Understand Your Stress

THE BASICS OF STRESS
Simply put, stress is a state of readiness. It is the mind’s and the body’s way of rising to an occasion and preparing you to do your best. Although the effects of too much stress can be debilitating, stress itself is a completely natural and necessary response, one experienced by all humans and animals. Stress is not—repeat, not—a mental illness. Just as people’s heights vary over a wide range from short to tall, people’s everyday stress levels vary over a wide range from relaxed to “stressed out.” Stress, no mater how extreme, will never make you “go crazy.” Stress is a natural occurrence and has a very useful function. Let’s say, for example, that you were going to be a contestant on a television quiz show. If you felt no stress at all, you may not prepare for the show, and as a result might do poorly.

If, however, you felt extremely stressed, you may be too nervous to study and could become confused and distracted when the cameras started rolling. But if you felt a mild amount of stress, you would prepare well in advance, concentrate beter,
and react faster when the questions were asked. Te physical and mental responses that constitute stress are useful if they happen occasionally and in moderation. But if they happen all the time, day in and day out, they can have unpleasant effects.

Experiencing a high level of stress for a long time can cause you to lose sleep, feel constantly fatigued, have trouble concentrating, and respond irritably to those around you. Long-term stress can also cause headaches, skin irritations, ulcers, diarrhea, and pains at the base of the jaw (temporomandibular joint [TMJ] syndrome). Stress can interfere with sexual function, inhibiting both desire and ability.

Research also shows that long-term stress may increase your chances of later
developing heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, or immune system problems.
Although this list may look intimidating, you should not add to your stress by worrying about health problems. Being highly stressed does not mean that you will get diseases, merely that you may increase your susceptibility over time. Clearly, reducing stress can have important benef ts, both mentally and physically

WHY AM I STRESSED?
If you are reading this book, you may be wondering why other people do not seem to be as stressed as you. Stress is not a disease, nor a sign of weakness. Feelings of stress come from a combination of two different sources: the world around you and your way of dealing with that world. Tese two sources, the environment and your personality, interact to produce your actual levels of stress. Sometimes your life can be f lled with so many stressful events that it is no wonder you feel overwhelmed. But stressful events are not enough. We all know of people who don’t seem to become fl ustered no mater how difcult the situation. Tese “cool customers” seem to have personalities that can deal with any situation, no mater how tough. On the other hand, there are some people
who seem to make “mountains out of molehills” no mater what the situation. For these people, no mater how small the event, it still seems that they will make themselves stressed. But personality is not the whole story. Different situations vary in how stress provoking they are. Te more difcult the situation, the more people you will f nd who become stressed and the more stressed these people become. So you can see that in any situation, the degree of stress you will feel depends on a combination of the type of event happening at the time (how stress provoking it is) and the way you respond to or deal with that event (your personality). Terefore, to change your stress levels, you can either change the world around you or change the way you respond to that world, or both. Surprisingly, it is ofen easier to change your own responses than to change what goes on around you. However, it is also quite ofen possible to do the later.

In this program, we will be teaching you to consider both parts of the stress response. In the f rst part of the program (Steps 2 through 5) we will teach you different ways of coping with the world around you—for example, modifying your personality. In the second part of the program (Steps 6 through 8), we will talk about ways in which you might actually change your environment to make it less challenging. Let’s discuss these sources of stress in more detail.

STRESSFUL ENVIRONMENTS
We all know that there are lots of things in our world that can make us stressed. Usually we think of the big things—losing a job, death of a partner, a serious car accident, or approaching deadlines.

True, these are all events that, when they occur, can make us very stressed. But we also need to remember what scientists call “daily hassles.” T ese are many of life’s more general, smaller events
Understand Your Stress 3
that are annoying, irritating, and unpleasant and can be an ongoing source of stress. Some examples of daily hassles might be heavy trafc on the way to work, an unpleasant work colleague, noise around the home, or an overdependent relative. In fact, because they are so common and tend to add up, daily hassles are ofen more of a problem for most of us than major life events. It is important also to remember that positive things can sometimes be stressful because of the negative aspects that go with them. For example, going on a vacation can actually be a major source of stress because of the organization and extra work you have to do to get away. Finally, the circumstances of our lives can be constant and ongoing sources of stress. Some of these are things we can’t do much about, such as being poor, having an abusive parent, or living in a high-crime area. Others
have a lot to do with our choices in life, such as trying to raise three children and have two jobs, working for a company that demands too much, or struggling to pay off that expensive vacation that you really couldn’t afford.

