Stress Management Myths

A Little Stress Is Good For You

Stress is the feeling of being overwhelmed. It's the feeling of having more to cope with than you can manage. Sometimes this means one overwhelming, huge problem. Most often though it means too many things to deal with at once.

Today we have more stress because there's more things coming at us and at a rate that we can't cope with. Computers are a great tool, they've helped us profit immensely. But not only have they helped us to get more done, they've also brought much, much more for us to deal with. Computers encourage us to multi-task to a greater extent. It's easy to have ten or fifteen or even more different windows open. Which then means you have ten to fifteen things clamoring for your attention. Your brain can't cope with that many distractions and so it becomes diluted and not powerful enough to deal with what's in front of it.

It's never that you aren't up to the challenge in front of you. It is only ever that the way you're dealing with the challenge, or the amount of challenges in front of you, is more than you can cope with.

Look at your body's physiological response to stress. Essentially it shuts every bodily process down to instigate a readiness to 'fight or flight.'

Why does it do this?

Because it wants to cut out every unnecessary distraction, so that you can focus solely on what's in front of you and deal with it with every resource you have.

Your body has a lot of accumulated wisdom. It's the result of thousands of years of evolution. It knows what works and what doesn't. You should listen to it and follow it's advice. And what it is saying loud and clear is;

'deal with one thing and complete it. Then move on to the next thing.'

What happens when we're stressed though?

We get all muddled and panicked in our thinking. So instead of a logical and orderly approach to what we have to deal with, here's what happens in our head;

'gotta get that report ready' - start to work on it. 'Oh shit. I forgot to send Jane a card. I should get a gift too'. - start searching for a gift. 'Hey, did I reply to Phil's email'. - check emails. 'I wonder how that order's progressing'. - check progress 'Now what was I doing.'

You see you can get a little of many things done and really get nowhere or focus on one thing and start clearing the decks. You need to develop the ability to just focus on one thing and see it through to completion. Because this is what brings power to your actions.

Focusing on one topic makes you think deeper and wider about the issue or problem and so brings you a full perspective of options and knowledge about the issue.

It's a lot like driving a car. If you drive, reverse, drive reverse and steer from right to left to right to left, you are making your journey longer and less efficient. The most efficient way to drive is to head in a straight line. You don't get your maximum power or efficiency when you get started. That's just warming up the engine. It's when you hit top gear and stay there that the car really starts to perform most efficiently.

And your brain is really the same. Your initial thoughts and ideas about a subject is just you warming up to the topic. It will take a little while for your real power to come through.

When you are chopping and changing your focus, this is analogous to the stopping and starting your car does in heavy traffic.

So to bring this back to the original point. It's not that a little stress is good for you. That is just confusing and sloppy. It is that you do need adversity. You do need a challenge to feel alive. You do need to be stretched.

These challenges are the roads built for your brain to travel. Driving at 70 miles per hour would be no fun in a muddy field. Driving on the open road without other traffic can be. So yes you do want the opportunity to stretch yourself.

What you don't want are lots of other cars to stop you from moving. So it's not that there's a little dial you can turn to say, 'yes this is the right amount of stress.' It's that you want a challenge to test and stretch yourself.

You Have To Treat Stress Rather Than The Causes Of Stress

Almost all stress management techniques assume that stress is unavoidable and the best you can do is to relax. Stress comes from an ineffective processing of life. Improve the effectiveness of your processing system and you'll experience less stress. Prevention is always easier and less costly than cure.

Relaxation, self hypnosis and so on are all well and good if you are already stressed. But to get to such a state, where you have to detach yourself from life, just to be able to think clearly, suggests that there's something wrong. Something deep underlying the way we are going about life. And so these tools are the emotional equivalent of an aspirin. They alleviate the symptoms, yet in doing so run the risk of not acting on the information our body, or in this case emotions, are giving us. It's like bailing water out of a boat, without plugging the leak. It's never ending. I believe each day should be focused on permanently reducing our stress levels through prevention of the causes, rather than constantly treating the symptoms.

Misunderstanding What Stress Is

Typically stress management writers talk about stress being an overload of demands on an individual that exceed his or her capacity to cope. The implication is that life is too difficult for the Individual to cope with. That's not true. And it's what underlies most of the intervention strategies. A philosophy of 'you poor thing. Let me just give you some relief.'

People can be far more resilient and can cope with much, much more than they currently do. The problem lies in the way that they process life. Stress is the residue from an ineffective system of processing life. Develop a more effective way of living and you'll eliminate most of the stress in your life and be able to cope with far more.

Over the last 100 years manufacturers have made huge leaps in productivity levels. Where once their profits depended on working their workers almost into the ground, today much of factory work involves only pushing buttons. Machinery takes care of most of the strenuous work. The cost of production is down in both economic and human terms. All due to a more efficient process of work.

The same is true I many other areas. Once Slaves were worked to death in Plantations and rowing boats. Today machinery is far more effective.

The stress we experience today is much like the exertions of Slaves and overworked Factory workers a century ago. It's unnecessary and caused by an ineffective processing system. In 50 - 100 years we will look back at the enormous economic, physical, emotional and social costs of stress and wonder why we could not see the solutions that will then seem so obvious.