A Courtesy of HP
Stress is a normal, life-preserving instinct that has allowed human beings to survive for thousands of years. But too much of anything is harmful. You can't escape stress, but you can learn to harness it. In this course you'll learn the LifePACT -- four practical principles that can help you replace old habits, inoculate yourself against stress and take charge of your life.
Lesson 1: Stress: you can't live without it
At times, stress can be your guardian angel, and at other times it's your worst enemy. But there's no magic bullet for eliminating stress. In this lesson, you'll come to understand the attributes and impact of stress, including how to acquire habits that moderate its effects.
What is Stress?
Stress saved a client's grandpa's life (Story told by the client)
He lived on a farm in a home without an indoor toilet. One night, he put on his slippers and set out through the darkness for the outhouse, which was some 10 yards from the house. As he fumbled with the latch on the outhouse door, he felt what he thought was the tail of one of the many housecats brushing back and forth against his bare leg. Then something totally unexpected happened. The cat's tail started to rattle. Grandpa was standing on the head of a rattlesnake! But not for long, believe you me.
In an instant, his entire body was three feet off the ground. When he came back down, he sprang back up a second time and many more times until he was all the way back in the safety of his bedroom. Being bit by a rattler at that hour in that remote part of Texas would probably have been fatal. But stress energized my grandfather, saving his life by sending him leaping through the darkness.
Chances are that stress has also saved your life a time or two. But then again, it may also be killing you.
That's the paradox of stress. Sometimes, it can save a life. As when some careless driver cuts across your lane and you slam on your brakes. Or when your three-year-old daughter loses her balance on the monkey bars and you dive under her to break the fall. At moments like this, stress is your guardian angel. But at other times it's your worst enemy. When it takes over too often, when it stays too long, when it is too intense, stress can be an overwhelmingly destructive force.
A fact of life
There's no magic bullet for eliminating stress. There's no patch you can wear, no tonic you can drink, and no shot you can take. In other words, you can't live without it. On the other hand, you can't live very comfortably when it's your constant companion. The key to dealing with stress is learning to live life in the middle -- to acquire the habits of moderating stress.
This course will teach you to harness the positive attributes of stress so that it can actually become a dependable friend, one that will never turn on you. Also, in the next five lessons, you will learn about the LifePACT model: a system that helps you define your principles for lifestyle management so you can maximize the benefits of stress while mitigating its costs. By managing your mind, hands, and heart, you'll achieve a honed body and spirit that act as one, enabling you to master your emotions. In Lessons 7 and 8, we'll see how to put everything we've learned in this course together and apply stress management techniques to everyday situations.
Now let's look at some of the symptoms and behaviors that accompany excessive stress.
You know you're stressed out when . . .
Your behavior will tell you when you're overly stressed. You might notice the quality or quantity of your work starting to slide. Perhaps you find yourself unwilling to deal constructively with conflict, or withdrawing from social contact. You might notice yourself displaying an apathetic attitude, or backbiting, or nitpicking. You may also find your personal grooming starting to slip as well.
Your emotions can also tell you when you're too stressed. You might have feelings of bitterness, depression, gloom, anxiety, guilt, or worthlessness. Or you might just feel empty emotionally.
Your body will let you know with headaches, backaches, upset stomachs, or a sense of disorientation. You'll notice weariness, tiredness, irritability, and a loss of energy.
And your thoughts will let you know. You might find yourself thinking, "I hate this job" or "I hate my boss"
"What's the use? I don't care anyway. People are so stupid, uncaring, and hypocritical." "What's wrong with me? Am I having a nervous breakdown? I can't relax. Something bad is going to happen. The future is so hopeless. Nobody appreciates me." Or simply: "This is terrible. I can't stand it anymore."
The story of stress is composed of both an inside and an outside part. As we'll see next, the outside part of stress is all the hassles in our little world that upset us.
Stress from the outside
The classes of hassles
It is literally impossible to get through even a single day without encountering one or more of the endless varieties of hassles.
As you read through the following list, think about an average day and how these hassles, commonly called stressors, may be reducing your enjoyment of life.
