you care about fall hard is one thing, death is another.

Doctors and other medical professionals are known for having a morbid sense of humor - for example some of the humor in MASH.