 Wherever I go, the topic of stress is an increasingly critical and hot topic these days! And you know what? It's not going to get much better as we move more and more into this "economic crunch" on top of the permanent insecurity created by 9.11. If you just lift your eyes from the page and think about it, you can feel the crunch, right?
NOTE: If my name sounds familiar, you're right. I used to run around the country doing a workshop at Holiday Inns (and other places ;‑) titled, "Birth, Death, and Other Minor Annoyances."
AND: I have also done a lot of organizational consulting, including some Fortune 100 and 500 companies, with an appropriately hysterical workshop for manic middle managers titled, "A Crash Course in Stress Management."
So, we must launch a counterattack with tools, techniques, and right understanding. Let's level that playing field! That's the purpose of this series of monographs: To take our lives back! Plus we want to always have fun.
[By the way, if you think having fun while discussing stress management is inappropriate, then you are definitely reading the right monograph!]
Dedication
To: –
The most important symbol is the "–"
A tombstone has two dates separated by the "–" representing your life.
It should be a lot more than a dash.
This article series is dedicated to your having a fulfilling, fun and meaningful journey.
Stress Tips
Vocabulary
You and I need a common language to maintain our clarity of communication, so let's agree on some vocabulary:
Stressor: anything, positive or negative, which urges you to make an adjustment or change from what you are currently doing.
Note that I said positive or negative. Stressors often come in the form of good news as well as in the form of the evening news. In the city where I formerly lived a fellow won the lottery for over $110,000,000. The stories on how profoundly this changed his life — and not always for the better — are well known around there.
Vacations, supposedly designed to relieve stress, actually provide their own unique variety of stressors. Why? Because by definition vacations ask you to make
adjustments. The demand to make adjustments is the stressor. This also explains why boredom is a stressor, since it literally begs you to make adjustments: "Jeez,
do something different, will you?!"
It is important to note that stressors vary from person to person, and this alone can cause many disagreements. The volume on my stereo was not a stressor for me
but it certainly was for my Mom — even through a closed door! Those unique events or attributes that irritate (or thrill) us show up as just part of that thing we like to call personality.
For example, our "pet peeves" are individualized irritating stressors:
- I don't like the sound of silverware on teeth — you may have never noticed that in your life.
- You are very put off by the appearance of our property when the garage door is left open — I could care less.
- I never balance my checkbook — you are uncomfortable if you don't balance yours as soon as the monthly statement arrives.
Stress: a reaction to a stressor.
It is very important to remember that your reaction to a stressor is mental/emotional/physical all at the same time, every time, whether you are consciously aware of it or not. Unawareness of this fact explains how stress can sneak up on you with illness, cancer, heart attacks and other nasty little surprises. Usually it is gradual and you merely get accustomed to it until — BOOM! — the final results are in.
Distress: damage to the system.
That's you! You are a system — actually a number of systems: circulatory; excretory; reproductive; digestive; neurological; muscular, skeletal, lymphatic; respiratory; and, immune. Any and all of these systems are affected adversely by ineffective stress management. So are your emotions. So is your mind. In this series, we will regard your mental, emotional, and social systems as not only as tangible as the physiological subsystems mentioned above, but actually the commanders of them.
In any particular individual exactly which system will distress, how it distresses, and when it distresses is a mystery. It seems a choice made by one's nature, and will unfold automatically until someone or something intervenes.
Intervention: providing different choices.
Remember this for later, or sooner as the case may be, because stress management is all about deliberate self-intervention - making a conscious choice to modify or influence the current path being followed. Humankind is probably the only species capable of becoming adept at this skill.
Common Signs of Distress
When your cup runneth over with too many stressors (and how much constitutes too many is, again, unique to each person) or you have too few tools, skills or
choices to handle the stressors that are appearing, you enter doors with the sign DISTRESS above them. These stressors multiplied until your attention comes around are feedback that intervention is called for. Ignore the signs and here are some of the price tags:
Physical: headaches; ulcers and other digestive problems; hypertension; fever blisters; backaches; insomnia; certain forms of cancer; chronic fatigue.
Emotional: persistent depression; persistent frustration; persistent anxiety; persistent impatience; persistent loneliness; persistent boredom (the feeling you feel when you won't/can't feel your feelings).
Mental: self-rejection; loss of creativity in problem-solving and decision-making; dissociation (splitting off from yourself); insecurity; procrastination; hyper-criticalness; obsessive thoughts.
Behavioral: compulsive habits; chronic interpersonal conflicts; chronic complaining; withdrawal from relationships.
Wow! How can all these maladies come from something so common as that little thing we all experience called stress? Let's learn a little more, then you will clearly see why and how it happens.
Never forget that knowledge is power. So? Well, being "stressed up with no place to go" is all about being powerless to handle something effectively. The more knowledge you have the more effective you will be. Therefore, it is important for you to grasp in a big way the knowledge that follows.
The Stress Cycle
Humans are supposed to be homeostatic, meaning: in a balanced state. This balanced state is maintained by responding to feedback in the form of sensory input from the environment. The occurrence of a stressor in your life sends you into an alarm state signifying that a decision may be needed to self-correct the imbalance. The pause while one contemplates (or avoids) the decision places you in a state of resistance. This state of resistance is physical (muscle tension), emotional (negative feelings), and mental (a cognitive "make-wrong" judgment).
The longer you stay in a state of negative-resistance, or avoid making a decision as to what to do about a particular stressor, the higher your chances for distress, or damage to one of your personal systems.
Overstaying your time in resistance/negativity/indecision will lead to exhaustion or "burn-out." To make a decision to unhealthily adapt (a few of the limitless examples are smoking, drinking, workaholism, temper tantrums, overeating, etc.) will also result in exhaustion. [Exhaustion, unfortunately, makes itself so very convenient with a front as well as a back door!]
The goal is to make wise adaptations so that you can have a happy and healthy life. If, however: a) Your life-teachers (parents/grandparents/preachers/educators/caregivers) failed, out of their own ignorance or absence, to teach you appropriate healthy adaptive tools and skills; and/or, b) at the opportune moment you were incapable of lesson absorption for some reason or another, then you are set up for "burn-out" sooner or later.
Usually it is sooner because life keeps making demands whether you have healthy stress management tools or not. This means that a person will more often than not utilize whatever is handy, including unhealthy, compulsive and ineffective habituated patterns of response to demands for change. Why? Because bad breath is better than no breath at all.
Anthony S. Dallmann-Jones, Ph.D. is a professor of graduate educational psychology at Marian University, and author of The Essential Guide to Living A Stress Free Life — Personal Rejuvenation for the New Millennium. Available at amazon.com or directly through this site.
Dr. Zest makes his home in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in the country on a river, and on Marco Island, Florida, on the ocean.
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