The Stress Series: Part I
A few years ago it suddenly struck me how ‘normal’ it was for people to be stressed. Trendy even.
Everyone I knew was “so busy”, “so stressed out” surviving the everyday nature of their own, self-made lives. Society has become so conditioned to believe that you’re not worthy or successful unless you’re excelling at absolutely everything while operating at a million miles per hour and juggling too many balls in the air.
Despite its monosyllabic pronunciation, stress is a complex subject combining elements of biology, chemistry, physiology and multiple disciplines of psychology. The science around its incidence, impact, management and evolutionary significance is constantly evolving.
There is Eustress (good stress) and Distress (bad stress), both of which have implications for our state of being - from feeling invigorated, dedicated and effective, to becoming detached, overwhelmed, out of control and unable to gain traction on anything where perhaps it’s easier just to opt out than push on. In order to perform optimally, the science says we need a balance of both types of stress in our lives - just not so much distress that we start to become dysfunctional or unwell.
How, when and why you experience stress is entirely relative to your own biology, psychology, and life and personal experiences. It can’t be readily compared to anyone else’s.
The way your body reacts and responds to stress is highly evolved, adaptive and complex. Although the physiological mechanisms work the same across humans, the effects stress has on your body, mind and behaviour are again unique to you and occur as a result of:
your genes and hard-wired tolerance for stress;
your social and emotional support systems;
your personality;
your nutrition, fitness and lifestyle choices;
the baseline chronic stress load in your life - including incidental environmental exposures;
the pattern of acute stress in your life;
the constructive stress management or coping strategies you employ;
and perhaps most especially, your attitude towards stress - whether you view it is an adaptive and helpful biological mechanism or a crippling, destructive emotion to be brushed under the carpet and avoided at all costs.
As well as the causal factors determining when, why and how stress affects you, your experience of stress has consequences for your physical health, psychology and physiology.
For some people, stress is still far too taboo to speak of - they are frantic beneath the surface while their exterior appears calm and in control. For others, it is more overtly expressed and perhaps too easily observable.
Either way, stress can lead to burnout and chronic illness. It has the potential to ruin lives, relationships and livelihoods.
The good news is, there is already enough science about stress to give us a solid understanding of how best to proactively and reactively manage the inevitable.
The key thing to remember is that you can never avoid it or remove it altogether, but you can gain better control over your reactions and take active steps to recalibrate towards eustress when distress begins to take over.
Like all of your LifeWork, you can create real impact by first reflecting and building awareness about your relationship with stress, and then making lots of small, incremental changes to your personal habits and attitude towards it over time.
However, doing something to help with your stress once won’t have a meaningful impact - there’s no pill to take or silver bullet to rid it - but doing a little bit towards it every day will eventually accumulate into something meaningful and tangible. Helping with the now while also better setting you up for the future.
As a first step, Kelly McGonigal’s 2013 TED talk is a very well-spent 14 minutes of your life - consider it today’s LifeWork. We recommend you find a window to squeeze it in… over lunch perhaps?
Follow us to keep pace with the rest of our Stress Series so we can provide you with entirely practical, science-based hacks for rebalancing stress in your life.
