Research shows that having stress is healthier than having little or no stress at all, as long as you have some control over your life. People who have some stress and some control over their lives tend to live the longest, feel happiest, and have the strongest immune system. Thus, active participation in directing your life with its built-in difficulties turns out to be better for you than passive acceptance of an easy life or feeling helpless in face of a difficult life.
Stress triggers release of cortisol in your body, and having too little cortisol can be just as unhealthy as having too much. Moreover, research shows that simply embracing stress rather than trying to get rid of stress causes people to handle difficulties better, and makes stress less likely to lead to depression, divorce and health problems.
This is good news, because an interesting and enjoyable life involves taking risks and facing the unknown, both of which are inherently stressful. The more practice we get in dealing with uncertainty and hardships, the more confident we can be in our approach to life. The more actively we endeavor to face and deal with challenges, the better we become at taking appropriate action, and the healthier the accompanying stress is to our system.
Imagine that you are deciding whether to take on a stressful job or a stress-free job. Consider first that there is a point where having too much going on in your life can cause you to lose control over your life. However, if you have too little going on in your life, your passivity and boredom are likely to lead to unhappiness and a feeling of meaninglessness or emptiness. Thus, it is important to pursue what gives you meaning and that you gain the confidence to handle the accompanying stress.
Taking control of your life means taking positive steps to deal with challenges. Such positive steps include the following:
• prioritize what is important in your life, • face your difficulties head on, • take steps to change what you can about any given situation, • change your perspective about circumstances you cannot change, • develop your sense of humor, • take care of yourself physically and emotionally.
By all means, take risks!
It is key to recognize that even when we don’t have control over external circumstances, we do have control over our perspective, attitude and response to external circumstances. Thus, Viktor E. Frankl survived the holocaust.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Staying calm is key to making wise decisions and essential to maintaining healthy relationships. Yet there are times when it’s impossible to stay calm. A teenager has lied to you, your spouse insults you, a co-worker yells at you. Anger or shock can trigger your fight or flight response, which activates powerful stress hormones.
Those hormones trigger many physiological, biochemical, and psychological changes. They increase alertness, and generate fear, aggressiveness, and anger. Such biologically-driven changes may be helpful when you are physically threatened. Yet they can be harmful to your relationships and social and work-related interactions. When too much of the primary stress hormone cortisol is rushing through your body, you are much more likely to say or do something that you will later regret. Delay your response – time for a pause
You need to find a way to delay responding until your stress level has subsided to normal levels.
Exercise: The quickest way to decrease the levels of cortisol and related stress chemicals in your body is to do five minutes of strenuous exercise allowing you to sweat lightly. For instance, you can go for a run or do push-ups, sit-ups or jumping jacks.
Meditation: Another way to forestall harmful reactivity in emotionally-heated situations is to meditate for at least fifteen to twenty minutes. Focus on breathing deeply while relaxing and letting go of any thoughts or emotions that pass through your mind.
Distraction: At a minimum, pursue other activities and wait until you feel calm before dealing with a particularly heated emotional situation.
Once calm, you will be able to ask questions and find out the how and why of the situation. You want to avoid simply jumping to conclusions and striking out against the people involved. Impulsiveness
A pause is also a powerful defense against making impulsive decisions. The desires for pleasure, food, sex, and approval from others have their bases in biology and can thus easily become excessive. Uncontrolled pleasure-seeking and impulsive decision-making can end up being more harmful than beneficial.
Thus, pausing before taking action is a key in preventing bad impulsive decision-making. Here are some examples of impulses that may be wise to forestall:
• Eating too much: You’ve just eaten a big plate of delicious pasta and you want to have seconds although you know you shouldn’t.
• Drinking too much: You crave that third or forth glass of wine regardless of the consequences.
• Buying too much: You want to buy an expensive jacket although you can’t afford it and you don’t need it.
• Pleasing others too much: You feel pressured into saying “yes” to a request to volunteer, although you are already over-burdened with other obligations.
• Wasting too much time: You feel like going on social media rather than doing something productive or spending time with family or friends.
