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Stress management
- 1. Stress Management Stress is the illness of the era. In a world in which increasingly more men and woman can become almost anything they dream of, and in which they are surrounded by people making demands regarding who they should become, it is not all that surprising that stress is a commonplace condition. For some, the goal of reducing stress becomes yet another stress factor, piling one more obligation on top of an already too-tall heap! Worse, for every person who realizes that stress is a problem, there is at least one more who thinks stress is a sign of virtue. I am sure you know people who feel that way. There is a very good chance you are one of them! Our world connects stress with high-achievement, with success, and with exceptional social involvement. There is hardly anyone who does not have a secret respect for the harried woman who is rising in her career, serving on five charity committees, winning trophies for her dahlias, and raising three over-achieving kids just like her. Or the man, who has built his own electronics company from scratch, is an active member of the Rotary, takes his children camping and coaches them in soccer, and whose “fun time” is spent restoring his antique 17th century farm house using only authentic tools and materials. The moans of overwork and stressful days seem like badges of victory sometimes, do they not? Our culture seems to admit it: being stressed means you must be doing something right. Only – we know that is not true. We know from our own lives that stress is a sign that something is not quite right, and we know that stress itself is something decidedly wrong. Stress is a fear-response. Living in stress is another way of saying you are living in fear – and, reasonably enough, living in fear carries a high price. The Adrenaline Rush In biology, stress is defined as the physical response to a period of perceived threat over which you have little or no control. That definition can be expanded to include emotional reactions under similar circumstances, as these then feed into physical responses, often creating continuous loops of reaction. When a person is stressed, the body manufactures fear-related endocrines, intended to help you in life and death situations. Adrenaline, cortisol, and other
- 2. endocrines are released which increase alertness and sensitivity to stimulus – sights, sounds, flavours, and more. Blood pressure increases, reflexes become quicker. A state of “nervousness” is reached. In nature, this would usually be a short-term reaction intended to prepare your body for fight-or-flight reactions to immediate danger. Think about it. It is fairly good to have sensitive hearing, intense awareness, high blood pressure, and a pounding heart to supply oxygen to your muscles, and so on, if you have just seen a tiger and may need to run away or fight. Within half an hour or so, the entire event will be over, and you will either be alive somewhere, catching your breath and bandaging your wounds, or you will be an intimate part of the inner life of a tiger. Either way, you and your body will not be dealing with corticosteroids crashing around your metabolism. Unfortunately, our body does not differentiate between tigers and being late for a child’s T-ball practice. On some level, we tend to interpret “threats” as “serious” even when they are not. Similarly, the body does not recognize that some threats are constant. Many people face daily concerns: tension in the workplace, life in high crime areas, debts, social conflict, or, most devastating of all, interior demands we place on ourselves. Fear can take many forms, and too often our greatest fear is of our own imperfection. I know many of my own worst stress rises from my own awareness of my shortcomings. I am, on the one hand, a perfectionist and ambitious, while being at the same time not naturally organized and easily led into procrastination. Those two pairs of attributes form a perfect stress-generator. If I do something that falls short of my own standards I am angry and distressed, because at heart I tend to feel that, in the words of the proverb, “anything worth doing is worth doing well.” In truth, not all things need to be done well, and no life contains the time to address all activities with equal attention to detail. A sloppily made bed is hardly a catastrophe. But my inner self, seeing I have mitred a corner badly, is stricken with a sense of treat: I have failed! Unfortunately, our bodies often treat a sense of failure as a sense of danger. “I am a failure” is as disruptive to the body as, “Oh, look! A tiger!” Therefore my body, seeing that uneven mitred bed sheet, responds with the same set of chemicals as if I saw a flash of orange slipping behind a hedge – with a little shot of bio-chemicals to handle the “danger.” But that is unpleasant. I become anxious. The next time I see a bed that needs to be made, I may fall into procrastination, muttering “I will do it later,” rather than risk finding I have once again failed to master a perfect hospital corner.
