Stress
reduction is a reasonable expectation and it’s doable.
The starting point is to understand the
stress-model. The
stress-model makes it
clear. Stress
reduction is possible if
you understand what stress is and how it works.
What stress is and how it works
To
understand stress, you need to make a clear distinction between
STRESSOR and
STRESS. The words
“stress” is often
misused. For
example, people will say
that “work is stress”. No,
it’s
not. Work is a
stressor. People
will say that “money problems are
stress”. No, they
are not. Money
problems are a stressor. Likewise
you’ll hear people say something
like, “noisy neighbours are stress”, or “hot weather is stress”. No,
these are all
stressors.
Stress is a heading
for a list of symptoms
such as sleep disturbance, feeling keyed-up, irritability, anger, poor
concentration, paranoia, gastro intestinal problems, nausea, anxiety,
panic,
exhaustion, burnout, depression, alcohol and drug abuse, etc (see
Figure 1a). If you
have any one of these symptoms or all
of these symptoms, then you are stressed (Sapolsky, 1994, Selye, 1984).
Another
sign of stress is when people say, “I think that I’m going crazy.” For
example, a client once
told me about her
irritability and sleep disturbance.
She
said that over the weeks of experiencing the bullying at work she just
got more
and more exhausted. But
every time she
put her head down to sleep at night, it popped up again. She just
couldn’t settle. The feeling of exhaustion
was getting to the
point where she thought that she was “going crazy.”
She said, “if only I could get a decent
night’s sleep, but I’m just too keyed-up.”
That client
wasn’t actually “going crazy” at all.
If
she were, she wouldn’t be saying that.
If she was going crazy, then she would be saying, “I
think that you (or other people)
are going crazy”.
A stressor, on the
other hand, is any
challenge, demand, threat, danger, hassles, change, loss, illness,
chronic
pain, etc. A
stressor will represent an
emergency of one sort or another (see Figure 1b).
 We have a
biological response for dealing with emergencies.
Usually
this event is referred to as the “fight or flight response”. Just
as a slight
diversion, some people refer
to “fight or flight or fright”. Or
some
people might say he is in either “fight” or “flight” as a response to a
stressor. These are
embellishments of
the original term; there is no need to mention “fright”. Whether you
actually
“fight” or “flight” or
“freeze” in the face of danger says nothing about stress. People who
use these
embellishments are
demonstrating their poor understanding of stress.
The term “fight or flight” is not a
description of behaviour, it is however a label for the sympathetic
response in the autonomic nervous system that changes
the body from neutrality to a state
of emergency. Fight
or flight mainly
denotes the release of adrenalin and cortisol.
These are the chemicals that our body produces to
deal with emergencies.
I keep away
from the term “fight or flight”. I
will
instead use the term “sympathetic response”, or I will use the metaphor
of the
“Emergency Button”. Let’s
just say, to
develop the “Button” metaphor that in our brain there is an Emergency
Button. We can say
that this is a brain
function. Your
perception of an emergency
is a mind function. The
Emergency Button
metaphor describes the mind-body connection (see Figure 1c). In other
words, The
Emergency Button is a
metaphor to describe the translation of mental activity into physical
actions. The
“mental activity” can be
conscious or subconscious images, ideas, or head-chatter that contains
the
meaning “emergency”. The
physical action
is the release of the adrenalin and cortisol.
Can you
tell the difference between your mind and your brain?
The kind of difference that makes sense to me
is this. If I want
to see your brain all
I need to do is drill a hole into your skull to peep inside to see your
brain. Your brain
is part of your body. If
I want to see your mind, I have to talk
with you. The
Emergency Button metaphor
describes the mind-body connection.
Getting on
The Emergency Button in response to a stressor is not necessarily a bad
thing. If you were
faced with real
danger then you would need the adrenalin to deal with the emergency.
The adrenalin gives your
muscles the ability
to burn energy quickly. It
is like
fanning the flames of a fire. Also,
your
body will need the cortisol for two reasons. One reason is to help
prevent
inflammation that could slow you down and secondly to provide the
muscles in use
with extra fuel.
So as a
mental exercise, imagine that you are crossing the road and you notice
a bus
coming at you. You
will hit the
Emergency Button and leap to the pavement.
Once you land on the pavement, hopefully you will
thank the fact that
you have an Emergency Button to hit in such emergencies. Hopefully you
will just
dust yourself off and
go about your business. If
you do this,
then your Emergency Button will pop back up and your adrenalin and
cortisol
levels will return to normal. There
will
be no stress.
