Stress Matters: It can be good for you if you know how to use it

Stress not.
Five ways to de-stress
Keep calm and be stress-free
Banish stress forever

Just reading these made me feel all stressed out. Don’t these headlines look and sound familiar? You bet they do. 

Each year as the month of April approaches (for the uninitiated, this month is supposed to be the Stress Awareness Month), the world and the media of course, doles out advice on how to keep your life stress free or how to completely banish stress from your life. 

You will be bombarded by articles on stress management and sent forwards on WhatsApp and Messenger and what have you, with well-meaning tips to get your life back on track. All this unsolicited help/advice can fall in an avalanche on you anytime, but mostly in this particular month because everybody wants to cash in on the ‘banish stress’ craze.

Come the month of May, and it’s a different story and a different agenda as the ‘stay stress-free’ advice dwindles a bit.
   
But honestly speaking, can you or I or anybody for that matter lead a stress-free life? It does sound ideal.  

A Utopian life where there is no angst, no pain, no grief, no hair-tearing moments or wanting to throw things around the house; but just peace and bliss and harmony and perfect happiness. 

All that is very well unless you consider the things one has to do in order to achieve that perfect life. It could range from online peddlers trying to sell you calming lavender oil, candles or jade stones for your home spa (yes, you’re supposed to create one the moment you’re stressed out?), chamomile tea or Rhodiola Rosea face masks or even new age Insta gurus telling you to plug in your earphones, no matter where you are and listen to some strange African or Indian beats that could actually get your heart rate pumping, forget calming.

But seriously, what would work for you? To de-stress?

Perhaps the sounds of pitter-patter on the roof or maybe a gushing waterfall? All this, even as you try to type an adequate response to some mean texts from a mean boss or deal with your better/worse half who is having a mental breakdown and the only thing you can do is tell yourself: I’m going to be okay as soon as I sign up for that de-stress Zumba workshop or maybe visit that neighbourhood meditation centre, for the inner peace to hit you, like a drag of marijuana?

Well, it wont work.

Because you may push stress to the back of your mind while you are indulging in those few minutes of ‘self-care’ and ‘love yourself,’ the larger-than-life stress is going to be back with a bang.

Simply because when there’s life, there’s stress and the two are synonymous with each other. Of course, temporary de-stressors can always help for that little while. 

But like they say, there’s always calm before the storm. And the storm will hit, not to mention that it may become a tsunami before you realise it, in your quest for a stress-free life as you wade through the million remedies to cut out stress, but you have your blinkers on.  

So, what's the next best thing?
I’d say, own your stress and make it work for you.

William James, American philosopher, historian, psychologist of the late 19th century and one of the leading thinkers of that era had this to say: The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

According to him, the mind has immense transformative powers. This train of thought is even more relevant today and our biggest ally as we wage a daily war with our multiple stressors that can mean anything from a relationship breakdown to a career debacle to managing finances to trying to keep people around us happy or even achieving career goals.

Stress need not viewed as exclusively negative. In fact, it can be a positive experience if we choose to look at it that way, by drawing into our inner reserves and calling forth our qualities of strength, courage and endurance in times of crises. 

The bad news is that stressors and anxiety can impact our organs, our nervous system, our guts, and our brains. Carrying stress around can make us more vulnerable to illnesses and infections or make our immune system hurt our cells. 

The good news is that we can control our reactions to stress (which by the way is the only thing in our control at that point of time) and how we alter our feelings towards stress. 

How do we do that?
By following the three important As.

1. Acknowledge: Mentally process your thoughts. See it, know it and feel it. Don’t wish it away. Just observe like an outsider to your mind, that you are getting stressed out. Tell yourself that you realise you are stressed. Do not deny it. That will mean shifting your thoughts from irrational fear to an amount of self-control. When you try to suppress feelings of stress by telling yourself and others that you are okay, it requires enormous mental pressure to subjugate your real thoughts instead of freely feeling.

2. Accept: Take a moment for yourself. There is no guilt or shame in accepting the condition we are in. Your stressors could be something small like feeling anxious about a social event that you don’t really want to go to or a little bigger like facing a partner with whom you’ve had a less than cordial breakup or thinking about the new changes in your office that you may not be comfortable with or even some drastic life changes like a divorce or a loved one’s illness. Know that the situation will not change if you don’t accept it.

3. Apply: Apply or use the stress that surrounds you as this third or most important step suggests. Leverage it to achieve your goals and also the things that you care about the most. So, if you are stressed out about an impending work presentation that’s not really your cup of tea, what do you do? You turn it around to make yourself a cup of coffee instead. 

Ah, just joking.   

But when you move out of that comfort zone and instead work harder to learn all those new things you were scared of; for one thing you’ve made it productive for yourself and the second, you’ve conquered your fear and made the stress work for your betterment. That presentation will be a success, fuelled by your positive thoughts instead of the 'stress' thoughts.   

Ok, now suppose you’re worried about a loved one who has just snapped ties with you and you cannot stop yourself from calling or checking up on them despite their rude behaviour. You feel sad, dishearted and stressed that they are behaving this way.
 
A better way to transform that stress to work for you would be to take one day at a time and believe people when they say they don’t need you. It works better when you use that to instead fix yourself. See a therapist, talk it out. You’ll realise that you are not to blame for their notions about you. And you’ll be the stronger for it.

Experts believe that true transformative change can occur only during stress or crises. That makes sense. How else would you progress, grow and evolve if you’ve never faced challenges in life.

Moderate levels of daily, manageable stress — also known as ‘eustress’ — may help protect against oxidative damage, which is linked to aging and disease, as a 2013 study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology tells us. Another article in Time magazine says that even though stress can feel overwhelming, it also forces people to problem-solve thereby building confidence and skills that can help in the future, according to Peter Vitaliano, professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the School of Medicine at the University of Washington 

An article in Science Daily, pegged on research done in the year 2022, at the University of Georgia says that some types of stress could be good for brain functioning and may help build resilience while reducing risk of mental illness. 

So, there you go.
In a nutshell, it’s not really the stress that’s bad; it’s our toxic relationship with stress that seems to be the problem. 

So, stress happens. We react. Fight, freeze or flight? 

I’d go for the fight. Always works.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)

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