We hear a lot about stress these days. It sometimes seems to be an all-purpose explanation for things that go wrong between people. Employers are blamed for causing stress in their employees, and celebrities blame it for their occasional bouts of high profile foolishness.
But stress isn't something that "just happens", like the weather, or taxes. It doesn't happen to you; in a way, you really do it to yourself.
Stress is caused by the way you respond to the pressure an event places on you. OK, you may feel other people are responsible for that pressure, or that it’s just your life that is piling more and more pressure on, but your reaction and the stress it causes, is all yours!
So you are free to get rid of it.
Not all of it - there is some "good stress"
What, there’s “Good Stress”?
Yes indeed. People do tend to give stress a bad press, but in fact it’s not all bad. Not always.
Everyone needs some stress in life. Remember, stress is only the response you have to events. Sometimes that response to the pressure of events is useful. For example, when you have an important presentation to make, you are under some pressure. But the stress you feel at that particular pressure should actually help you perform better when you come to give your presentation. There are lots of events where if you didn’t feel a degree of stress, you’d just become a cabbage. The right amount of stress can help you to produce your very best work.
Bad stress, the stuff we usually hear about, occurs when you let the pressure build up to a point where you feel overwhelmed. It can make you feel sick, do unwise things, and mess up your relationships.
You don’t have to let it happen like that. Stress-related illness usually happens because the effects of one initial cause of stress, even a small one, can mess up your responses to the next pressure you come under, and gradually you cope with every new pressure less and less well. Perhaps, for some people, one really big, sudden pressure that they can’t cope with is all that is needed to tip them intro a stress crisis. It’s a very personal thing.
Because stress can build up quite gradually, often it’s other people who see the signs in you before you notice.
Perhaps you:
Get generally irritable and snappy at work and home
Make a big fuss over small events.
Are regarded as a little cloud of misery
Are getting less done than you used to, putting things off until it’s too late.
Seem to be engaging in diversions instead of doing the job.
Keep whingeing about the things you have to do.
Can't make your mind up, and spend ages on simple decisions.
Complain of indigestion and headaches too often.
Are seeking more solace in alcohol than usual.
Lack get-up-and-go at work or home
Or are prone to sweatiness!
These things usually build up over time, so you tend to take them as “normal for me at the moment”. Accepting them like that can actually make the stress grow.
So if people point them out, maybe instead of just thinking them rude and insensitive (which they also may be!) consider whether they are actually doing you a favour. After all, if you don’t know about it and do something, sooner or later you’ll be in danger of the three really nasty illnesses of stress:
Anxiety attacks, with symptoms like feeling helpless, panicking, and being unable to relax or even sleep without help;
Aggression, with its over-reaction to trivial events, even picking arguments or bullying people;
Depression, with a general loss of purpose, extreme lethargy, exhaustion, feeling worthless and unvalued, and tending to tears.
These are real illnesses. You’ll need medical help. So before any of these happen, maybe this is the time to decide to do something about any early personal stress signs. Like that indigestion.
To do that you really need to know what stress does to your body.
In the great scheme of life, the universe, and everything, it’s useful to remember that humans have been around for only about 2 million years. That’s really only a moment in evolutionary time. So we “modern humans” still share quite a lot of the characteristics of our cave-dwelling forebears. These signs tend to come out when we are subject to unexpected or unwelcome pressure.
In those long distant days (OK, we are going back to the cavemen here), the pressure was likely to come in the shape of a bear or similar fierce mammal appearing at the edge of the settlement, posing an immediate threat. There were essentially two possible caveman responses to that threat. Our common ancestors could run for it, or they could decide that they had had just about enough of these pesky wandering bears, and the time had arrived to deal with them. Or as we tend to put it today, their choice was between “flight” and "fight”.