An
emergency hopefully is brief with a distinct beginning, middle and end.
The “end” bit of an
emergency is often
referred to as “closure”. So
if you hit
The Emergency Button and you keep on hitting it, or you jam it in the
on-position, then stress will quite probably be the end result. By
maintaining a state of
emergency in our
body we eventually create stress.
Stress
will occur after a time of elevated levels of adrenalin and cortisol.
These emergency chemicals
are not meant to be
in our bodies at elevated levels for an extended period of time.
For
example, let’s say that you do leap out of the way from the bus. You
land on the pavement
and instead of just
dusting yourself off, you fire up the head-chatter about the bus driver
and his
incompetence (see Figure 1d)? “The
prick
tried to kill me,” you mutter to yourself.
 “What’s his
number?”
“Where did
he get his licence?”
“Is he
blind?”
“What’s the
bus company’s number?”
“I’m going
to write them a letter.”
“I’m going
to ring them up.”
“I’m going
to get that driver sacked.”
“Blah blah
blah.” On and on.
Head-chatter
emphatically and absolutely is not thinking.
Often, the internal dialogue, as in the example
above, is referred to as
“thinking”. This is
an inaccurate use of
the word. Thinking
is useful and will
lead to a useful adaptation, or resolution of the stressor. This
important point is
developed in the sessions
beyond.
With
head-chatter like this, and depending upon how much you keep it going
and to
what level you are prepared to take it, chances are that by the time
you get
home, you’ll have a headache. By
keeping
the head-chatter going perhaps you’ll have a disturbed sleep that
night. You might even have to
take the next day off,
call in sick.
Under the
heading for Stress in Figure 1a, note the symptoms of sleep
disturbance,
irritability, anxiety and panic. These
symptoms are obvious signs of elevated levels of adrenalin in your
body. Take the feeling of
anxiety/butterflies as an
example. How do you
feel anxiety? Where
do you feel it in your body? Chances
are that you feel it in your
gut. You might say
that you feel
nauseous or that you have a knot in your stomach.
Or you might say that you have a welling up
inside your chest. You
might say that
anxiety makes you feel tight in your chest.
You might notice that you hold your breath, the
baited breath. Or
you feel agitated or just uneasy.
These feelings are the presence of adrenalin
at elevated levels. What
you feel is the adrenalin. The anxiety
is your interpretation of that feeling.
Under
normal conditions, after getting on the Emergency Button, adrenalin is
quick to
release and quick to disperse. In
other
words, it’s released then it quickly goes away.
So for you to actually feel anxiety, you have
clearly gotten onto the
Emergency Button and stayed on it.
To
develop the metaphor even further I ask you, “What have you done to
your
Button? Have you
jammed it in the
on-position? Have
you hammered it
through the floor? Have
you nailed it
down? Have you
stacked a fridge on
it? Are you
continually banging on
it? Have you taken
a swan-dive on to
it? Are you sitting
on it?” I find that
individuals have their own ideas
about what they have done to their Emergency Button.
Elevated
levels of cortisol over time are far more damaging to our bodies than
we care
to imagine. As I
mentioned, cortisol is
an anti-inflammatory steroid. Many
people know about cortisone creams and injections.
These creams or injections are usually
medical treatments for inflammation of one kind or another. Cortisol is
produced by
our adrenal glands.
Cortisol at
elevated levels in our body over extended periods of time is quite
destructive
(Sapolsky, 1994, Selye, 1984). It
will
damage your immune system. It
will cause
a build-up of bad cholesterol in your body.
It will compromise your body’s ability to process
salt. All these
lead to long-term health
risks. But more
importantly, it will
muck around with your blood-sugar levels.
It can cause you to feel continuously exhausted and
drained of energy. Burnout
can be the final straw.
Cortisol is
a complex chemical and apart from its anti-inflammatory properties, it
will
proved fuel for muscles in use during the emergency. So if you’re
running like
the clappers from the lion, then your legs get the fuel. If, on the
other hand
you are sitting on your couch, stressed but doing nothing much, none of
your
muscles get the fuel. Your adrenalin is fanning the flames and burning
up the
fuel and it’s not being replaced.
Elevated
adrenalin and cortisol together lead to a strange feeling in our
bodies. On one hand we are ready
to go, because of
the adrenalin. On
the other hand we feel
exhausted, because the cortisol will only fuel active muscles. This is
the feeling of
being keyed-up. As
you are probably only too well aware, this
is a very uncomfortable feeling.
