What is stress? Stress is made up of stressful thoughts and images in the mind, a rush of adrenaline, and corresponding sensations and tensions in the body. Anxiety and fear are other words for stress. Fear is as natural and healthy a response as the pain we feel when we put our hand in the fire.
Fear is a useful message that says: “Danger! Pay attention! Take care!” The question is, is there a real (immanent) danger, or is it an imaginary danger, like the thought, “I won’t be able to do it all,” and the feeling that something horrible will happen if I don’t?
Usually when we talk about stress management, we mean ways to get rid of or reduce tension or fear. The only way to reduce fear is to feel safe again. Fear/stress activates our fight/flight/freeze response so that we can become safe again.
But what happens when we can’t find our way back to safety, as in our fear of not completing our dissertations or getting our degrees? or the fear of losing our loved ones; or the fear of losing health, etc.? We stay in the fight/flight response longer than is healthy for our bodies, so they start to shut down to conserve energy. This manifests as tiredness, fatigue, lack of energy, loss of motivation, or depression.
To feel safe again in the face of failure and loss, we can come to accept them as inevitable in life and realize that while they are uncomfortable and painful, they are not dangerous. We have all survived both. They are like an injury or illness from which we heal.
I remember the quote from at the will of the body by Arthur Frank, paraphrasing: “Whenever we get sick or injured on some level, we fear our death, but we recover from each injury or illness until we find the one from which we do not recover.”
This leads directly to our inevitable existential fear of death, which we too successfully deny (see The denial of death by Ernest Becker), but of which we are inevitably and frequently reminded.
There is a saying that “FEAR can mean one of two things: Forget everything and run, or face everything and get up. We can spend the rest of our lives running, distracting, and avoiding, or we can find the courage to face our fears and rise above.” above them to do what we love and live our lives fully until we die. We can choose. Only one of them qualifies as self-care.
Kelly McGonigal found research showing that stress is not bad for us. What is bad for us is the belief that it is bad for us. The people who died from stress were only those who believed stress was bad for them (see her TED talk https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend)
To summarize, the drive to manage stress is probably always motivated by our fear and resistance to our stress, which only increases our stress. It is not stress that needs to be managed, but our response to stress.
When we respond to stress by simply acknowledging, allowing, and accepting it, we are turning off the sympathetic nervous system (fight/flight) and activating our parasympathetic nervous system (calming us back). We could call this “permission to be stressed.”
When I first found out about this, I told myself, “I have to be as stressed as I need to be for as long as I need to be,” to counter years of messages telling me I shouldn’t be stressed. , I didn’t have to be stressed and get over it. Facing stress with acceptance is self-compassion and is the first step towards our long-awaited calm. This is self-care in the face of stress.
