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Creative
Ways to Transform Challenges: How to Live a Stress Free Life,
Get Healthier, and Become More Resilient Dr. Hans Selye, the physician
who conducted the pioneering research about “biological stress,” apologized
after he retired for making a serious mistake. In his autobiography he
confessed that “stress” was the wrong term. He said he should have called his
research findings the “strain syndrome.” The wide-spread belief
about jobs having harmful stress is an artificial, “consensus reality.”
Articles, books, and workshops about stress, while well-intentioned, sustain an
illusion that something called “stress” is constantly assaulting and harming
us. The difference in
meaning between stress and strain is an example of how our minds can put up
barriers or build bridges to resiliency. What most people call stress is really
an internal, physical feeling of anxiety or strain that they don’t like. This
is not just semantics. Stress is the external pressure, strain is the internal
effect. One consequence of
false beliefs about stress is that many employees have been misled into blaming
their working conditions for their feelings of distress and do not try to
develop resiliency strengths. Your ability to hold up under pressure is
strengthened when you understand that unpleasant strains experienced at work or
in your private life are your personal, subjective reactions. In a high-pressure
job you can choose to cope well with the strains and work with strength, or you
can allow yourself to react like a weak, helpless victim. The ability of our
minds to observe what is happening and then create choices for effective
responding is what makes humans different from animals and makes modern humans
different from their ancestors. Our minds and attitudes can convert threats
into challenges that energize us in healthy ways. Selye studied the
physiology of “being sick.” He described a living creature’s physiological
responses to sustained, biologically overtaxing demands as a three-stage
General Adaptation Syndrome: the Alarm
Reaction, the Stage of Resistance and the Stage of Exhaustion. The Alarm Reaction is
our emergency alert system. It is the fight or flight response that helped our
ancestors survive in hostile environments where predators or enemies might
approach unnoticed and suddenly attack. When you feel anger or
fright, hormones from the adrenal glands instantly prepare your body for
emergency action. Your blood sugar becomes elevated and your heart rate speeds
up to pump blood to your muscles for instant fighting or a short burst of
running. Your red blood cells become “sticky” to increase clotting if you are
wounded. The pupils in your eyes widen, you breathe harder and faster, and you
perspire. At the same time, the activities of the parasympathetic nervous
system, the “repair and heal” system, are suppressed. Immune-system functions
decrease and digestion slows down. When people feel
constantly threatened, angry, or anxious, their sympathetic nervous system
keeps them in an agitated condition of emergency arousal. If sympathetic
nervous system arousal continues unabated for weeks and months, diseases of
adaptation develop—high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, bleeding
ulcers, and cancer—leading to eventual death, if not reversed. Events may trigger an
emergency response and always should. We need to have a physiological emergency
response for getting us out of a burning building or carrying a child through
floodwaters. But in modern life the fight or flight biological heritage that
saved our ancestors is shortening lives. Researchers in The challenge for us in
a rapidly changing, fast-paced world is to learn how to intersperse periods of
sympathetic nervous system arousal with periods of parasympathetic, repairing
and healing activities. To remain healthy, your body needs times when your
heart rate slows down, digestive processes increase, and the complex activities
of your immune system increase. Parasympathetic activity is a physiological
process that can be influenced indirectly, but not directly. It functions best
when you leave it alone and allow it to work without your conscious efforts. The new science of resiliency psychology
shows that: • You can increase your resiliency when you
free your mind from the cultural illusion of “stress.” • People differ in their perceptions,
attitudes, and explanations about their circumstances. Less resilient people
experience their work environment as hostile and harmful. More resilient people
in the same work environment, experience it as a safe and enjoyable. • As biological creatures we have automatic
reflexes to perceived threats that trigger sympathetic nervous system
responses. By knowing this and seeing why it is useful to understand your
inborn, survival biology, you can observe what triggers your emergency alarm
reactions. You can ask yourself why you feel threatened, and decide to accept
responsibility for your reactions. The more you know about mind-body
interactions, the more you can consciously choose to act in ways that sustain
your health and energy. • People differ in how much emotional and
physiological strain is optimal. Some thrive in high levels of pressure and
strain that would cause heart attacks, ulcers, and illnesses in others. Some
people function best in low-pressure, tranquil circumstances that would be
distressingly unstimulating and boring for others. • Good health isn’t something you have to
chase or work hard to develop. Good health is what you enjoy when you live in
ways that don’t harm your body, and allow your body time to repair and heal.
Long periods of emergency alert, autonomic nervous-system arousal can lead to
serious health problems if not interspersed with time for the parasympathetic nervous
system to do its repairing and healing. People differ in which activities are
most useful for them. • People differ in how much they feel able to
take action to create an optimal environment for themselves. Some people who
feel distressed by their circumstances do not believe that personal effort
could make anything better. Others feel personally responsible for how well
their lives go. They know that they have some control over events and how they
respond to events. • When you live an optimal strain life-style,
you free yourself from feeling vulnerable to “stress.” © Copyright 2006,
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