- 3. But I am a perfectionist; perfectionists are threatened by undone chores. Undone chores mean failure and, unfortunately, more endocrines to keep me edgy. Now imagine that cycle being acted out dozens and dozens of times a day, over dozens and dozens of issues – few of them severe enough to really justify a tiger reaction. The end result is stress. Our bodies have no natural sense of perspective, and no understanding of duration. As long as our subconscious perceives a threat, our bodies will prepare us to cope with that threat in the old, adrenaline- rush fight-or-flight pattern of the wild; and our bodies, and our mind will pay the price for that. Even if there were no drawbacks but the obvious nervous, twitchy sense of always being under threat, it would be desirable to break the cycle of stress. Knowing the physical cost over time, it becomes vital. Stress Defies Philosophy: What Doesn’t Make You Stronger, Kills You The great modern philosopher, Nietzsche, is widely known for the quote, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” It is a questionable position in any case, but when it comes to stress, it is an outright lie. Stress is a killer – it robs your body of strength, resilience, weakens the immune system, raises blood pressure, damages the heart, has been associated with such diverse conditions as backache, gingivitis, and rashes. Stress is a factor in depression, in self-destructive conditions like anorexia and cutting, and influences suicide levels. Stress increases the odds of aggressive behavior. In other words, while short-term stress may save you in an emergency, prolonged, chronic stress is bad for you. It is also often bad for the people around you. “Stress management” is not a fad movement – it is a response to a real problem. And, of course, since stress is a real, life-threatening problem, dealing with it can be yet another stress factor. Approached the wrong way, an attempt to end the fear cycle can have a reverse effect, and add more stress, not less. How to do it right? Look to both ancient wisdom and modern exploration, take your time, and start out with the assumption that there is no failure.
- 4. Remember, stress rises out of a sense of threat. The more you can train yourself to think of failure properly – as just a step on the path to success, or as a necessary badge of greatness – the less stress you will experience in your efforts at stress management. So, that is rule one: so long as you are using good sense and making an honest effort, there is no failure, only ordinary experimentation as you search for the best answer. Failures are good: they help you narrow down your options and point you in the right direction. Determining Your Strategies It is time to go back and think about the definition of stress: reactions you experience when you feel that you are threatened and have insufficient control over the situation. There are a lot of points in that definition, and they all matter when it comes to stress management strategies. Let us consider them: Stress is reactive: It is a response to a perceived threat. Stress is something you experience: Physical and emotional response, not logical response. The trigger is perceived threat: Your body and inner self do not easily distinguish between real threats and imagined ones; physical threats and abstract ones; important threats or unimportant. If you perceive threat, your mind and body respond, often without any sense of proportion. Stress is a response to not just threat, but insufficient control: The more you feel you control a situation, the less threat it presents and the more confidence you feel. Knowing these things can help you begin to get some mastery over stress. Let us begin at the beginning: stress is reactive. It is contained within you. Stress is the result of your mind and body responding to possible danger in certain ways – some out of your control, others within your control. It is important to realize that regardless of where or what the apparent danger or threat is, the stress response is inside you, and is created by your mind and body. We commonly blame people, things, or events for our feelings. “You made me jealous.” “The stupid computer made me so angry.” “The earthquake terrified me.” That type of cause-and-effect statement is dangerous, because it denies the ways we can control our own response, and choose our reactions – and entirely misses the point that things outside us do not control our responses
- 5. and feelings in the first place. Your partner may or may not want you to be jealous, but only you can control whether you become jealous or not. The computer, perverse imp of technology though it may appear to be, is incapable of “making” you feel anything at all. It is an inanimate object and is completely unaware of you – unless you are living in a fairly exciting science fiction story, in which case all bets are off. An earthquake is a real threat, but it is not in any way controlling your body or mind: if you are terrified, the terror is your own. Understanding that is very important – not so that you can blame yourself or feel guilt, but because knowing allows you to take back control of your stress levels. Your partner may be a manipulative, cruel person who wants you to feel jealous; your computer may