How Stress Happens – Part 1

May 23, 2009 by Dr Dane
Filed under How Stress Happens

The purpose of this article is three-fold:

To give you some background on stress and it’s basic causes
To alert you to other causes which are not yet part of mainstream thinking
To offer empowering resources to assist you in reducing stress in your life, and optimizing your response to it

“The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat!”

Lily Tomlin

Stress seems ever-present in our lives today. Exploring the hidden nature of stress and its many causes can help us to recognize its signs and take more appropriate and effective action to restore balance in our lives.

While I don’t consider myself an expert on stress, I’ve learned a lot through my personal life experience, and through working with many people who were struggling with its effects. I’ll be sharing several important, but little-known, stress factors that could make a big difference for you or someone you love. I suggest that you simply take what works for you and leave the rest.

Some Conditions Caused by, or Worsened by Stress:

Pain
Heart disease
Digestive problems
Sleep problems
Depression
Obesity
Autoimmune diseases
Skin conditions, such as eczema

Your thoughts, beliefs and attitudes, traumas, and life experiences directly influence your biology. We know that stress and other psychological factors can have a major impact on your health. Now we understand that 95% of all illnesses are either caused by or worsened by stress.

The UltraMind Solution, by Mark Hyman, M.D.

What is Stress?

The term, “Stress” means different things to different people, and has multiple definitions which apply to various branches of science. In this article, I’m speaking about mental-emotional distress and the body’s response to it.

To begin, my basic definition of stress will be: “our mental, emotional or physical response to challenging events or situations in our lives.” Later, we’ll modify this to incorporate a new understanding.

Common Signs & Symptoms of Stress

Cognitive (Perceptual)
Memory impairment
Difficulty concentrating
Poor judgment
Seeing or focusing only on the negative
Anxious or racing thoughts
Constant worrying

Emotional
Moodiness
Irritability or short temper
Agitation, unable to relax
Feeling overwhelmed
Sense of loneliness and isolation
Depression or general unhappiness

Physical
Aches and pains
Diarrhea or constipation
Nausea, dizziness
Chest pain, rapid heartbeat
Loss of sex drive
Frequent colds or infections

Behavioral
Eating more or less than usual
Sleeping too much or too little
Isolating yourself from others
Procrastinating or neglecting responsibilities
Using alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs to relax
Nervous habits (e.g. nail biting, pacing)
Source: HelpGuide.org http://www.helpguide.org/mental/stress_signs.htm

What Causes Stress?

Stress is commonly thought to caused by external forces, such as our boss, spouse, mother-in-law, or the IRS. (Nobody mentions tigers much these days). We may feel overwhelmed or threatened by people or circumstances in our lives.

External factors are really just the tip of the iceberg – the superficial viewpoint. While not insignificant, they mostly act as “triggers” that set off our internal (and automatic) stress-making machinery.

In Part I, we’ll focus on how external events trigger the cascading stress response in our body.

In subsequent parts, we’ll explore the subtle network of thoughts, beliefs, perception, and chemical-nutritional influences that determine the nature of the interactive playing field where your game of life is played.

In turn, the nature of this playing field determines how the events in your life affect you in terms of stress. It can even determine whether a challenging life event brings you to your knees, or catapults you to a whole new way of being in the world.

At the end of each part, I’ll offer suggestions and other resources to assist you in your personal journey with stress in your life.

How Does Stress Work?

Episode 1 – Vacation in India
Let’s imagine you’re on vacation in India, walking along the edge of the jungle in a grassy area, daydreaming about that attractive person you met at the coconut stand this morning. Suddenly you see the proverbial Bengal tiger bounding through the grass, straight toward you and closing fast. Nah, that isn’t scary enough – let’s say it’s a real Bengal tiger! Most everyone would agree that this was a stressful situation, right?

In the milliseconds that follow, your subconscious mind transmits an urgent alert to your adrenal glands via your sympathetic nervous system (the fight or flight part) to release a healthy dose of adrenaline into your blood stream, pronto!

Slammed back into the present moment by the sight of the tiger, you feel the jolt of adrenaline coursing through your arteries. Your heart rate, blood pressure and respiration surge, and glucose is released into your blood as emergency fuel.

