Stress: You can handle it (Part 1)

This article is reprinted with permission from herbalist expert Steven Horne.

Life is filled with challenges, conflicts, problems, and sometimes hardships and tragedies. Some of these are personal, others involve major world events, the news of which can create stressful feelings. For example, in recent years there has been a global pandemic, food shortages, rising cost of living, multiple wars, and a range of natural disasters.

It’s important to learn how to deal with the stress you feel over world events and your own personal challenges because chronic stress adversely affects your health. Feeling stressed interferes with digestive function and can lead to indigestion, gastritis, constipation, or diarrhea. Stress also creates muscle tension, which can cause various types of pain, such as back pain, neck pain, and headaches. Stress increases heart rate and blood pressure and is a contributing factor in heart disease. It depresses immune function, which leaves you more susceptible to infections and illness. It may also be a contributing factor in diseases like cancer and dementia.

The good news is that all of these health risks can be reduced or even eliminated by learning better stress management skills. That’s because stress is not just about what happens; it’s also about how you react to it. So, in this article, we’ll be exploring what stress is and how you can respond to it in healthier ways.

Understanding Stress

Stress is rooted in the fear response. Anything you perceive as frightening will trigger a stress reaction. When you perceive something dangerous, your brain sends a chemical message to the pituitary gland via the hypothalamus to release adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH). This stimulates the adrenal glands to release the hormones cortisol and adrenaline into the bloodstream.

Adrenaline is also the neurotransmitter in the sympathetic nervous system called epinephrine. Adrenaline/epinephrine is what causes the rush when something is startling or frightening.

This stress response isn’t meant to cause harm. Rather, it’s designed to help you survive. It primes the body for action so that you can escape the danger, fight back against the threat, or react in other ways that can save you in life-threatening emergencies.

Some stress is actually exciting. It’s why people go to amusement parks, engage in extreme sports, or watch horror movies. A good challenge triggers a mild stress response that provides energy to deal with the situation. This positive stress, which helps you feel focused and motivated, is known as eustress. It is distress that we want to minimize. Distress is the negative stress that you experience in situations when you don’t feel able to handle the situation. This chronic distress is what leads to feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and eventually exhausted.

Learning how to manage stress

Stress management involves learning and applying skills that will help you turn unhealthy distress into positive eustress. It’s kind of like adjusting the stress volume to a comfortable level. The expression “turning stumbling blocks into stepping stones,” is another way of viewing this process. An obstacle in your path can either trip you up or can be used as an opportunity for personal growth and development.

Perhaps the best way to think about this process is to compare stress management to exercise. Regular exercise puts a eustress on the muscles that causes them to become stronger. However, if you hurt yourself trying to perform a task your muscles aren’t conditioned to handle, you can experience a distressing injury.

It works the same way with the things that cause stress. If you exercise your stress management muscles regularly, you can increase your ability to handle life’s difficulties without having them negatively impact your health. But, if you’re mentally, emotionally, and spiritually out of shape, these same events can cause harmful distress.

There are many stress management skills you can learn. As you practice these skills you’ll find yourself able to handle life’s challenges. To get started here are two of the most important skills to start practicing.

Practice Calming Down

An important aspect of the fear reaction or stress response is that it can temporarily shut down your rational thought processes. This helps you react instinctively to the current situation without overthinking. These instinctive reactions include getting angry and fighting, running away, or freezing to avoid attention. These responses work well if you’re facing a wild animal, but they don’t work very well if the source of stress is an unexpected bill, an IRS notice, or watching some bad news.

For example, getting angry and arguing with a bill collector or IRS agent is likely to make the situation worse, not better. And it’s not going to help to yell at your TV or computer screen or take your anger out on the people close to you.

Likewise, running away won’t help. While you can physically run away from some problems, it is much easier to run away emotionally by turning to distracting habits. For instance, spending hours playing video games, watching videos, or scrolling through social media are all ways to emotionally distance yourself so you don’t have to think about or face what is causing stress. People also run away by drinking or using drugs. But none of these escape behaviors relieve the cause of the stress.

So, when something is causing you distress, you need to ask yourself, “Am I in any immediate physical danger?” If not, you need to practice calming down and engaging your rational brain, so you can act on the situation rather than reacting to it.

The easiest way to do this is with deep breathing. Stop whatever you are doing and start to consciously slow down your breathing. As you breathe deeply, you can also start a process of autosuggestion. For instance, you can think, “I am relaxed,” or “Everything will be OK,” or “I’ll get through this.”

You can give yourself a hug, wrap your arms around your shoulder and give yourself a squeeze. It may also help to allow yourself to shake or tremble to discharge the tension in your body. Once you feel more calm and relaxed, you can move to the next step.

Do Something Constructive

Remember that the stress response is priming you for action. So, one big stress management skill is to learn to take action when you feel stressed. It’s important to calm down and think first so your actions will be constructive, but doing something, particularly something physical, will put the energy created by the stress response to positive use.

So, once you calm down take a piece of paper and start writing down constructive actions you can take to help you deal with whatever is distressing you. Then pick one and start doing it.

Remember that all problems, no matter how big, are solved by many small steps, taken one day at a time. Taking these actions, even small ones, will exercise your stress management skills.

If the problem is one that you can’t do anything about, such as news of a tragedy or problem in the world, then make a list of things you can do to take better care of yourself. For example, you can take a walk to clear your head or decide to eat healthier food or take some supplements that help your body deal with the stress so you’ll be better equipped to handle it.

We will get into some more ways to help your body handle stress next week.

 

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash