Can We Give Stress A Break?
Let me guess, you are still trying to find ways to reduce stress, manage stress, or you just need to give stress a break. If this is you, play along with me for 5 minutes. Before reading on, act like you do not know that stress is bad. Act as if you know about stress, but it is not good nor bad.
Okay, you ready to play along now? Let’s go…
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Your boss just came into your office and asked you to help finish a project one of your co-workers wasn’t able to finish. Where does your mind go?
Your spouse calls you to ask if you are able to pickup the kids early from practice. Where does your mind go?
You get a notice in the mail about an unpaid bill that you had no knowledge about. Where does your mind go?
Stress Everyday
Everyone faces stressors everyday. The degree of stressors vary as well as do frequency. But one thing is for certain, we are triggered to stress continually. According to Dr. Joe Dispenza, author of Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself and You Are The Placebo, 70 percent of our waking life is in a stress response.
Stress is normal and our body’s reaction to stressors are normal. That is how human beings were made. Our bodies are filled with cocktails of hormones or drugs to help us survive, live, and thrive. Sometimes our body responds by helping us survive, sometimes to live normal lives, and other times thrive in our situations. Stressful responses can accomplish all three. However, stress has gotten a bad wrap.
Bad Rep of Stress Today
Many stressful responses manifest in the survival mode to protect us from, what our mind has categorized as, a threat. However, if the mind keeps replaying the threat situation, or story, the body’s stress response keeps shooting protecting hormones into our body and the stress stays too long in our system. In this scenario, the stress drugs will eventually cause physical and psychological problems because the stress drug level remains too high for too long.
Stress CAN be bad and this is primarily why it has gotten a bad wrap.
There is no denying the harm of lingering stress in our body, but only seeing this one side of stress is unfair to you and to stress itself. Stress is not as bad as society has made it out to be and recent research has attempted to change the reputation of stress.
Flipping Stress’ Bad Reputation
In 2013, Kelly McGonigal, a professor and researcher from Stanford University, presented a TED Talk entitled, How To Make Stress Your Friend, that has been viewed over 20 million times. Later in 2016, McGonigal published the book, The Upside of Stress. McGonigal was on a mission to help people understand that stress is not all bad, but has benefiting factors. Her countless research demonstrated the dominant, negative view of stress is not all accurate.
The stress label needs a break and people living in stress need a break.
While stress can harm people, it is only when the stress hormones exist too long in the body when it becomes harmful to the body. People are remaining stressed for too long. If those hormones, such as cortisol, exist in the body for short periods of time, they can strengthen people, help them memorize more, help get over traumatic events, and live more fulfilling lives. However, if we stay stressed by replaying the stressful event that we deem as a threat, we continually release the stress hormones and our body does not cope well with these hormones for long.
Stress’ Original Purpose
Stress was never meant to harm us. It was meant to bring our body back into normalcy. Hans Selye, the father of stress research, defined stress as, “a non-specific response of the body to a demand.” While this seems to paint a broad but accurate stroke of stress, there still is much-left unknown from this definition. In fact, psychologists and researchers have wrestled and debated the totality of stress over the years. Even more interesting, Hans Selye himself struggled with his own definition because of people’s interpretations of his definition.
But what we do know is that our body’s response to stressors was to counter the threat by releasing hormones to alleviate the stress by fighting the stressor or flighting the stressor and hence bringing life back to normalcy. As you encounter stressors and your body responds by releasing the hormones to counterbalance the threat you are perceiving, the aspiration of your body during stress is balance or normal. Stress is the fight to get back to normalcy.
The problem exists when your brain is still perceiving the threat of the situation far beyond the actual threat. Your brain cannot necessarily distinguish between whether you are in a threatening situation or you are replaying the stressful situation. Both scenarios will release the stress hormones and hence keep your body in a stress response state.
Give Stress A Break
You need a break from stress. It is time to allow stress to run its course in the moment and then release the stress in order to get back to normal. And the best way to accomplish this is by not replaying the threat of the stressor in your head where your body has to respond to the threat. You can replay the situation, but you must reinterpret the situation as no longer threatening and now a learning situation.
Stress in general needs the break of being the bad person. It is not. It has a role and the less we see the negative of stress, the more opportunity we will see the benefit of stress in our lives.