• Slipping into inappropriate relationships: You can’t resist responding to a married person’s inappropriately-flirtatious text with a suggestive text of your own.
By simply delaying taking action or making a decision, the impulse to act immediately tends to diminish. Forestalling taking action is easier than resisting an impulse, because you’re not saying “no” to yourself or to others. You are simply saying, “I’m going to wait for five minutes/15 minutes/a day before making the decision.” With a little time and distance, other priorities and desires will tend to decrease your overwhelming urge to act impulsively.
Impulsive behavior becomes stronger when a person is bored. So taking the time to engage in another activity and gain distance from the temptation will also help the impulse fade away.
Prepare yourself
If you know what kind of situations present temptation or tend to make you angry, try to imagine the situation likely to occur and imagine how you are going to respond.
Example: If my teenager does something terrible, I will say, “Let’s talk tonight/tomorrow.” Then I will go for a run. I may try to get the situation in perspective by talking to a friend. I will put myself in his/her shoes and imagine how I can be most effective in a conversation. I will have a calm tone of voice and allow him or her to explain before interrupting or making any assumptions.
Example: If there is a buffet tonight, I will pace myself during the meal, and take a fifteen-minute break before deciding if and how much seconds I’ll have.
When people are immersed in fear, they generally don’t feel secure enough to focus on higher-level aspirations such as improving their relationships or expressing their creativity. Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of needs is an elegant picture of the order in which human needs are met. Generally, it is easier to focus on love and happiness when you are not worried about food and shelter.
Understanding Maslow’s hierarchy helps us deal with people in our lives who are under stress. Where someone is on the pyramid is not solely a function of external factors, but also a function of the person’s psychological tendencies. Understanding where they are helps us to relate to them more effectively.
As with most theories, the hierarchy of needs is a useful way of seeing general patterns, but it is not a rigid structure.
Living at a lower level of needs
Many people around the world live on one of the bottom two rungs of the pyramid for their entire lives because their physiological or safety needs are always under threat. When you are hungry or living in an area of civil unrest or war, you don’t have time to worry about your child’s self-esteem or your own self-actualization.
Yet, poverty and unrest do not preclude higher levels of psychological attainment, such as pursuit of friendship, community, and living up to your potential. However, the greater the external threat the more challenging it becomes to pursue those higher aspirations.
"Maslow's Pyramid of Needs"
Living at a higher level of needs
These articles are primarily read by and written for people who value personal growth and loving relationships. They are fortunate to be free from the relentless worry about basic needs and survival, and can thus focus on higher needs such as belonging, love, and life’s meaning.
Yet, in an instant, anyone can suddenly find him- or herself at the lowest level on the pyramid, if only psychologically. A person who becomes ill or loses a spouse or a job may be racked with fear as nightmarish as someone living in the middle of a wartime environment. The chemical and psychological responses may be just as severe as if there were a deadly threat.
Even when future safety is not at stake, someone who loses his or her job may react as though it were. For instance, someone whose very identity is based on being a productive career-oriented person may feel annihilated when he or she loses that job.
Psychological response
While the hierarchy of needs is greatly influenced by external circumstances, another critical factor is the psychological state you choose when the going gets rough.
Even some of the most fortunate people, who don’t need to worry about food and shelter, may live under great stress worrying about their financial deals or the stock market, finding themselves at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy psychologically. The same is true of some healthy people who live in constant fear of disease and thus have turned into hypochondriacs, or exercise fanatics, who destroy their bodies in their obsessive quest for “health.” It is low-level fear that drives them even though they have adequate health, food, and shelter.
On the opposite side, there are people whose basic needs are constantly threatened, and yet, they are able to live in a tranquil psychological state aspiring to love and self-actualization. Thus, they manage to reside at the top of the pyramid.
Anyone can find him- or herself at the bottom, and anyone can bring him- or herself to the top. Clearly, however, the worse the external circumstances, the more challenging it becomes to have the ability, strength, and support to focus on higher-level needs.