be packed rock solid with balky chips, failing circuits, dubious RAM cards, and dozens of glitchy software programs and imported viruses; an earthquake may indeed threaten to kill you. But you alone can decide how you want to deal with that. Your only opponent is what lies inside you, not outside, and much, if not all of that, is within your control. However, before you even start to work on internal control, you can work on external control. The first strategic move in stress management is to control the outside things that trigger your stress. You must make choices about your environment. These outside triggering agents are called “stress factors.” Stress factors can be extremely varied. The most common in modern life have to do with how we have chosen to live. In the average daily life, we expose ourselves constantly to spaces that are not our own home territory. We deal with people who are not our family or close friends. Many of us are employed in positions that involve intense human contact, extremely high focus and attention to detail; work that keeps us in a state of hyper-alertness for hours at a time, much like warriors in a siege. We are almost all deeply dependent on the good will of superiors; more of us, quite possibly, than at any previous time in history. Day after day we are on display to our supervisors, co-workers, neighbours, customers, friends and family – and most of us absolutely must have at least some degree of peace with all these people to be sure of an income and a stable home-life. We have, in short, chosen lives that offer great rewards, but at very high stakes. We then complicate that by adding in obligations, expectations, and dreams, filling our lives with an onslaught of pressures and demands. The first move to make in stress management is to simplify our lives, and reduce as much pressure as we can. That involves making some hard choices, and setting some priorities.
- 6. The Ideal of the Simple Life Finding a simple life, a non-stressed life, is not simple at all. It takes great discipline and careful choices. To accomplish the feat, you must accept the necessity of making decisions about what is important, and what is not. You must set priorities, and then abide by them. Many of us find that almost unendurably difficult. Faced with a choice between hamburger and salad, we choose both. Considering a movie or a favorite TV show, we go to the movie – but then make sure to watch the show on TiVo. Considering the question of career or family, we try to have both, and find some way to have both full-time, 24/7, ignoring the fact that this is technically impossible. We often over-commit. We extend ourselves too far. We take on too much. Why? Often because we feel we have to. How can we choose between work and family? We work for our families, but often can afford families only because we work. How can we choose between sleep and relaxation (good for our health and sanity, but “selfish” and “non-productive”), and taking the children to a sports practice, or collecting funds for a charity (both admirable actions benefiting others – but time consuming, exhausting, and often far less rewarding than we like to pretend). Faced with a necessary act of selfish rest and an unnecessary act of generous giving, we attempt both, and end up neither entirely rested, nor living up to very high standards of giving. The soul of simplicity is found in resisting non-essentials. “Just say no,” is a central mantra. Preserving the integrity of your own time and rest is an inviolable requirement. To live without stress, we must first say “no” to a few things. You alone can determine which things: in finding the answers you will learn much about who you really are. Will you leave the world and become a monk in a religious order? Will you spend a year or so as Thoreau did at Walden Pond, considering the basics of life? Maybe. Most people cannot afford that choice, though: their own personal necessities forbid such complete renunciation of worldly stress factors. Your choice may be as simple as deciding that there will be no more television to babble at you in the evening, no more talk radio to pump your anger levels on the drives to and from work, nothing but a good book, or a pleasing CD, or an hour or two drawing, at the end of the day. For you, a major
- 7. stress factor may just be the feelings provoked by loud dramas, bullying talk- show hosts, hot-topic debates, and the sense that, somehow, you cannot live without all that. You may decide you simply have no time to give to charity at the moment, in spite of the certainty that charity is worthwhile. Or you may be forced to admit that your social circle is too large or too turbulent for your actual endurance levels. Do you have friends coming in or calling at all hours to cry on your shoulder, rant about the villainy of their lovers, pace the floor while discussing their evil boss? Maybe, for you, a primary means of stress management is to stop being the stress-manager for everyone else. When you sort out your priorities, and decide what stressful things to keep, and what to throw away, consider throwing out all stress that is not rightfully your own. It is hard enough to manage one person’s stress. It is impossible to manage if you are carrying stress for yourself and