Emotional hassles
This category includes the fears and anxieties we struggle with. For example: Can we prevent nuclear war? What if I run out of gas? How am I going to pay the light bill?
Family hassles
Interactions with family members can be stressful: The striving of teenagers for independence, a spouse who drinks too much, in-laws visiting.
Social hassles
Our interaction with other people: Asking a person for a date, expressing anger at another's behavior, giving or going to a party.
Change hassles
There's a limit to the amount of change we can comfortably sustain before something becomes a hassle: Leaving a job, buying a house, moving to a new city. You may be able to handle one or even two changes at once, but the third could send you spinning.
Work hassles
Whether you work in an office or from home, you'll experience work-related stresses like asking for a raise, rushing to meet deadlines, or cleaning tracked-in mud off the floor for the fourth time in one day.
Commuting hassles
This is the category of unpleasant life events like the stress of discourteous or reckless drivers that occurs in rush hour traffic. It also includes the hassles of air, bus, or train travel.
Decision hassles
Making decisions, especially regarding important issues or when there is no perfect solution to a problem, can drive you bananas: Should I have the surgical procedure now or wait? Should my aged parent be institutionalized? Should I get a divorce?
Pain hassles
Pain stressors are the aches and pains of new and old injuries, or of ongoing medical conditions like a sore tooth, migraine headaches, and PMS. Chronic pain and discomfort can lead to social isolation and depression.
Environmental hassles
This category of stressors includes aspects of our surroundings that are often unavoidable: Smoke-filled rooms, cramped offices, the glare of the sun, or the cold of winter.
The first step toward managing your stress is to identify the external events that set you off. And now that you can recognize the day-to-day categories of life's hassles and that you're not alone in combating them, let's peer into the inner part of the story of stress. This discussion will give you a better understanding of why stress affects you in the way it does.
How you react to stress
Our society rewards people who deal with stress by working harder and faster to produce more in a shorter time. But all of us respond to stress differently, and many of us are incapable of handling it productively. Go to the Message Board and discuss with your classmates some of the methods you've used to combat stress in the past. Which one worked best? Which one or ones didn't work? Why?
Your tool to less hassle
One of the greatest stressors is feeling like we have to remember a million pieces of information. Take the pressure off yourself by storing your contacts, calendar, and to-do list in your HP handheld PC
The inside story
What happens within you as your body copes with these external hassles is indeed the inside story of stress. When my grandfather performed his gazelle imitation all the way back to the farmhouse, it wasn't a well-thought-out plan. Rationality wasn't involved at all. Something very primitive intervened. Another side of his humanness stepped forward and said, "I'll handle this." Immediately, a series of changes was set in motion: an instinctive process that started in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus mobilized glands and immediately affected respiration and muscle groups. In an instant his entire body reacted to the danger of the rattlesnake.
This marvelous capacity for self-preservation comes at a price. I once saw a bumper sticker that read "I brake for the heck of it." That's a good way to wear out a perfectly good set of brakes. In the same way, getting stressed too often is a good way to wear your body out. Preparing to fight when somebody in front of you has one too many items for the grocery express lane, or allowing your blood pressure to skyrocket because you can't stand the thought of facing another day at work -- these are misuses of a perfectly good survival instinct.
Next, let's lay the foundation for the LifePACT model I mentioned earlier by taking a look at the anatomy of stress.
The anatomy of stress
Imagine this:
It's 2:00 in the morning on a Sunday. The police have just delivered one of your children to your doorstep. There was a car accident. The driver, your child's friend, was drunk and the police found several bottles of liquor in the car as well as some drugs. The police have just left the house. Since no one was seriously injured and it was a first offense, the police agree to take no legal action . . . this time. Now that they have left, the only thing left for you and your child to do is "have a talk."
This situation is full of stress, plain and simple. If you have ever been in a situation like this as a parent, you may recall how confused you were by your feelings, thoughts, and impulses to act. You wanted to do something; you felt compelled to take some kind of action. But the decision of what to do had gone to some type of internal committee, and the members of that committee couldn't agree.