Fortunately the human system had been designed to cope with such emergencies. Indeed, so well hard-wired is the coping mechanism that even today it has not yet managed to differentiate very clearly between the threat of a rampant bear or the – possibly lesser – threat of a rampant boss. In either case, whether the decision is to fight, or to run for it, there are certain changes that are needed to bring the human system from a lounging-around-the-fire-eating-roots state to a fighting-or-fleeing-from-bears state. The body's defence system therefore automatically swings into “action”
To prepare for the coming action, the human system releases a great swoosh of adrenaline into the bloodstream. Adrenaline is the chemical that makes the heart beat faster, shoving the blood around quicker, carrying oxygen and energy to where it's needed. That’s why we use it to treat heart attacks and anaphylactic attacks after stings or allergies.
All that work pumping blood around faster makes the system get hotter, hence the sweating we have – that’s to cool us down. While trying to keep oxygen supplies up (causing faster breathing) the speeding up of the system can also cause the brain to run short of oxygen, which sometimes causes messages to the rest of the body to get stuck or distorted – usually known as “freezing in panic” or “not thinking straight”.
This big belt of adrenaline will also affect the digestive system, giving rise to “butterflies” and other socially unfortunate symptoms.
At the same time a hormone is released that increases the glucose in the blood system, providing lots of extra energy needed to run or fight. This leads to extra strength, and is evidenced by the common puzzlement about “I don’t know how I found the strength!” when superhuman effort was needed in emergency.
So, all this stuff going on inside us is really helpful in the case of the single bear event that day. But if the threats are constant, if they are daily pressures, the body just keeps on responding in the same way. So the system never gets the chance to recover from the “fight or flight” preparations, or rebalance to “normal”.
Such a prolonged state of readiness for action, the same old stuff our ancestors could cope with on an occasional bear-at-the-door basis, when it becomes continuous, can bring on a whole range of longer-term effects on us modern humans. These include ulcers, headaches, and the shakes.
So you see, the defence system that served our ancestors so well is still serving us today. It’s just that like anything else, if we rely on it all the time, sooner or later it’s actually going to cause us problems.
Hang on a moment, is this fun ? You’ll remember that we established early on that stress is really just how you respond to pressure – no one can “give you stress”, and it’s up to you whether you accept the stress when you get the pressure. And that there is good stress as well as bad stress.
It follows that whether you get stressed rather depends on how you perceive a situation. So for example, if all of your life so far (we’ll pop back to the stone age here for a moment) you have been hanging out with bears, playing tree climbing games with them, and you know the local bears intimately, it is possible (no higher than that) that when a bear appears on the corner of your encampment you might say instead,
“Hey! Whee! There’s Old Scrawny, the bear from down by the big water! I must go and give him a hug!”
In other words, if you perceive a situation to be fun, or pleasurable, whatever others may think, you can regard it as not stressful at all. Or only a little stressful. Or as outright good fun.
Which is why it is possible for people to throw themselves off high bridges with nothing but a rubber band between them and the bottom of the canyon, or go for terrifying fairground rides. Yes, it’s “dangerous”, but hey! It’s fun! “Good stress!”
On the other hand, going for a drive in the countryside might seem a really fun way to pass the afternoon to your mate Big Bob the Boy Racer, but maybe you have been in his passenger seat before, and to you it is going to be a trial by terror. So you get stress effects all through the week before the trip.
It’s all about how you look at it.
OK, but there aren't too many bears about these days....
We’ve already established that stress is actually your response to events that happen to you. In this wild modern world, there are very few bears, but there are two really big sources of “virtual bears” that we all have to deal with. These are:
Workplace Pressures, the pressure that we say, “Goes with the job”, and Life Events. See how many of these you recognise in yourself. (And try not to panic)
Workplace pressures:
Constant change, making you insecure
Unclear targets and standards of performance
Impossible demands or unrealistic timeframes and capabilities
Responsibility without authority
Job insecurity
Impossible bosses
Impossible staff
Long hours and heavy workloads
Bad work environment, clutter and poor equipment
Life Events:
Death of a friend or relative
Divorce
Relocation
Illness
Children
Financial worries
Repeated daily irritations like commuting
Getting older
There’s a name for all these; “stressors”.