many others. Let it go... A Clear View of the Problem When you have stripped out the stress factors in your life which are not necessary, you will be left with a set of stressors you decided you could not live without. Most of us seem to want to keep our children, though they can drive us crazy, put up with our friends, though they, too, can worry us more than a bit, and retain our jobs. We continue to live in a world filled with taxes, house payments, insurance premiums, postal deliveries, meals to make, eat, and clean up after, laundry and garbage and chores, noisy neighbors, contagious diseases, economic downturns… The Bible instructs us that we are “in the world, but not of it.” Unfortunately, we often seem to be “in the world” up to our armpits, with the water rising fast and the sharks circling in for the first bite. It can be very difficult to cope with the bombardment. We are now, clearly, moving from simplifying your life – stripping away needless stressors – to considering how to deal with the stressors we are stuck with regardless. After all, even hermits and monks experience stressors – irksome squirrels chattering at them during meditation periods, fellow monks with peculiar voices, abbots who are entirely unreasonable about the daily roster of chores…
- 8. Stress is, ultimately fear; but the fear can be tied to many things. Anger can trigger fear, because it promises conflict and even possible combat. Similarly, it can trigger fear because it threatens our social bonds: family relationships, work relationships, all are put at risk when anger is present. Submission to authority can trigger fear, because it demands trust – a trust which may be betrayed. Tolerance can trigger fear, because living with those who are different from us demands we accept change and the unknown – always a potential threat. Love can trigger fear, because it poses the possibility of loss and rejection. Living life is a fearful thing: great and fearful. Why, then, should anyone bother with the stripping away and simplification discussed previously? And what can one do when the fear and stress remains afterward? Well, the simplification and stripping away does help in stress management, by reducing the sheer volume of stressors in your life. That is no small thing. Indeed, for many people that single strategy is sufficient to shift stress levels from “too high,” to “not so bad.” It is a sensible first step to a less stressful life. As for what to do when stress remains? Move on to strategies that involve interior stress management. Remember the point that stress is a reaction inside you, not something that is caused by factors outside you? Exterior factors may function as triggers, but the actual process of stress is internal. Because of this, much of stress is under our own control, using three basic classes of strategy. Two have to do with mental processing. The third has to do with physical management, and I will reserve that for later. Stress is fear, and fear grows from perceived threat and danger. The more intensely you believe something to be dangerous or threatening, the more seriously you take it, the more stress it will generate. The more you fear, the more you are stressed; the more you are stressed, the more easily you fear. You can trap yourself in an endless loop of round-and-round self-defeating terror very easily. The first mental trick of stress management is to learn to properly assess our fears: to know the true shape, weight, value, and danger implied in anything that trips off your fear response. Most of us, fearing, look away. We are all
- 9. cowards in our minds, if we are not very determined to be courageous. So if we are worried about whether we have cancer, far from choosing to go see the doctor, we ignore it, pretending we are not worried at all. If we think our spouse is cheating, we do not ask, and do not investigate. If we are worried we cannot afford to pay a debt, we avoid calling to find out what it is, hoping it will just go away. Similarly, we may avoid flying, because we might crash. Or we avoid all dogs, because we are afraid they may bite. The trouble with this approach is that, far from freeing us from our fears, it keeps them there, and makes them worse than they may really be; in most cases, far worse. We tend to imagine the very worst, and then some. Things we cannot clearly see are our bed monsters – the stressors our minds make in the shadow. Things we will not clearly see, though, are the monsters we raise up ourselves, knowingly, refusing to send them away with the light knowledge shines. Every time you refuse to look at a stress factor clearly, study it, and strip the mystery away, you sabotage yourself. Most stressors of the mind, we create ourselves. Most that we do not create, we exaggerate. Cancer, for example, is a fearful thing. I know of no one who desires a diagnosis of cancer. But I have known many people who either died, or suffered much more severely than they needed to because they dreaded going to the doctor to learn about their condition more than they actually feared pain and death. They chose lethal ignorance over a potentially saving discovery. Tragically, in the end, they suffered both the staggering fear of ignorance and the fear of a revealed cancer. So: mental strategy number, one to manage your stress is to develop the discipline to always, always find out what is really there. Do you have a pimple, or cancer? A staggering debt or an unexpected return? Is that a monster in the corner, or a rocking chair with pretty pink roses? Deal with stress by turning on the light, and seeing what is really there, not what your mind can imagine in the darkness of ignorance. A Matter of Perspective When you have courageously committed to seeing the true nature of your fears, there is another little bit of mental jiu-jitsu to perform, if you want to maintain an upper hand on stress. You must not only know the truth, but know
