The Buddha devoted his entire life to the reduction of stress. Our every day lives can be stressful and this can affect our physical health too. If we do not acknowledge fear relating to our most difficult problems, it can be debilitating.
Just like any other problem, resolving stress starts with understanding it’s causes. Those can be understood by acknowledging our actions, how we are feeling, what we are thinking, and the feedback we are getting from the world. The Buddha explained that stress arises because we are trying to solve all our past and our future problems at once.
A more skillful approach would be just to take things one at a time, moment to moment. When we practice Vipassana we learn how to direct the mind with mental noting so that we are only concerned with present moment awareness, that is, we limit our field of attention to what needs to be done right now. While our actions in the present might be intended to have impacts in the future, the important element is that mental noting aims our mind at experiencing this moment rather than some future or past interaction.
How do we go about creating this separation between how we experience the world and determining what actions are suitable? The answer is relatively plain. We can see this distinction if we train ourselves to observe each moment distinctly with acknowledgement. We will then see that our emotional reaction to an event is one thing whereas our objective assessment of what action is the right one to take is something quite different. This is why insight meditation by mental noting can have such a powerful effect on reducing stress. Unhindered by our fears, worries and doubts, our minds will be clear enough to determine the right course of action.