Blood flow diverts from your digestive tract to your muscles for drastic action. You experience a real-life “Oh, shit!” moment, as your bowel and bladder lighten their loads. Oops!

But you barely notice. Blood has also been diverted from your conscious, thinking cortex to your subconscious primitive brain stem for rapid, programmed survival instincts to take over.

Your next thought, if you can manage one, is likely to be, “RUN!!!” In fact, you discover your body is already running, having decided not to wait around for you to make up your mind.

And forget that romantic spiritual stuff about “becoming the tiger,” because you’re certifiably freaked out and running like you’ve never run before. In fact, you’ve never felt this strong before.

You sneak a glance backwards and see he’s only 20 feet away, bounding directly toward you. Realizing that running is hopeless, in a moment of bravery you stop to face him.

He’s right behind you, launching into a powerful leap with a heart-stopping roar . . . 500 pounds of muscle, fangs and claws are hurtling forward . . . you fall backward . . . as the 9 foot long tiger sails gracefully over your sprawling body and bounds off into the jungle in pursuit of that hot babe he spotted a minute ago!

You see, he wasn’t even hungry, having just eaten Ronald McDonald at the hamburger stand in the local village a little while ago. He was just looking for a party . . . but being a practical joker, he thought he’d give you a little thrill along the way.

Heart still racing, and body trembing, it takes you a few minutes to begin to calm down. You replay the “movie” in your mind, but that doesn’t help matters. So you stumble to your feet and head back to the village, casting furtive glances over your shoulder.

The mess in your pants gradually comes to conscious awareness, along with a strong urge for a beer, well, maybe a six-pack. At some point, it occurs to you that it might be a good idea to stop at your room and get cleaned up before going to the bar.

Sorry I had to put you through all that, but you know what they say, “Experience is the best teacher!” While probably not “up there” with an Indiana Jones movie, hopefully it gave you a better understanding of how your natural stress response was designed to work as a survival mechanism. Perhaps you even had a bonus chuckle or two.

Let’s rejoin our hero/heroine now, for a look at the type of stress most of us are familiar with . . .

Episode 2 – Back at the Office
Having had the “time of your life” in India, you’re relieved to touch down back home, far away from pesky tigers. Things are different here, in the concrete jungle.

It’s your first day back at work in the ad business, and you’re hoping it will take your mind off those recurrent nightmares of the tiger leaping at you. Before long, you get your wish, at least temporarily.

Your boss calls you into her office. She explains that business has been slowing down, and the president has decided to downsize the company. Twenty percent of the employees are being laid off. She pauses.

You feel a slightly nauseous as your gut turns over and a few drops of sweat drip from your armpits. Your palms feel moist, and you realize you’re holding your breath.

“We’d like you to stay,” she says, “But the hours will be longer, and for the same salary. You can think it over and let me know tomorrow.” She gives you a sheet with the details and ends the meeting.

Back at your cubicle, you find it hard to concentrate on your work. The knot in your stomach has eased, you’re no longer sweating, and you feel relieved, relatively speaking.

But you’re already working 50-hour weeks, which is putting a strain on your relationship. And the prospects of looking for a new job in a dismal market is no more appealing. “I should be grateful to have this job,” you tell yourself, but somehow you find it difficult to feel that way.

Your “inner critic” is giving you a lecture, letting you know in no uncertain terms that you’re a weakling, and don’t really deserve to keep your job anyway, nor your relationship for that matter . . . “Oh, shut up!” you mutter, as you reach for the phone to make an appointment with your therapist.

You’ve been at this job for nearly ten years now, with only two weeks off each year. You’re 36 years old, and feeling like 50. You’re already taking pills for blood pressure and cycling through alternating constipation and diarrhea. Not only that, but you’ve been loosing your sex drive, which isn’t helping the relationship, either.

You have to take a sleeping pill to get any rest that night, and wake up with a nasty headache. You decide to see your doctor, before anything else goes wrong.

Your doctor is very understanding, as he writes you a prescription for an increase in your blood pressure meds and some Valium, as needed. He tells you it’s “just stress,” and recommends that you “take it easy,” and to see your therapist on a regular basis for a while.