Your body wanted to take action now. Your emotions were bouncing from feelings of relief to feelings of betrayal to feelings of shame and guilt and back to anger, round and round, over and over again. And above this fray, there was the voice of rationality saying, "Take it easy. No one got hurt. Stay calm. Do the right thing." Who's in charge here, anyway? A fundamental aspect of learning to deal with stress is by understanding its components. So let's now disassemble this real-life drama and see if we can identify the separate pieces.
How would you react?
The difference between sympathy and empathy is infinitesimal yet immense. Can you relate to all aspects of the incidents on this page? On a scale of 1 to 10, how upset would you be if you were the parent? How upset would you be if you were the child? How would you feel if you were the police officer? Bringing your sympathy as close to empathy as possible will enable you to improve your ability to manage stress.
The structure of stress episodes
While all stress episodes are unique in their particular circumstances, they all have a similar structure. For instance, every episode of stress begins with a trigger. In the above incident, the trigger is the arrival at your doorstep of a member of the local police department. That event sets in motion a chain of other events. Things happen very fast when you're in a stressful situation. Although it's difficult to ferret out the sequence of what follows, most experts say that the trigger then stimulates the resident translator in your mind.
The resident translator looks at the details of the trigger, quickly sizes them up, and interprets what is happening as crisis, non-crisis, or somewhere in between. How the translator labels the situation determines the intensity of stress or, more precisely, the extent of physiological changes in your body triggered by the event. Your stress reactions can range from "not upset" to "mildly upset" to "totally blown away." The intensity of the physiological changes determines what happens in yet another link in the sequence of events: behavior.
Your behavior is the action you take to discharge the stress brought about by the translator's labeling of the trigger, which happens in an instant. Before you know it, you find yourself completely confused. Your heart is pounding, and you don't know what to do. You can avoid this confusion by recognizing that an episode of stress is composed of these separate pieces. Knowing this, you are able to tinker with each of the separate pieces until you can take charge of the stressful situation.
Considering the trigger
For instance, consider the trigger. Are there any steps you can take to undo the policeman-on-the-porch problem? No. He's there, and so is your child. But what about the spin you are putting on this situation? Your first take might be, "My God, this is the end of the world. My kid is an addict! I can't believe she would betray me like this! After all I've . . ." In other words, you send the message to the rest of you, "Catastrophe! Major train wreck!" And in an instant your entire body is mobilized for a panicked reaction.
But there is another course things could take. What if, in mid-sentence, you intercepted your initial translator and interjected a less extreme perception on the situation? What if you had developed the capacity to think, "Slow down, everyone, let's get our responses together. Let's get some facts first." Now the message to your body is not full mobilization but a more reasonable "Stand by."
What if, in addition to moderating your thoughts, you also had the presence of mind to take three slow deep breaths? Slow, deep breathing goes directly to the core of the stress and puts the brakes on runaway feelings. The trigger itself hasn't gone away, but the situation no longer seems like a total emergency. In addition to this, the bodily reactions (stress) have been tempered with relaxing breathing. You were on your way to a 10 on the stress barometer but, by taking charge of your thoughts and feelings, now you're only at a 6 or 7. You're not indifferent -- you are still upset. But you're not overwhelmed by the situation. You have managed the situation by managing yourself.
Let's now add one more element to the mix. Imagine saying to the officer in a calm steady voice, "I am so relieved to see no one is hurt. Thank you, Officer." It doesn't matter that you don't feel calm. Acting calm sends yet another message to the primitive side of you that things are under control.
Moving forward
No one is an expert at taking charge of runaway thoughts, feelings, and behavior. It is absolutely normal to muddle your way through all the ups and downs that come your way. It is important to understand that managing stress does not mean eliminating stress. You can't do that -- nor should you even want to. Stress can be your ally. Stress is nature's way of sheltering you from the unpredictable mishaps of life. By understanding the anatomy of a stress reaction, you can see more clearly the choices available to you.
Your successful completion of this course will not result in the total eradication of stress from your life. You will see that success is achieved by regulating your behavior so that you're not overreacting to certain situations. The key is matching your stress response to the demands of the situation, a skill that you can sharpen with practice. In the next lesson, we'll take a more in-depth look at managing stress, including an introduction and discussion of the LifePACT model of stress management.
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