April is Stress Awareness Month

Stress is not an emotion! It is a cognitive/mental condition that results from having fewer coping skills than your current condition requires. But stress can be a result of not understanding your emotions and your emotional reactions. Let me explain.

You have feelings – they are a natural element of your human condition. We evolved to have emotions as part of our survival structure. They guide our behavior and feed us vital information about our surroundings. But our emotions can feel overwhelming if we don’t understand them or how they come into being. What you need to know is that emotions are manufactured by our brains and by the complex inner workings of our meaning-making structures in the brain. And that is precisely how stress is manufactured.

Our brains are bombarded with thousands upon thousands of stimuli every second of every day. Many of these stimuli (think of them as incoming messages to the brain) are simply a result of monitoring our physical being – our heart rate, breathing, digestion, and so much more. If our autonomic systems were not monitored, we might “forget” to breathe, or our heart might stop. Our central nervous system and brain must keep a check on all of that. At the same time, our five major senses are also continually providing a stream of data to be processed by the brain as well. And it does almost all of this below the level of conscious awareness. In fact were we aware of all of that input, we would go crazy and be unable to function.

So the brain has a function that sorts what is important to pay attention to and what is not. Though our breathing and heartbeat are essential for life, we don’t need to pay attention to them unless we are meditating or doing breathwork. Likewise, we don’t need to pay attention to the myriad stimuli from our senses. But that is just the input function. What also lives within our gray matter are the zillions of stored memories, experiences, lessons and outcomes from our past. These form a sort of backdrop for the meaning-making process that evaluates those zillions of data points streaming in every moment. So, what is happening is that the brain gets input, compares that with the stored data it has to interpret what that may mean, and then projects that onto the future – either near-term/immediate or some distant future.

When the input from our bodies or from our sensing the external world falls outside the standard, or what we are accustomed to experiencing, or when these data don’t line up with the expected interpretation, we get triggered. Sometimes that triggers panic, sometimes stress, worry, fear, and of course sometimes that might be happy anticipation – but that is not apropos to the topic we are discussing. Understanding the source of our reactions and projections is essential in managing them. That is what we teach when we are teaching emotional intelligence.

But, as I said at the outset, stress is not an emotion, though it can be the source of the many emotions above. Stress is a set of thoughts: “I don’t know how to handle this.” “This is too much.” “I might die if I don’t fix this and I don’t have the skills to fix it.” There are countless such thoughts that arise when the stimuli are more or are outside the standard ways we are accustomed to experiencing.

So how do we handle stress? It starts by identifying the input sources. Some of those come from our senses. But the same time that those are coming in, we also may experience physiological responses and those bodily sensations are other messages sent to our brains – tension, nausea, and pain. When the thoughts are accompanied by physical tension, our stress levels go up. It is the combination of all of these (and so many more) incoming datapoints that is experienced as overload on our circuits. And suddenly our happy little eight-pound meaning-making machine starts interpreting this as stress. But knowing that is also the key to handling it. When our brain lumps it all together, it looks overwhelming. And recognizing the sources can also help us separate them and begin dealing with them individually.

Start by identifying the antecedent thoughts that are causing your emotions. This may be difficult because once we start the process, we may also open the gates for what some call “flooding,” and it may feel as thought you can’t get them all written down before the tons of other thoughts come rushing in. That’s okay! Capture what you can, knowing that is we can lower the number or intensity of those, it may provide the freedom to capture others. The key here is to remember that we need not eliminate the stressor entirely, it may be sufficient to lower its volume or intensity.

Lowering the intensity of the preceding thoughts means that you try to replace those thoughts with other less stress-producing thoughts. Changing the thought, “This is too much” to “I can handle some of these things” drops the pressure already. Changing “I can’t do this” to “Let me just do the parts that I can” can also lower the bar. So if you think of stress as an incline (the more things I can’t handle the greater the stress I feel), you will note that somewhere along that line is a threshold point above which we move into breakdown and overwhelm. Therefore, stress management is the process of lowering the intensity of enough of the problems that we move back under the threshold point.

You need not be a superhero or an ascended master to manage stress. All you really need to do is break out the components and work with the few that you can manage. Besides, thinking that you must handle it all is an additional stressor, but knowing that you can handle some of it – enough to move below the threshold – already feels better!

Kris Girrell is an author, speaker and retired executive leadership coach. His recent books, Typhoon Honey: the only way out is through and Learning to Feel: One man’s path of reconnecting to the heart of emotions have received high praise and numerous five-star ratings from the industry. Typhoon Honey is available on Amazon and Learning to Feel can be pre-ordered at MSI Press or on Amazon as well.