Stress management

What is stress?

Stress was a term used in the 1950s by Hans Selye to describe a condition in which patients failed to cope with adverse life events. Resulting in medically unexplained problems like fatigue, muscular pain, gut disorders and headaches. Later on this list was extended by other writers to include mental health issues such as anxiety, insomnia and panic disorder.

It is likely that ‘stress’ is a mistranslation from the original German in which Selye wrote, and that he was merely referring to bodily distress: changes in the adrenal glands, gut, heart and immune system that occurred as individuals failed to cope with life changes. After a while the body starts to fail, unable to support the increased load.

As the meaning of ‘stress’ has changed over the past seventy years it has become an over-used term to describe the suffering that people go through when they cannot cope. Leading first to frustration, and then on from there to anxiety disorders, burnout, depression or physical illness.

The causes of stress

‘Stress’ has now become a vague reference, meaning little more than a group of distressing mental and physical symptoms. Moreover, individuals vary greatly in the way they adapt to adverse life events, from physical breakdown to a complete absence of symptoms. For those reasons it it is impossible to assign a one-to–one causal relationship between life events and stress symptoms.

However, it is possible to list a number of sources for distressed reactions. These include:

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The skills of resilience

In a series of articles I wrote on resilience two years ago, I listed nine habits I observed in the resilient people I have met.

1. Resilient people tell it the way it is
2. Resilient people have solid boundaries
3. Resilient people exercise mind control
4. Resilient people know what to do with their emotions
5. Resilient people are hard realists
6. Resilient people practice self-renewal
7. Resilient people spend time with resilient people
8. Resilient people take ownership
9. Resilient people are (mostly) spiritual people

Doing all these things enable people to weather adversity, and to shine as they overcome it. Resilience being the art of doing just that.

In this article I describe the most important skill of all: non-attachment to thought. It is related to No. 3 in the list above and, also in a surprising way, to No. 9.

The inability to practice thought defusion is a principal reason why the other habits fail to take root. When you are overwhelmed with worry, you forget about your options and possibilities.

The basis for non-resilience

The opposite of resilience is fragility. Non-resilient people are not able to hold up under trouble; instead they get panicky, overwhelmed, or stressed. Or else they avoid dealing with their trouble (which makes things worse in the long run).

In my thirty-two years as a psychotherapist I find that the most common reason for non-resilience is that people listen to the wrong thoughts, and then fuse with them. Anxious people fuse with anxious thoughts, depressed people fuse with depressing thoughts, and stressed people fuse with thoughts that make their problem worse than it has to be.

The capacity for thought is intrinsic to being human. In fact all our experience is created in thought, and by thought. Your experience of this article (including your feelings about it) is entirely conditioned by the thoughts you bring to it, and the thoughts you listen to on reading it.

In the same way, your painful memories are made painful by the thoughts you have about your past. Your future expectations (good or bad) are made-up thoughts. Your self-judgments are created in thought. So, too, are the judgments you make about other people. Your personal experiences are saturated by your thoughts. So much so that most of your experiences are really a waking dream created through your ego.

Looking more deeply still, the very idea of the self (i.e your ego) is created in thought. By the ideas you carry around about yourself in your head, by the thoughts you use to define yourself, and the thought-driven cravings you cling on to: status, success, love, control, or self-righteousness.  When the ego defines itself in terms of limitation: failure, weakness, rejection, etc., then non-resilience is the inevitable result.

Examples of non-resilience in everyday life

Do you recognise yourself in any of these experiences?

It’s your first day at your new job, and you worry that you might lose it before you’ve even started, because your last position ended in redundancy. You spend a sleepless night fretting about whether you’ll be good enough, or whether you’ll fit in with the organisation. On the way to work in the morning you wonder whether you should just turn around and go home. Your thoughts about failure seem overwhelming.

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