HANDLING OUR ENVIRONMENT
Te way we cope with stressful events like those described above is really a part of our personalities. As with any personality characteristic, your general stress level has two major components: genetics and environment. Researchers are still trying to pinpoint the exact genetic component to stress.

What is most likely is that there is no specif c stress gene. Rather, if you are a highly stressed person, you may have inherited a tendency to be generally emotional. In other words, you may f nd that you are more sensitive and generally emotional than many other people you know. On the negative side, this means that you will respond to challenges with higher levels of stress. But on the bright side, this tendency probably makes you a sensitive and caring individual. Te genetic factor, of course, only means that you may be predisposed to feeling stressed—it does not mean that stress is inevitable. Even if you have a genetic predisposition to stress, you can learn to manage it.

Much of your personality probably comes from your environment, from things that you have learned over the course of your life. Tese things may have been learned from your parents or from the circumstances and experiences of your life. Tese lessons vary from person to person, and we can’t necessarily describe them here. But we do know that people who feel high stress in a lot of situations tend to have two major beliefs:
1. Tey believe that their world is full of negatives.
2. Tey believe that they don’t have as much control as they would like over the negatives in their lives.
If you can identify with these beliefs, just remember that it took you a long time to learn them.

You are not going to unlearn them overnight. But with hard work and practice, your outlook can change.

We will not be looking into your past to try and determine what caused your original
tendency toward stress. You will not be expected to regress back to your childhood or to blame

FACING CHALLENGES
When you perceive a potential threat or challenge, your mind and body prepare you to deal with it. Te danger does not have to be real; anything you perceive as a threat or challenge triggers your body and mind to get ready. Actual physical threats are not the only trigger. Potential failure or ridicule is a major source of stress for most people.
Let’s consider an example. Imagine that you are walking home at night and your route takes you down a deserted lane. As soon as you enter the lane, you are on alert. Your mind and body are preparing themselves to take action in the event you are confronted with danger. Tough it may not be immediately apparent, the purpose of stress is to protect you. If a mugger suddenly jumped from the shadows in the lane, you would be physically ready to respond quickly. Te challenge of deadlines provides another common example. When you have an important report due in an hour and you haven’t f noshed it yet, you feel stress, in this case because of the potential failure that is involved if you don’t f knish the report. When your sister is coming to pick you up in a few minutes and your children are screaming and you haven’t had time to take a shower, you feel stress.
In both of these cases, the threat is not the deadline itself. It is the fear that you will fail and that someone important to you, your boss or your sister, will criticize you for letting them down.

 If you cared nothing about these people, you would not have these stressful feelings. But most of us do care; therefore, most of us would feel stress in similar situations. T is shows how the environment (approaching deadline) interacts with your personality (caring about your boss’s opinions) to produce your level of stress. Te closer the deadline, the higher your stress. In the same way, the more you care about your boss’s opinion, the higher your stress. Your f nal level of stress, then, will depend on a combination of the environment and your personality

THE STRESS RESPONSE SYSTEMS
Stress is a response to some sort of potential negative that we perceive in our environment. Te word “stress” is a broad, poorly def ned term that we use to refer to a large range of responses to negatives. When you perceive a situation as having some potential negatives, you atempt to deal with that situation and eliminate the negative. If you do this successfully, you feel positive emotions. But if the situation is beyond your ability to cope, you experience a range of negative reactions that are broadly labeled “stress.” Te various emotions you might experience include anger, anxiety, and depression. When you experience these feelings, your mind and body will react in
certain ways. Tese are described below

The Physical System
Te physical or physiological response system includes all the changes that take place in your body when you are stressed. Some of these changes can seem quite bizarre and frightening when they are unfamiliar. But rest assured that they are all natural, important, and, in the short term, harmless. However, if stress is maintained for long periods, your body’s immune system can begin to break down, leaving you more susceptible to developing diseases.
When you perceive or anticipate a threat, your brain sends messages to a section of your nerves called the autonomic nervous system. Tis system has two branches, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Simply stated, the sympathetic nervous system releases energy and gets the body primed for action. Later, the parasympathetic nervous system returns the body to a normal state.