Dealing with someone on the lower level
When someone has dropped into a lower level of the pyramid, it is not the best time to discuss how to improve your relationship or your happiness. It is more effective and compassionate to meet that person on his or her current level and try to help.
Imagine your teenage child comes home from school under great stress because of a remark made by a peer. The parent should realize that the teenager has dropped into the bottom of the pyramid psychologically. While such an event may seem trivial to an adult, to a teenager it is not. Don’t expect warmth and family affiliation. Simply be there to help if help is needed.
Similarly, if your partner has lost his job, don’t expect him to work on the relationship. He just needs to know he is loved, unconditionally. This is where your own ability to remain calm and non-reactive can help him from spiraling downwards into panic.
Sometimes getting out of the circular thinking that creates panic may require a change of activities or a change of setting to evoke a different psychological state. For some people that might involve playing with the kids, going to an inspirational talk or church, or doing volunteer work. For others, it might involve playing a sport, watching a game with friends, or going on a trip.
Nobody’s life is ever totally secure. It is left up to us to seek and aspire to higher levels of meaning despite life’s uncertainty. One of the best examples is the Greek sage and philosopher Epictetus, who wrote his most inspiring work while imprisoned.
It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
~Epictetus
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will.
Having a newborn can put a lot of stress on a relationship. Understandably, most of your focus is on the baby rather than on your partner because newborns are totally dependent on attention and care.
You may be exhausted, overwhelmed, and getting hardly any sleep. It’s no surprise that many relationships start to experience difficulty after the birth of the first child.
Relationships tend to do best despite the physical and emotional challenges of parenting when BOTH partners are engaged and try to do the following:
1. Show love and respect to one another,
2. Help and support each other,
3. Willingly do at least half of the overall work rather than focus on making sure that the other person is doing his or her fair share,
4. Be patient with your partner’s irritability due to exhaustion, and above all,
5. Cultivate your sense of wonder, gratitude, and humor.
No matter what, it is important to be able to get support when you need it. The most effective way to ask for help is to make a positive, specific request rather than a demand, command, or complaint. Your request will be most compelling when you show appreciation in your tone of voice and wording. For example,
“I know you’re tired, but I would really appreciate it if you could feed the baby tonight. I’m just exhausted.”
Having perspective helps ease the stress of feeling submerged. Keep in mind the bigger picture, namely,
that challenges are part of life, that parenting is demanding but fleeting and rewarding, and that with a little bit of luck, eventually you get out of life and relationships what you put into them!
And if not, at least you can feel good about having done the best you could!
Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder.
~Mason Cooley
People who procrastinate put off things because they hope to avoid the stress in dealing with them. However, procrastination is really a form of self-sabotage, actually increasing a person’s stress level and making most problems worse.
If you don’t deal with a late bill, the charges go up and your credit rating goes down, creating more stress. If you don’t talk to your partner or child about their behavior toward you, their behavior becomes ingrained and communication becomes more difficult, creating more stress. If you don’t start a work project, the pressure to get it done mounts, and other activities get tainted by stress.
Life is full of surprises and challenges. By facing such challenges head on, we adapt, grow, and learn to manage life without exacerbating the stress. If you stop running from your problems and face them sraight on, starting with the biggest one first, the relief you will feel will be liberating and life altering.
Rather than letting the fear of pain and frustration cause you to avoid life and its challenges, you can examine that fear to make better decisions. Instead of thinking, “Oh no, how can I avoid this miserable problem?” you can ask yourself, “What added pain and frustration will I have to suffer if I put it off?” No one likes undue stress; however, it is much easier to endure when we realize that we are minimizing long-term pain and suffering and maximizing long-term peace of mind.
Making a list of the steps you need to take is a good way to start. Then you just have to take that first step and face a problem head on. That’s usually the hardest part. If you just start the project, the momentum builds and usually takes care of the rest.
Of course there are appropriate times to procrastinate. On some occasions it’s wise to mull problems over for a day or two. Moreover, if a truly exceptional situation comes up, it can be worthwhile to wait until tomorrow and then to stop procrastinating.