- 10. how to properly value it. Learning to judge the real importance of problems can make all the difference in life. “Poor little rich girl” is a common stereotype: we imagine a lucky child from a good family, born with every advantage, pampered from birth, who pouts and whines over trivial issues because she has never experienced true hardship and pain. Unfortunately, most of us have a share of that failing. A splinter in our finger is more devastating than another person’s amputation. We become more worked up over our own parking tickets than over another person’s hydroplaning accident. Or we throw a major tantrum over a child’s “D” in math, while ignoring his repeated “A+” grades in history. Remember the notion of stress being a fear response to a possible tiger? We fear many things, and are angered – and thus fearful, about many things. We feel superstitious dread of being somehow fated or doomed to odd and unfair losses. We fear being neglected or deprived of pleasure and joys we’d planned for – of being shoved to the back of life’s bus by poor service in restaurants and crying babies whose mothers are indifferent to our ruined evening. We look at a child’s “D” and imagine a nightmare of dysfunction suffered in years to come, as little Davie fails to become the superman we fear he must be to survive a threatening world. We react to the imagined tigers in our lives. But those tigers are often really no more than alley cats, or even merely mischievous hearth-cats – or nothing more than shadows on the wall. Our instincts treat all shadows as tigers. But we can alter our instinctive reactions, and release out stress by giving our fears their proper weight. Again, remember, stress is a matter of perceived threat, and perceived lack of control. If our minds imagine a threat as far worse than we fear, it also, at the same time, imagines us as far less able to control things as we are. A tiger can eat you. You, however, could, if you had to, eat a hearth-cat; and further, you could pick it up and cuddle it and make it purr. Give your fears and your stressors their true faces, and then evaluate them with realism and calm. Dismiss the ones that are unworthy of your fears. If you have looked at them squarely, and judged them fairly, you will be amazed how many of them “swiftly and silently vanish away,” like the Snark in Lewis Carol’s nonsense poem, “The Hunting of the Snark.”
- 11. Body Over Mind, Mind Over Body We have now talked about a wide range of stress management techniques; some dealing with how we behave, others having to do with how we think. There is an important third approach to stress management: how we manage our bodies. Remember that there is a purely physical element to stress. Your mind perceiving a threat – rightly or wrongly, whether you are aware of it or not – starts a physical response. Dozens of automatic chair reactions begin, that will alter your mood, your reasoning, and certainly your emotional reactions long after the first fear response may have passed. To avoid or reduce the stress problems caused by this pattern, you need to play to your body’s strengths, and use positive reactions to counter negative elements in your life. What can you do to improve the physical aspects of stress? To begin with, it is to your advantage to exercise daily. This accomplishes any number of things. Some are rather hard to pin down. Does exercise make us less easily frightened? Or does it make us deal more easily with fear-chemicals when our bodies produce them? Does the body produce anti-fear chemicals as a “reward” for behavior that satisfies the flight-or-fight reflexes in our instinct? It is hard to say. What is clear is that regular, vigorous exercise improves mental condition. Exercise reduces depression, fear, and anxiety. Stress levels fall, blood pressure goes down, sleep improves, and relaxation is more easily accomplished. Regular exercise makes people happier, healthier, more relaxed, and less nervous and fearful. Much of the physical and mental damage done by stress has been shown to be reduced or eliminated by exercise. There are many ways you can incorporate exercise into your life. Whether you are a home-body who finds even a trip to the gym too much of a venture from your own home turf, or an adventurer; a brawny type or a putterer, there are forms of exercise that can be fit into your daily life. Depending on your needs and pleasures, exercise can occur indoors or out, be social or intensely private, involve teams or be solitary. Exercise can be as simple as you and your dog taking a walk every morning and evening, or as complex as preparing for competitive team sports.