Te sympathetic nervous system releases two chemicals, adrenalin and noradrenalin, from the adrenal glands on the kidneys. Fueled by these two chemicals, the activity of the sympathetic nervous system can continue for some time. Activity in the sympathetic nervous system makes your heart beat more rapidly and your blood fl ow much faster and differently. By tightening your blood vessels, your sympathetic nervous system directs blood away from places where it is not needed, such as skin, f ngers, and toes, and
moves it toward places where it is needed more, such as your arm and leg muscles. For this reason, when you experience extreme stress, your skin may look pale and your f ngers and toes tingle or become numb. Meanwhile, the value of this effect for your survival is that the blood fl ow has primed your large muscles for action.

Te rapid heart rate and fast breathing you experience when under stress help to provide more oxygen to your body. Although this is important for fast action, the change can make you feel as if you are choking or smothering, and may cause chest pains. In addition, the reduced blood supply to your head can make you feel dizzy or confused, causing blurred vision or a feeling of unreality.

Overall, stress affects most of the systems in your body. Tis process takes a lot of energy, which explains why you feel drained at the end of a stressful day. It is important to know, however, that your sympathetic nervous system cannot get “carried away” and leave you in a state of “high stress” indef nitely. Your body has two safeguards to prevent this. First, other chemicals in the body will eventually destroy the adrenalin and noradrenalin released by the sympathetic nervous system.

Second, the parasympathetic nervous system is a built-in protector. When your body has “had enough” of the stress response, the parasympathetic nervous system will kick in to restore a relaxed feeling. Tis may not happen as quickly as you would like, but it will happen. Your body will not allow your stress to keep increasing until you “explode.”
In addition to the effects on your autonomic nervous system, feeling stressed produces a release of chemicals from your pituitary gland (a small area at the base of the skull). Tese chemicals travel to another section of your adrenal gland to release various corticoids and steroids that help to reduce swelling and infl ammation. If stress is prolonged, the constant release of these chemicals can also produce some damage to your body (e.g., in the circulatory system) and make you more susceptible to disease.

Te physical responses that prepare you for action, as well as those involved in calming you down, are largely automatic. You cannot eliminate them altogether, nor would you want to. As we have said before, stress serves an important protective function. It can lead to greater accomplishment and even, under the right circumstances, be enjoyable. In the short term, stress is not harmful, and small amounts of stress can actually have some benef ts. But if you experience high levels of stress for long periods of your life, you may be more likely to have physical problems. Obviously, learning to control your stress is important for many reasons.

The Mental System
Your body is not alone in preparing for action when you face a challenge or threat. Your mind also gets into the act. Te major mental, or cognitive, response is to change your focus of atention. When you are under stress, you tend to scan the environment constantly, looking for signs of threat. On one hand, this shif in atention is useful; if danger exists, you will notice it quickly. On the other hand, you may feel easily distracted and unable to concentrate on any one thing.

As part of this scanning process, your mind considers all the possible outcomes of a threatening situation. In other words, you have a lot of anxious thoughts or, as most of us would put it, you worry. Worrying is one of the main characteristics of people under stress. A litle worrying is normal; everyone does it. Many of us worry about the same kinds of things. But people who are continually stressed have trouble turning off the worrying. Sometimes they even feel they need to worry, fearing the lack of worrying might be irresponsible. Try to avoid falling into this trap! Being responsible is an admirable goal. But if you have reached the point where the thoughts churning through your head are keeping you awake at night, worrying is not helpingyou.

In fact, it’s hurting you. We will be teaching you ways of controlling your worry later in this program. Let’s apply these components of the mental response to our example of walking through a dark lane. As you walked, you would literally be scanning, looking and listening for possible danger. If there were a sudden noise, even from a harmless stray cat, you would most likely jump. But if a mugger appeared, you would probably spot him quickly. T e worrying in this case might take the form of questions running through your mind: “Is he going to hurt me?” “Does he have friends around?” “Does he have a gun?” To some extent, this worrying is useful; it prepares you for the possibilities.
In the example of the late report, you would probably concentrate hard on the task at hand. In this situation, your focus would not be on scanning, but chances are you would still be worrying, asking yourself: “What if I don’t f nish on time?” “What will my boss say?” “What would I do if I lost this job?” T ese worries may be useful if they remind you of how important the task is.

But if the worries become so great that they interfere with your ability to f nish the report,
you may have started a vicious cycle. Worrying could make you miss the deadline, which would cause you to lose conf dence in yourself. Without conf dence, you may miss the  next deadline, and then you would feel even more stressed than you did before. Obviously, you do not want to let worrying go this far.

The Behavioral System…. Next article