The different elements in situations and circumstances that make us suffer from stress are referred to as ‘stressors´. They are found everywhere: in relationships, the family, the street, at work, and even in one’s own mind, that is, as much in the external environment as within us. They all have the same effect: they activate the basic biological stress reaction.
What scientists call the basic biological stress reaction is a part of our survival instinct and its function is to help us survive any danger that threatens our life. Placed in a life-or-death situation it is absolutely necessary to become stressed because if not, we would die. To survive that kind of situations we have two options: to fight or flee. Both require the mobilization of the large muscles of our extremities. The brain, on perceiving the threat, sends a message of danger to the supra-renal glands, which begin to secrete greater quantities of the stress hormones adrenalin, noradrenalin and cortisol. In raising their level in the blood, the body automatically produces all the necessary changes to give more strength to the muscles in order to make the flight or flee reaction possible. Among these changes are an increase in blood sugar levels, blood pressures and heartbeat, deeper and faster breathing and a redistribution of the blood towards the extremities. Without these reactions none of us would be here now; we would have been extinct as a species a long time ago.
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE STRESS
Adrenalin is therefore something positive and necessary. Today, however, rather than helping us face life-threatening dangers, the stress reaction can be a source of the energy, motivation and enthusiasm that are necessary to achieve many things. But our body is built to manage and withstand the stress reaction in an intermittent way, that is, in short intervals. If the reaction continues for too long, the same thing will happen as when we turn off our car with the headlights on: the battery goes flat - or in our case - we become exhausted and get sick.
According to the Law of Balance, anything positive carried to its extreme of excess or privation turns into something negative that creates suffering. The same thing happens with stress. In an adequate dose it is positive, but when it is exaggerated it becomes harmful. Negative stress is therefore nothing more than an overdose of positive stress. (The reverse effect is also possible, but not very common: negative stress because of a total lack of pressure).
THE DIFFICULTIES
The art of managing stress is in theory very simple: to know how to deactivate the adrenalin reaction when it is not needed. This is done with physical exercise, relaxation techniques, moments of recreation and a more or less balanced life. Sound simple, doesn´t it?
The great difficulty that we have, however, is that we almost never relax, we often sacrifice opportunities of recreation because of work commitments and in our lifestyle the lack of relaxation and physical exercise is the norm, as well as a poorly balanced diet, an excessive attention to the material and a lack of emotional and spiritual satisfaction. We live as if we were permanently fighting with some threat or escaping from some danger, which keeps the survival instinct activated at its maximum all the time. This is what harms us.
Why do we live and work as if life itself represents a threat?
THE INTERPRETATION OF REALITY
What is important to understand is that it isn’t the situations, but our way of perceiving them that creates the problem. That means that it isn’t other people or circumstances which cause stress but we ourselves and our perception of them. The fact that we feel stressed almost all the time means that for some reason we feel permanently threatened. Anything at all makes us mobilize the cardio-vascular, respiratory, nervous and muscular systems unnecessarily. It is as if we are fighting a ferocious tiger all the time or escaping permanently from some sort of life-threatening situation. But if that isn’t the reality, why do we get stressed so often? If in most stress situations our life is not at risk, then why is our body constantly interpreting it that way?
The answer is simple. We are permanently misinterpreting reality. We are perceiving threats that don’t exist. But we aren’t doing that on purpose. It stems from our unconscious perceptions and the automatic reactions of our reptilian brain which on receiving the warning of danger, activates the instinctive reaction immediately, without asking if the threat is real or not.
The question that we need to answer is this: why do we perceive non-existent threats? The answer is: because a lot of our reactions are automatic or conditioned responses to reality. We are programmed to get stressed continuosly. Let’s look at what I am talking about.
THE CONDITIONING
The unconscious perceptions of threats are not an intellectual, but an emotional problem. They originate in the early experiences in life. The greater the lack of affection and the stronger the demands were on the part of adults in the first ten years of our life, the more insecurity and fear we will feel towards life in general and certain stressors in particular as adults. For example, if our parents showed little or no affection and at the same time were very demanding, and/or if a very military upbringing style was applied to us, we are as a result unconsciously programmed to satisfy everybody, because as children we learned to win affection with obedience, submission and good results at school. Because of receiving this conditional love, we learned that the way to be loved is to please everybody, so now that we are grown up, any situation that implies the ‘danger’ of being rejected by others because of not satisfying their expectations, induces a strong stress reaction.
This mistaken perception of danger occurs especially towards those we consider to be authorities; our boss at work, for example. The organizational cultures of permanent urgency, that predominate in so many companies, have been created by individuals socialized by conditional love, in many cases reinforced by an autocratic and hostile leadership style. What we call the culture of fear is a collective expression of the emotional insecurity of each individual. The exaggerated fear of making mistakes, of getting bad marks or failing exams or of being fired from a job is what makes us work in a flood of adrenalin, although the elevated level of stress hormones is unnecessary for the tasks that we are performing.
And what is the threat? It is what we felt every time our parents got angry with us when we were children. Back then, the anger or rejection was perceived as a life-and-death situation, because as children, we instinctively knew that if we didn’t receive a minimum amount of recognition, we would die, regardless of whether we were well fed or not. (There are documented cases of well-nourished children who died because of lack of affection).
Our boss’s anger or bad marks at the university are not going to kill us. Neither is great muscular force required when we make a mistake or when there are urgent things to be done at work. So most of the time, the one that is frightened by different stressors is not our rational adult, but what psychologists call our inner child. As long as we do nothing to become aware of or eliminate the unconscious fears of this child, they will continue to influence the way in which we perceive reality as adults and create unnecessary amounts of stress all the time.
For the ones of you that are ready to work on your emotional memory and heal your inner child to reduce stress by eliminating unconscious fears, there are many excellent therapeutic techniques. However, there are many things we can do in order to better manage stress without having to go through emotional therapy. In the next post we shall talk more about that.
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