- 12. Whatever you choose, you give yourself an enormous gift when you commit to exercise. Your health and your happiness are both likely to improve, and your stress levels are likely to fall in direct response. After exercise? Food – but food chosen with care and sense, and an awareness that small amounts of humble, good food often serve both health and happiness better than luxurious volume. There’s probably a good reason that proverbs pair happiness and contentment with simple eating of the most frugal and spare sort. Herbs, dates, a handful of rice. The Jewish saying “Give a poor man a whole chicken and both of them are sick,” says a lot about the complexity of our relationships with food and with eating. Serious adjustment of your diet can help improve your stress levels, but they need to be made with a nutritionist’s input, and they need to be undertaken in ways that don’t add to stress in their own right. That said, a simple diet based on vegetable products first, and possible entirely, can promote a lot of positive changes while keeping you healthy and happy. After food: meditation and/or prayer. How you sort these out is entirely up to you, but the act of taking a time for deep mental and spiritual focus is proven to lower blood pressure, reduce tension and anxiety, help control panic attacks, and generally promote good stress management. The act of stilling the mind and body, and coming to a state of mental buoyancy seems to help derail the entire process of stressful thinking and stressful physical response, and the benefits linger beyond the time of meditation or prayer. Do not fool yourself: one hour a week will not immunize you against all a week’s stressors. But daily meditation can provide you with a reliable mechanism for dealing with stress you cannot manage or eliminate through other techniques. Finally: joy, rest, and recreation. That is not a frivolous suggestion, it is entirely serious. The right and obligation to give yourself time for play, lazing about, fishing off a pier, dozing in a hammock in the shade, reading a good book, going to a movie, laughing with a friend – this right and obligation can save you more grief, and protect you from more stress damage than a year of medical insurance could cope with. That also includes really good medical insurance, such as most of us cannot afford. Do not skimp yourself. Our culture tells us that pure pleasure-filled lazy activity, done only because it makes us happy, is somehow wrong. The values of our stress-creating, anxiety provoking culture insist that there is always something more important to be doing than just lolling about being at ease.
- 13. The trouble is that thinking like this is exactly what puts most of us in line for stress in the first place. “Should,” and “ought to” replace the commonsense realization that we are not made to drag our lives as eternal burdens, in service to the world, or to our chosen God, or to duty, or to charity. We are earthly creatures, as earthy and simple as the lion dozing in the sun with a full belly, or the donkey the Bible insists should be allowed to eat some of the grain it grinds. If stress is fear, pure relaxation and recreation is the direct experience of life without fear. To refuse yourself or deny yourself the guilt-free experience of peace and contentment when it is possible is a crime against both truth and health. It is a crime against health for obvious reasons – the insistence on stressing yourself further and further will do damage in the long run. The crime against truth is less immediately obvious. But stress and fear grow out of a fear that life is never safe, success never possible, joy never in reach, and gratification always just over the horizon. To live in stress is to live in a constant state of self-denial, and denial of the possibility of contentment. There is no better or more sure way to kick stress in the teeth, refute the bleak pessimism of inner fear, than to refuse to sacrifice joy and content. In the tradition of the Abrahamic religions, there is a Sabbath that must be celebrated: a set-aside sacred time for enjoyment of the world we experience, the blessings we receive, and the bounty found in even the simplest and most carefully limited living. A Sabbath of heart and soul and mind is no crime or sin, but an obligation. Think about that the next time you feel guilty at the thought of giving yourself some time for celebration of your own life’s blessings, for appreciation of the safety, happiness, and recreation available to you. By at least one set of rules, a minimum of one seventh of your life should, by rights, be set aside for a Sabbath in which you turn away from stress. That is an obligation, not simply a suggestion. Have you met that obligation lately? Have you demanded it of yourself? Defended that Sabbath from any who would steal it from you? For your own happiness and well-being, defend your time of peace and joy. It is yours by right, and by necessity, and when you hold to it, it will pay you back in still more joy and peace.