Stress

It amazes me how little the average person understands about stress and that lack of understanding comes from a basic lack of understanding about who we are as human beings and how  we are made.




Stress isn't about what is happening around us as most of us think. Stress is MY BODY'S response to what is what is "changing" around me. Stress is my physical body's reaction to change. Stress is not bad; it just is our own body's way of dealing with change. Our body puts out  hormones from our adrenal glands sometimes called corticoid hormones which give the body a burst of energy to effectuate a change. When a person gets up out of bed in the morning, it takes energy to change from the prone, laying down position to the sitting up and then the standing position. The body releases energy in the form we often call adrenalin to energize the body to make a move, a change. This is what is called the "stress response."  It causes the blood vessels to constrict and increases the heart beat.




  When I drive down the highway and a car cuts in front of me suddenly, my body releases some of these hormones to allow me to make a "quick response." These responses always call out whatever my predominant "thinking" is in that  kind of situation.  For instance, if you grew up in snow country, you probably learned riding with your parents and then learning to drive, how to drive in snow, how to handle going into a skid.  It is the predominant thinking relating to driving in snow. I live on the West Coast and we don't develop those skills in our youth and our first response to any kind of situation is usually put the brakes on. The stress response pulls from our very basic survival techniques and what we have programmed in our minds as to how to respond.   That is why it is often called a survival mechanism.




The problem with the stress response is two fold. 




One, without adequate understanding of our own physiological and personal make up, we tend to see stress as a matter of "external stimulus" and get into what is appropriately called "victim status."  It upsets me, it makes me, which are both language we learned from our childhood and which we as parents enforced to get compliance with our expectations and standards. Do it or else!   Victim status increases our stress response because it puts us in an ongoing status of "survival" or "threat." So our body is in "high alert" mode ready to act at any moment. One of the problems with this is that the release of lots and lots of adrenalin overpowers the front lobe of our brain where we make rational decisions.  In survival mode, we aren't in need of thinking things through. When a deer runs in front of my car, it isn't the time to think about what kind of deer it is, is it overpopulated, will it decrease the populations too much if I hit it.  It is a time to make a "save my life" decision based on whatever "automatic" response I have programed whether knowingly or unknowingly.




Second..one of the problems with the stress response is that if we get into situations where there is one change upon another in a rather random pattern, we stay in "high alert" mode and our bodies never go back to "relaxation mode."  Anyone that has started a new job knows the stress of dealing with all new stuff...change after change after change. Then after a week or two we become accustomed to the changes and they begin to be anticipated at which time the body doesn't have to release so much adrenalin.  People can work in high change or what we call high stress enviroment and not have "stress issues" because they have learned to relax and take "change" as if it were normal.  I worked in a field where I dealt with a variety of issues and people throughout the day, changing regularly. However, if I had focused on how things changed everyday I would have been highly stressed out. I learned at least in the later years,however, to stay in a place of "rest", quietness in my inner man and move through what came to be "typical changes" without issue, most of the time!! In the field I was there were big changes, crises, and we knew after they were over, we felt like wrung out dishrags...our bodies had "sped up" to handle the changes and when the crisis was over, there was what we call "adrenalin let down."  And that is a healthy thing...it brings us back to the place where the blood pressure goes back to normal and the heart beat goes back to normal.  If however crises are continual and there is no relaxation period and the body doesn't get time to relax and be restored between changes, we get stress related medical issues.




I was in a high stress situation for 20 years and had no understanding of these things and as a result my doctor told me some years ago that my "stress response" is hair trigger sensitive. It has been overworked until it activates without any real change.  I was having major spikes in blood pressure while doing routine things that made no sense.  For me, once I recognized that and when I changed to a gluten free diet, things  in my body have changed.  It is to note that intolerance for Gluten itself will cause blood pressure spikes.




During a crisis, not only does our body increase the blood pressure to give us more energy (which is sort of stored in the blood) the heart beat is increased as it has to pump the blood that the increased blood pressure causes. In normal situations, if the blood pressure rises, the heart beat lowers to maintain the equilibrium of the system. Not so when under stress............or under the use of any kind of amphetamines or stimulants where both heart beat and blood pressure are elevated as if to prepare for a life threatening emergency.




