Stress Management

Welcome to my Stress Less, Live More column. I’m bringing the column back after taking a few years off to serve on the Marco Island City Council.

The principles and practices recommended in this column are based on evidence-based research and practical application with thousands of students and clients over the past 30 years. My approach to managing stress revolves around my Five Rs of Coping Model, a multi-level defense system against stress. Each "R" in the model represents a different approach to coping with potential stressors. The Five R’s: Rethink, Relax, Release, Reduce, and Reorganize, can be used individually or in combination to provide a flexible system of coping with stress that can be used by anyone to combat any type of stressor.

In this first column, we’re going to start by taking a look at what stress really is and how to manage it. That’s right, manage it.

Unfortunately, as much as I’d like to tell you otherwise, you can’t eliminate stress because unexpected, potentially stressful events that are beyond your control crop up every day. Even in a paradise such as Marco Island, unexpected events ranging from getting stuck in traffic on your way to work to losing your lanai in a hurricane happen all the time and are beyond your control.

Since you can't completely control unexpected stressors, the best you can do is manage them. This is why the focus of this column will be on stress management, not stress elimination.

The first step in beginning to manage your stress is understanding what stress really is. Most stress management “experts” tend to define stress as either a stimulus (traffic, bills, etc.) or as a response (muscle tension, migraine headaches, etc.). Unfortunately, both of these definitions are sorely lacking because they leave out the role that your mind plays in understanding stress.

In fact, stress is a transaction that combines three things; (1) a potential stressor (the stimulus), (2) your self-talk (what your mind tells you about the potential stressor and your ability to cope with it) and (3) a response that kicks in if your mind tells you that you can't cope with the potential stressor.

Potential Stressor

A Potential Stressor is anything that threatens you or has caused you harm or loss. If something doesn’t cause you to experience threat, harm, or loss, it isn’t a potential stressor.

A threat is anticipatory. It involves something that hasn't happened yet. For example, imagine that your roof was damaged from a recent hurricane. Your roofer gives you an estimate of what it would cost to replace the roof and assures you that your Homeowner’s Insurance will cover it. You agree to have the work done, anticipating that you’ll only have to pay half of the estimated total cost of the replacement. You feel threatened by the unknown cost but still agree to get the roof fixed.

Harm or loss involves something that has already happened and has hurt you in some way. Using the same example, imagine that you went ahead and replaced your roof thinking that the insurance reimbursement would cover the estimated cost and you’ll get reimbursed for at least half of the entire amount. Instead, you just got a letter from your homeowner's insurance company telling you that they will not cover any of the reimbursement costs because you failed to have your lanai inspected last year as their coverage required.

To pay the bill, you have to use all of your emergency fund and take out a Home Equity Loan for the rest. This creates a severe financial loss and emotional harm.

Self-Talk

Your Self-Talk about your loss and harm, and your ability to cope with it determines whether or not your brain triggers a stress response. In your case, even though you were able to pay for a new roof, your mind tells you over and over again that you’ll never be able to recover from this loss and your entire future is ruined.

In reality, your income from your job and investments is more than adequate to pay off your loan and rebuild your savings in a few years, but your mind won’t allow you to see this. It constantly churns out worst-case scenarios that keep the loss at the forefront of your consciousness.

In other words, it isn’t the potential stressor (the unexpected roof-replacement bill) that triggers and prolongs your stress response. What fuels your stress response is your self-talk about the bill and your perceived inability to cope with paying it. This is a very important distinction because what your mind tells you (your perception) about the threat, harm, or loss, and your ability to cope with it isn't always accurate, rational, or helpful.

Stress Response

A Stress Response is a specific reaction that combines powerful hormones, salts, and sugars that jack up your blood pressure, get your heart racing, tense all of your major muscles, and give you energy to fight or flee. This is why it is often referred to as the Fight or Flight Response.

Once your mind says, “this is threatening and I can’t cope with it,” your brain instantly triggers the fight or flight response. This is a life-saving response to threat, and it has been with us as a species since the dawn of time. This response can save your life by literally fighting or fleeing from an imminent threat (like a mugger or a car swerving into your lane on the highway). Unfortunately, it also kicks in with threats like the roof repair bill.

While the fight or flight response is vital for our survival in the face of life-threatening stressors, being exposed to ongoing chronic, low-level stressors will trigger the same response. This continual stress response activation to low-level stressors can cause serious physical and mental health problems. Unfortunately, many of us are exposed to potentially chronic stressors such as failing relationships, financial pressures, contentious work relationships, and caring for aging parents. Inaccurate, illogical, and unhelpful thinking about such potential stressors can create a lot of unnecessary stress in your life by keeping your stress response alive long after the threat, harm, and loss associated with these events is gone.

Now for the good news about taking a three-dimensional view of stress.

The good news is that you can stop stress in its tracks by learning how to change the way you think about potential stressors and your ability to cope with them. Changing the way you think about potential stressors and your ability to cope with them can keep them from ever becoming actual stressors. This will stop your stress response dead in its tracks.

By understanding the people, places, and events that are your stress triggers, you can start to take steps to minimize your exposure to them. For example, you don’t have to waste your time with people and activities that are likely to stress you out. You can learn how to minimize your exposure to these potential stressors and spend your time in more productive and relaxing ways.

Lastly, you can also learn how to stop the stress response once it kicks in by learning how to put your body in a relaxed state that is incompatible with stress. Because it is physiologically impossible to be stressed and relaxed at the same time, putting your body in a relaxed state will cancel out the stress response.

As you learn these and other new coping strategies, your thinking about potential stressors and your ability to cope with them changes. You no longer feel like a victim, helpless in your battle against stress. You feel empowered, less threatened, and more able to cope.

In this column, I'll show you how to change the way you think about stress and improve your ability to cope. I'll share with you several different ways to minimize the amount of stress in your life and manage the rest. I’ll use information and activities taken from my college stress management textbook and series of six short books that I wrote that are based on the textbook.