This
feeling of exhaustion can also lead to the development of depressive
behaviours
such as hiding away and withdrawal.
This
often develops further into avoidance behaviour as a coping strategy.
Avoidance as coping can
perpetuate and
maintain feelings of anxiety. Quite
often a person who is exhausted or keyed-up is saying “just leave me
alone, I
just don’t want to know”. Clinical
depression can then develop.
Ok, here’s
a question to see if you’ve been paying attention.
In Figure 1e, do stressors cause
stress?
It’s
tempting to answer “yes”. But
here’s a
thought experiment to do before you commit to an answer. Can you ever
eliminate
stressors from your
life (see Figure 1e)? That
is to say, can
you ever rid yourself of challenges, demands, threats, dangers,
hassles,
change, loss, illness, or even chronic pain if you have it? You might
like to think
that perhaps you can
avoid, escape, suppress, blame or deny your way out of some specific
examples
of some stressors. But
in reality, you
would know that we cannot eliminate stressors from our lives. Stressors
are life happening.
Can we
eliminate stress from our lives? Well
we’d hope so. It
certainly seems like a
good aim to have. It
may not be possible
in an absolute sense. But
why shouldn’t
we work on it. We
don’t need sleep
disturbance, feeling keyed-up, irritability, anger, poor concentration,
paranoia, gastro intestinal problems, nausea, anxiety, panic,
exhaustion,
burnout, depression, etc. We
don’t need
stress, so why not work on stress-reduction?
So there
cannot be a direct causal link between stressors and stress, because we
are
unable to eliminate stressors from our lives, and we are able to
significantly
reduce stress. This
is important to
understand. Stressors
are to be resolved
not eliminated, avoided, suppressed, denied, forgotten, etc.
What causes
stress-symptoms? Follow
the process seen
in the full Stress Model in Figure 1e.
- Stress-symptoms
are caused by having the emergency chemicals, adrenalin and cortisol,
in our bodies, at elevated levels, over an extended period of time.
That
is what causes
stress-symptoms.
- What
causes the
emergency chemicals to be in our bodies at elevated levels over an
extended period of time? To
develop the metaphor, “jamming the Emergency Button in the
on-position”, that’s what.
- What
“jams the
Emergency Button in the on-position”?
Head-chatter, that’s what.
- What
causes
head-chatter? Having
unresolved stressors
is what causes head-chatter.
Stress-symptoms
are caused by the Emergency Button’s continued use without giving your
body the
chance to recover. In
the case of the
bus story, if you allow your mind to drift into obsessional
head-chatter about
what might have happened, then your body will remain in a state of
emergency
and you will become stressed, you will suffer.
If you live your life like this, you will experience
stress-symptoms as
chronic anxiety and/or panic attacks, and/or depression, or as any of
the other
stress symptoms seen in Figure 1e.
The answer should be
clear by taking a good
look at Figure 1e. The
answer is in two
parts.
- One
is to work
on resolving stressors.
- The
other part
is to take control of the head-chatter.
It is true
that if you resolve your stressors, then the head-chatter will
evaporate. But we
need to be realistic here. It’s
probably the case that we will never
have all our stressors resolved at one time, so taking control of the
head-chatter is also essential. There
will always be stressors that are at different levels of resolution.
Not only that, there are
stressors that we
will not identify immediately. Some
stressors are not so obvious.
There are
two types of stressors, external
and internal.
External
stressors are the demands, threats, challenges, etc, that
come from the
issues
of living. Chronic
pain and illness are
in this category. In
other words,
external stressors require us to adapt in some way.
The good thing about external stressors is
that they are usually obvious and easily identified.
Internal
stressors
come from within. These
are our
unworkable/maladaptive beliefs that reside in our personality. In this
sense, we are our
worst enemy. Internal
stressors are our entrenched beliefs
and attitudes that are in conflict with the world around us. They are
too close for us
to see them without
help. It’s like not
being able to tell
the forest from the trees, because we don’t even know that we are one
of the
trees.
WARNING
For very serious psychological problems such as posttraumatic stress
disorder, specific phobias, addiction, conduct disorder, or personality
disorders, I strongly recommend that you seek out a local psychologist
to tackle those problems in face-to-face consultations. For serious
psychiatric disorders such as psychosis or bi-polar or schizophrenia
you will need to consult with a psychiatrist face-to-face about
suitable medication.
Byron Bay Psychologist 0266853219 |