We tend to see all these stressors as “beyond our control”, but in fact they aren’t. It’s just that we avoid taking any steps to deal with them or reduce their impact on us, usually because we are afraid of the consequences. But there is another source of stressors that affects us all.
Our own expectations of ourselves. Can you recognise any of these in yourself ?
Perfectionism. As well as making us take impossible care with things, and set absurdly high standards for everything we do ourselves, this is the habit of thinking “if you want a job done properly, do it yourself!”. So we drive ourselves to take on more and more tasks, until one day we break under the strain.
Approvalism. The need to always be seen to have pleased people, which again makes us try not only to do things to perfection, but even to anticipate what people might like us to do, and do it before they ask, gathering for ourselves yet more demands that we “have to meet”.
Urgency. Always feeling we haven’t done enough in the time, or expecting everything to take less time than it is going to. This places unfair pressures on ourselves, and when we fail to meet our own deadlines, we get exasperated.
Our inner strength. We don’t want to show that we can’t handle situations, or to ask for help, as that might make people think less well of us.
It is hard to deal with these, because they are what make you what you are. But if you can recognise them in yourself you can at least try and tone them down, using a few basic strategies like:
Asking if it really needs to be done that well,
Allowing a bit more time
Telling people what you really think about situations
Not trying to do what you haven’t been asked to do
If you now look over the last section, you will see that you are subject to quite a number of stressors all the time, and it isn’t all that surprising if occasionally a few more pressures, a few unwanted demands, can push you into a stressed situation instead of trying to deal rationally with the causes of the pressures.
Try to remember, the more of these three types of stressor you are carrying around, the less margin you have to cope with that virtual bear when it appears. Even in Leeds.
“I usually just count to 10”
There are of course occasions when that old virtual bear appears, and you know that at the time you can only cope with a very limited amount of extra pressure. So the best response is to tackle the things that “fight or flight” is doing to you right then, tricking your system into thinking you have taken the necessary action, and getting it to calm down so you can feel better fast. The immediate things you can do to achieve this are:
Adjust your posture. Sit up straight, and give your shoulders some exercise, raise them and lower them, relax them. This means that you are taking your body “down” from a state of readiness to a state of relaxation, and when this happens the brain assumes the threat is over, and the “fight or flight” processes slow down.
Control the oxygen deficit. As the fight or flight syndrome takes over, you burn up a lot of oxygen. Replace it by breathing deeply, and the oxygen deficit that has threatened your thinking – as oxygen has been diverted from your brain to other places – is stabilised. So the system can slow down again.
Move about. The body is expecting action, so give it some. Once it knows that you are taking action, it assumes you are getting away from the threat, or dealing with it. All the adrenaline and hormones can stop, and your system can settle down to normal.
Once you have regained control of the system, you can think rationally about what to do with that ol’ virtual bear. Here are some ideas for the next stage of your fight to keep stress at bay:
Decide if you can do anything about it now. If not, put it put of your mind until you can do something about it, or decide who can do something about it, and get them to take the load off you.
Decide how big the issue is. Compare it with other things, and decide if it is so important you need to move it to the top of your list now, or if it is just not big enough to matter to you – now or later.
Isolate it. Don’t let a little snowball turn into a big one. Work out what exactly needs to be done to sort out this issue, not to deal with all the consequences, real or imagined, into the distant future. They’ll may not happen at all if you just tackle this properly now.
Clear your mind. Concentrate on the one thing. Maybe do a displacement exercise, like visualising something calming and peaceful. Then with that clear mind you can deal with the single issue.
Adopt someone else’s’ s view. Is this really as big to other people as it is to you right now? Do not make a mountain for yourself out of someone else’s molehill.