I retired in 2013 and I love retirement. I didn't have many days sitting around home not doing anything because I had so much I wanted to do that I didn't do while working full time.  Was retirement stressful! Most definitely!  Was it bad? NO....Stress is about change and I changed from going to work 4-5 days a week and being gone about 12 hours a day to being home all day.  Now my days were full, but they were full of different things than I was used to. I started Zumba twice a week, I started painting, I worked in my garden....all things that were "changes."  Plus...my energy consistently went out to the pattern of life that I had established for 12 years. There was an empty hole there where what I used to do no longer existed. One can't fill up that empty hole with all the stuff that I did.  It is a grief and loss issue no matter how busy I stayed.  Grief and loss are about "change"...grief is what I feel when there is a loss or a change where energy went out to something and it no longer goes out there. One can't just change directions of ones energy flow. One has to reckon with the loss or one will find themselves  totally empty on the inside yet busy on the outside.  There was grief and loss issues when I retired though I loved and still love retirement. The people I talked with weren't there to talk with...and NOTHING can replace what isn't there. I had new people in my life but that doesn't deal with the energy going out to what was "yesterday" and which I was accustomed to.

Grief is a feeling based on my past experiences involving "change."  One experiences grief even when what changed is positive. And griefis one of the neatest of "uncomfortable feelings" in that it decreases everytime we feel it. The empty hole of loss fills up as we feel the grief of the loss.



I am sure every husband and wife love their first child...but the birth of that child involved a loss of their independence and a complete change in lifestyle. And as much as you welcomed it, it was still a change/loss and sometimes people don't recognize this. In these changes not only is there grief but the whole body has to accommodate to a different pattern and it takes the stress response to handle that change.  One of Newton's laws says something about a body that is in motion takes a force equal or greater than that motion to create a change.  And in the body, dealing with change involves the stress mechanism....whether the change is positive or negative in our estimation. It takes energy to deal with any change in my life...it is about me, my body effectualing the response to changes.



Stress is an important factor in our lives. Stress creates enough anxiety over change and in change that we adjust our behavior. The stress we feel of an uncoming test, or social event, prepares us, gives us energy to study for the test, or get things ready for the social event. Without the stress response, we'd  be stuck in the same position we started the day in all day long.  Learning that we as the human being with this human body are literally "in charge" of our stress responses, releases us from a lot of the guilt and shame from facing stress related issues, of denying stress and blaming people places and things.  

I am pushing 70. I still am aware of certain things from my past that activate my "survival" mechanism almost immediately. I am learning to understand these things and as I change my thinking about them, I have some measure of power over the stress response by coming to a place of acceptance and relaxation in my body.  Anxiety is a part of what we call "stress ailments"....and I used to find at at 5pm each day I would find myself stressed out, in a measure of anxiety and there was no present circumstances that was activating it. Instead it was a long established survival mechanism of gearing up for change around 5pm not knowing if the man of the house was coming home when he got off work at 5, if he was going to call and say that he was working late, or if I wouldn't hear from him and it would be later before he'd come in staggering drunk with who knows what consequences then to face. Years later when I recognized that anxiety would come up about 5pm I learned to address my thinking, speak forth the reality which I was living in in the now, which then solicited different emotions and my body then could relax. It took some time for this process to wipe out that anxiety pattern altogether but it began. The same thing activated when someone didn't show up when I expected them too. Suddenly I found myself irrationally anxious...and the stress response went into high gear. Again, I began to "see" that it was tied to my past experiences, change my thinking about the now that it wasn't the same, altered my emotions, and my body began to respond differently....again a process.



We are in a victim based society today therefore stress is very high and stress related illnesses are maxed out as is seen in the amount of antianxiety medications that are prescribed. Also, the end result of stress is burn out and depression. More and more people on the job are facing "burnout." One speaker on this subject told how he had so been filled with adrenalin, functioning at a high paced lifestyle that one day his body literally stopped...in  the middle of the 520 Bridge in Seattle and he couldn't move or drive his car and had to be extricated from his vehicle by emergency workers. His whole body had been drained by the demand that had been put on it, mainly by the stress mechanism, continually exhausting the energy supply of the body until it was drained.  Several years later, he was still having to take things to supplement his body to help repair the complete drain and exhausted supplies. He learned he  has to order his day very simply to be able to maintain his physical body in that state of relaxation as much as possible.



We are not going to escape Stress........it isn't about our circumstances as such. It is about our response to the changes in our circumstances and our attitude about them. The more we see our stress as about what is happening to us, the greater activation of the stress response we have....because I am a victim and that puts me into a survival mode.   My husband and I joke about being the victim because so much of our language and that of our society's is victim language which puts us into survival mode and increases our stress levels.  So for his birthday a year ago I got him a black T shirt that said I AM THE VICTIM!    For us it is a joke, something we can laugh about, and remind ourselves that we have a choice today and we don't have to operate out of victim mentality and have our stress levels activated unnecessarily. Life itself without our contributions brings us enough change.



Meri Ford