Many of us suffer from stress or overwhelm. The pressure is on as we face an increased workload, deadlines, competition, and challenging relationships and expectations to live up to. The economic climate is tough, our teenagers suffer from anxiety and depression, our aged parents have health issues, and the world is changing so fast that we can barely keep track of it all. There are addictions, hormone challenges with menopause and peri-menopause, mid-life crises, interest rates, recession, and wars... It's no wonder our health and mental wellbeing is pushed to its limit.
Let's explore what stress is and its impact on our well-being.
What is stress?
Stress is a physical, mental, or emotional response to external or internal demands that exceed an individual's perceived ability to cope. It can be triggered by various factors, such as workload, relationships, or personal challenges, and can have both positive and negative effects. Put another way, stress is the body and mind's response to any pressure that disrupts normal balance. It's an automatic reaction and begins with a trigger or stressor.
The stressor becomes a negative trigger when something threatens your emotional and physical status quo. It can be external from something you see, hear, feel, taste, or touch. Or, it can be internal, from a thought stored in your memory. It can be both internal and external. Even if it originated externally, it becomes internal because everything you experience through your senses becomes part of a thought. A negative trigger or toxic stressor is activated by fear, so fear is the root of stress.
Good stress
We know that some stress is good for us. It is called eustress. Good stress is a positive force that helps you grow, adapt, and thrive. It’s the kind of stress that challenges you just enough to push you forward without overwhelming you. Recognizing and harnessing eustress can enhance well-being, success, and personal fulfillment.
Eustress stimulates motivation and energy, pushing you to take action, meet deadlines, and achieve goals. Eustress can improve performance by sharpening focus and lead to peak performance in sports, work projects, or even public speaking. It can also be protective if you have to suddenly get out of danger or defend yourself from imminent attack. It can create a sense of excitement, and enthusiasm about tasks and challenges.
Encountering and overcoming challenges that cause eustress can build confidence and resilience.
It can lead to personal development by encouraging you to step out of your comfort zone and grow.
Bad Stress
Eustress causes short bursts of adrenaline and corticosteroids to flood the body, stimulating the release of glucose in the blood to provide muscles and nerves with energy. It's perfectly acceptable and manageable as long as it doesn’t last for too long. If your body stays under a constant barrage of stressful stimulation, toxic waste begins to build up, and eustress turns into bad stress or distress. If left unmanaged, it eventually leads to chronic stress or toxic stress.
Ugly Stress
Your body functions on thousands of biochemical feedback loops. These are necessary for homeostasis, the chemical and metabolic balance needed for your body to work properly. Toxic stress disrupts homeostasis. Too much adrenaline and cortisol can be toxic to the body and eventually lead to tension headaches, muscle tension, pinched nerves, memory issues, high blood pressure, weight gain, and elevated levels of triglycerides, cholesterol and blood glucose. The longer it goes on, the worse you end up feeling.
The disruption in homeostasis makes you feel anxious, depressed, and lethargic, with general aches and pain all over. Your immune system is compromised, your thinking becomes foggy, you feel tense, and your creativity hits rock bottom. It's ugly...
So, what do we do about it?
The bad stress starts with fear that something is out of control. ''Am I in trouble? Have I messed up? Am I at risk of loss? Is this more than I can cope with?'' This feeling of being out of control or threatened may not reflect the truth of the situation.
The best thing you can do for yourself is pause, and ask instead, ''Can I handle this? How do I handle this?'' By shifting into logical and analytical thinking you move from a reactive state to a proactive state.
It's dangerous to allow your feelings or emotions to rule you as they mix fact and fiction. By allowing negative thoughts and their attached emotions to run wild, stress becomes toxic - and goes from good, to bad, to ugly.
According to the American Institute of Stress, between 75-90% of all visits to primary-care physicians result from stress-related disorders.
You can control your emotions with wisdom and rational thinking. You are not your thoughts. You can choose which thoughts stay and which thoughts go. By choosing your thoughts, you control how stress impacts your mental, emotional, and physical well-being.
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