The pills relieve the intensity, but something still doesn’t feel right. You’re tired before you even get out of bed in the morning. You’ve taken to checking under the bed at night, to make sure the tiger isn’t there. Sometimes you feel a bit disappointed when you don’t see it – you’d almost prefer the tiger to this . . .

Epilogue

Yes, it’s a made-up story, to illustrate an important point and do a little teaching. You now have a sense of our built-in survival stress response. It’s designed to deal with dangerous situations we would commonly encounter in a more primitive world.

Wild animals still live like this every day, and so do we, in a way. Living in our concrete jungle instead of a natural one still exacts a heavy toll on our mind and body. The difference is that most of the stress in our modern world is much more subtle than a tiger leaping at you.

You can still encounter the concrete jungle’s equivalent of a hungry tiger, like a street gang, other human predators, or war. Most of us experience milder challenges on a frequent or constant basis. It “comes with the territory” of being a human on Planet Earth.

Instead of bam, you’re done, it’s the slow torture of constant pressure wearing us down. Some of us seem to have more than our share of pressure, and others less. It’s only a matter of degree.

Even though there is no tiger under our bed, our sensitive nervous system is perceiving danger, and acting accordingly. Our adrenal glands are still secreting stress hormones, and our body is following their orders. The results are not as obvious, but they are occurring to some degree in each of us, nonetheless.

Our unhappy hero/heroine is on teetering on the brink of adrenal exhaustion (or some other catastrophe), when our adrenal glands can no longer deal with the demands we place on them. When that occurs, we no longer have a choice. We have to rest, because there is not enough energy to do anything else.

How to Cook a Frog (or Stress a Human)
You’ve probably heard the story of the frog in a pot of water on the stove. I can’t imagine doing this experiment myself, but apparently someone did, and here’s what happens. If the water is heated slowly, the frog doesn’t notice until it’s too late, and it can no longer leap out of the pot!

The hapless frog can serve as a metaphor for you or I, and humanity as a whole. These are times of increasing personal, cultural and environmental stress. The complexity of our life and the extent of our commitments often increase gradually, and we adapt to the hotter water. If we’re paying attention, however, our cerebral cortex can grok (comprehend) the situation, and where it will likely lead us. With that awareness, we can choose one fork in the road, or the other:

We can choose to ignore the warning signs, and greatly increase our risk of winding up with one or more stress-related illnesses.
Or, we can wake up to the reality of our situation and make a course correction. We can start by taking better care of ourselves. I think it was Mark Victor Hansen who said, “If we don’t take time for health, we will eventually have to take time for disease.”

We don’t have be victims of stress. We have the power of choice. We can say “No” to certain things, and “Yes!” to others. When the choice is hard, it helps to remember what our choices are.

In the hundreds of choices we make every day, we are literally choosing between health and disease; life and death. But because so many of these choices are little ones, they seem trivial at the time.

“Disease starts out humbly in the body as some imperceptible imbalance, and proceeds slowly from there. The outcome of a full-blown disease may be devastating, but it has been built up through insignificant everyday actions.

What we eat and drink, how we behave, how our emotions affect us – these are small things. When they support well-being, we don’t give them a second thought.

But no action is lost on the body. We are always building. Every bite of food, every breath, every thought, is like laying a brick, even if we aren’t aware that we are building.”

Deepak Chopra, Return of the Rishi, pp 91-92

We often make crucial choices unconsciously, by default. This happens when we’re not aware that we even have a choice, or cannot see the path of possibilities before us.

We can make a commitment to “waking up,” to becoming aware of our choices, and where each choice will likely lead us. We can ask Spirit for clarity and guidance when we face tough choices. We can also ask for the strength to follow our heart and walk down the path we intuitively know is best for us.

Conscious choice is the most powerful tool we have to change our lives for the better, and it works on all levels. I consider it a Divine Gift, and I’m hoping you can see it that way, too.

Recommended article: The Art of Being Your Own Best Friend. It will help you in your choice-making!

How Stress Happens – Part 2 will continue where this leaves off. We’ll begin exploring the powerful hidden causes of stress: our thoughts and beliefs. I refer to them as “hidden causes” because they are rarely acknowledged as factors that contribute to our stress load. Please stay tuned!

To learn about an effective way to change subconscious limiting beliefs, see the short article on PSYCH-K.