Is stress a choice?
“I’m so stressed.”
“This is so stressful.”
These phrases, spoken frequently today are often taken at face value. Yes, you may have a lot going on in your life. Yes, you may have a giant project at work. Yes, you may have gained a few extra pounds dealing with all of this, and your body just doesn’t feel like home to you anymore.
Life is full of choices. Is stress one of them?
To answer the question, we must first define stress.
The World Health Organization (WHO) states that stress is a “natural human response that prompts us to address challenges and threats in our lives.”
Stress is your body’s response to anything that requires attention or action.
When the body is “stressed,” the sympathetic nervous system is activated. This is that well-known fight/flight/freeze response, activated by the proverbial tiger prowling behind the tree. Your adrenals dump cortisol and epinephrine, hormones that give the body an extra boost to do something, anything that will get you out of this situation.
These are physiological results from stress.
But… what if we didn’t actually see the tiger behind the tree? Or maybe the tiger was actually stalking a deer just to the left of you, and had no interest the crazy bipedal creature meandering in the forest.
In the first case, our bodies wouldn’t react at all. In the second case (if we even saw the tiger in the first place), we’d get an initial reaction but it would get turned off much faster than if the tiger were actually chasing us.
Why?
Because the origin, the root cause, of your stress is entirely psychological.
Stress comes from the mind.
Taking the tiger for example, our acute stress response is (healthfully, helpfully) activated because we think the tiger is going to attack us.
If the tiger turned out to be nothing more than a squirrel skittering through the underbrush, we likely wouldn’t have the same reaction. Why? Because we don’t think the squirrel will attack us. In fact (if you’re anything like me), you may think it’s cute.
These are simple, cut and dry scenarios that make sense to our animal brains, and a great example of acute stress: the one hit wonder type of scenario.
The trouble is, we’re finding more and more in our society today is that people are constantly under chronic stress. The adrenals keep firing, we’re wired and tired and still have a to-do list that’s 56,844 miles long. Approximately.
So, what’s to be done about the chronic stress? The kind that keeps us up at night, caffeinated during the day, requiring that adult beverage (or three) to unwind? The kind that feels like there is, in fact, a saber toothed tiger with particularly long fangs chasing us— all the time.
Where’s the choice there?
We absolutely need to make sure we’re taking care of our own human needs:
Sleep.
Light.
Movement.
Community/Connection.
Nature.
Nutrition.
Hydration.
Breath.
But what happens when these things that are our foundations, our basic building blocks, just seem like another to-do and just add to the stress?
An unexamined mind is like an errant toddler who was given Mountain Dew, a cookie, and set loose with all the valuable china. Things are going to break.
How do you rationalize with a toddler? You get on their level. (With a metric F*ton of patience).
Pick the loudest thought, the one that is weighing your down the most, that when you think about it, you immediately want to just not. The one that feels like it’s got the fattest, reddest marker and it’s coloring on the walls of your mind.
You sit with that thought, and you analyze it.
Let’s take a project at work for example.
A project at work that You. Do. Not. Want. To. Do.
There’s no way out of it. Your boss says it has to get done, and it’s yours. Your boss also says that your dream job, the one you’ve wanted for-ever, is also waiting on the other side of this project.
So now you want what’s on the other side. When the project’s done, there’s a shiny new title waiting for you, with a raise. It’s a dream role that will bring you even more fulfillment in your career, and you want it. Bad.
But the project is hyuuggeee, the people you need to work with on the project have their own expectations on how it should be done, there’s a tight timeline, and, and and…
You’re stressed.
Here’s the thing: if you want what’s on the other side of the project, and the project is the only vehicle to get you there, then you do want to do the project. And I’ll bet you want to do it damn well, because that’s energy you want to bring into this next phase of life.
Any time the thought, “I don’t want to do this project” pops up, you get to turn it around. Because you do. The juice is worth the squeeze to you, and you can do hard things.
And, because I believe we all need a bit more fun in our lives, I bet there’s a way to make the project fun. An extra challenge: to not just grit through it, but find a way to enjoy the process, because you do want to do it.
I heard a story once about a super successful CEO who just really didn’t want to do her taxes. She also didn’t want to go to jail even more, so it turns out she did want to do her taxes.
But it still felt like a chore.
She was speaking to a friend about the dilemma, and the wise friend asked the CEO, “what would make it more fun?”
The CEO’s husband came home that night and found his wife naked with a glass of wine and bright red lip stick, sitting in front of the computer. “Sit down honey,” she told him. “We’re doing our taxes.” I bet they got their taxes done in record time.
Now, unless you work from home or work for some scintillating organization, you probably can’t do your work project in the buff, but consider this a challenge: what would make this more fun?
The problem isn’t the project at work. Or what your spouse said to you. It’s not even your thoughts about these things. It’s that, instead of examining these thoughts to see if there was truth, the thought was turned into a belief. And this belief was wired into your nervous system, making you feel stressed.
It’s time to take care of our nervous systems, so they’re activated at appropriate times.
It’s time to examine these thoughts, and see how you’ve turned them into beliefs.
And if, at the end of the day, you cannot find a reason of why you would want to do the project (other than you get to keep your paychecks), or stay at the company, it’s time to evaluate. If you’re not finding fulfillment in your work, there may be a misalignment with your calling.
Learning to identify your thoughts, beliefs, and the most authentic you is the only way to create a life you love. This is why I created my program.
It’s time that we made the choice to not let the toddler operate the control mechanisms in our brains and instead lovingly, gently, take the reins, and decide for ourselves what choices we want to make, and how we want to feel.
Yes, things can be stressful at times, and it can feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. But diamonds are made under lots of intense pressure. You get to decide the color, cut, and clarity.
TL;DR: Your stress comes from not your thoughts, but your beliefs about those thoughts.