Not all discomfort deserves relief.
Tension appears when a judgment hasn’t been made, when a hypothesis hasn’t been tested. The instinct is to remove it. That’s a mistake. Unread tension is information. It marks exactly where you need to look.
Stress is different. Stress is what stays when you carry tension about things you cannot change. Same feeling. Different cause. One deserves your attention. The other deserves to be put down.
I stress-test assumptions before committing to a position — in risk work, in investments, in anything with a long tail. Part of what that practice does is separate the two. The tension that survives is load-bearing. The rest is noise I was carrying for no reason.
The Stoics named this as a diagnostic, not a comfort: what is in your control, and what isn’t. Productive tension lives in the first category. Chronic stress almost always lives in the second.
Learn to read the difference before you reach for relief.