Stress, if you let it, is going to keep coming back. The world isn’t going to stop, you still have a life which will create stressors. You still – we hope – have a job that you need to do. So you really need to build into your life some habits that can reduce the effects of future stress.
Learn to relax. For some people this is desperately hard. They just “don’t know how to relax”. Well, they need to learn! The problem is often that they haven’t found the thing that will give them relaxation. It may be gardening, or painting, reading, or walking the dog, cooking or swimming. There will always be something that can be a form of relaxation, something that gives the body time to recover. Pursue this. Don’t let yourself off with “nothing appeals to me”. Make a list, try stuff.
Get regular sleep. It is a vicious cycle – stress makes it hard to sleep, lack of sleep causes fatigue, fatigue reduces the capacity to cope with pressures. To recover from a stressed situation it is necessary to have break with old sleeping habits. Your doctor can often help, but so can a long vacation or a change of habits. Actually scheduling the right amount of sleep for yourself, and then making sure you get it, is one of the best long term ways to ensure you cope with pressures without suffering stress.
Pay attention to your diet. Constant snacking and drinking coffee, or always eating the sort of “junk food” that makes your metabolism work too hard, or food that only provides short term bursts of energy, only messes up your system. No wonder your system can’t cope with all the adrenaline and hormones. Oh, and do remember, alcohol is a depressant, not a stimulant. Too much of it will not only mess up your system, but also your thinking.
Socialising. One of the big problems, especially for men, is that they often have very limited circles of social acquaintance, and this tends to make them focus far too much on work. But socially different things take you to different mental places, give your brain a real break, and help you to balance that working life by comparing your life with people who are not going to “talk shop”.
Exercise. As any teenager will testify, the more you stay in bed, the more you want to stay in bed. The problem with this and other forms of lethargy is that you never get the system really moving, so it doesn’t perform its self-service functions. You need a degree of activity to burn up calories, to flush the blood around the body, to put the heart under a bit of pressure. It doesn’t have to be a lot of effort, just regular walk to the station instead of driving to work, or getting an allotment to go and dig. You don’t have to sign up for the local over thirties Saturday Rugby league, or buy a mountain bike. Just find something to make sure you have regular exercise.
OK, but, well, me, I'm just .........
It’s all very well considering the things you can do to reduce the impact of stress on your life, and surely you will need to do these things from time to time. But avoidance is better than a cure, and you can make a huge difference to your life and your health by certain evasive actions. These are simple to learn, and really very rational.
Don’t expect too much of yourself. You know your limits, really you do! Don’t deliberately get into situations that will over-stretch you, or undertake things that will inevitably place you in an impossible position.
Change when you need to change. Stop hanging on to things, habits, established practices, when they have passed their useful life. Use the “garage strategy”. If you don’t know whether you can get rid of something, put it in the real or imaginary garage. If after a couple of months you haven’t really the loss, you don’t need it any more, so just id of it.
Avoid people and situations that are going to stress you out. If going to visit your partners family every Sunday is causing you grief, arguments, anger, inadequacy, just stop doing it. As we said before, there is always something you can do to lessen stress – it’s just that it can be frightening to think of the consequences. So think about what could be worse than tackling the stressors – like heart attacks, ulcers, depression, death. Got it?
Learn to say “no”
Finally – feel better about yourself. It helps to understand stress, what causes it, what effects it has. But ultimately you decide how stressed you get. If you feel good about yourself, you are less likely to fall victim. So make sure that once in while you evaluate yourself honestly, and decide what you can feel good about, and where you want to be. Think about your achievements, and be happy for what you have done, and done well. Be proud of your strengths and your experience.
Is that it?
Yes.
There you are.
You know what causes stress, how it happens, how to reduce it, how to avoid it.
If you can’t kick stress out of your life entirely, you can certainly do something from now on to reduce it. And maybe live longer. Certainly better.
Remember – stress is an optional extra.
