Stress is toxic.
Actually, that’s not quite true. Long-term stress is toxic.
In the short term – say, for getting away from a tiger – stress is
very useful. It turns you into a temporary superhero. Your senses become
sharper to detect danger, your memory is enhanced (so that next time
you’ll remember not to blunder into the tiger’s territory), and your
blood fills with energy-boosting and protective chemicals and rushes out
to your arms and legs so that you can a) hit the tiger hard on the nose
and b) run away quickly. So far, so good.
The long-term not-a-tiger problem
The problem is that in 21st-century cities, what we have is not a
tiger (which you either escape from quickly, or… not). We have debts and
relationship issues and work pressure. You can’t hit them, you can’t
run away from them, and instead of being resolved in 20 minutes they can
go on for months or years.
That’s when stress becomes toxic. The blood that’s
stuck out in your extremities isn’t helping you, for example, to digest
your food and otherwise run your internal organs. It’s at high pressure,
and it’s thick with all of the chemicals that are there to boost your
speed and protect you from infections, allergies and pain. But they
never get used, and either you run out of them (and get the infections,
allergy and pain), or they lurk around and potentially clog or burst
your arteries.
Your memory keeps getting poked: “Remember this. Remember this. Pay
attention.” Eventually it can’t cope any more and starts dropping things
out.
It’s toxic.
The 3-step stress detox
So what can you do to get out of this toxic state?
Here are three simple steps.
1. Connect. This seems totally unintuitive at first
glance. Our instinct, faced with bad things happening, is to close them
out of our awareness – but that’s fighting against the stress reaction,
which is saying, “Danger! Warning, Will Robinson! Pay attention, this is
important!”
We can end up putting an awful lot of energy into that struggle that
we could be using for something more helpful – like resolving the
situation.
Most of the techniques that psychologists refer to as “maladaptive
coping” are ways of distracting ourselves from unpleasant situations.
I’m talking here about everything from cutting yourself to overeating,
drinking and smoking (or just working too hard). The stress is too big
and scary, so we turn away and hope it won’t eat us.
The problem is, in doing so we’re trying to ignore the alarms that
are going off and signalling that something’s wrong. By “connecting” I
mean paying attention to the alarms – not to the fire, just yet, only to
the alarms. Connecting means becoming consciously aware of what’s
happening in your body, where you’re holding tension, how you’re
feeling.
When that’s clear, move on to step 2.
2. Welcome. Again, this goes against all our
instincts. But we’re not welcoming the bad situation, we’re just
welcoming the feelings that tell us about it. And we welcome them by
name. “Welcome, anger.” “Welcome, fear.” The feelings are there to help.
Naming feelings is very important. It creates a link between the
rational, language-using part of your brain and the irrational part that
is experiencing the feeling, and starts to draw off some of its
activation.
You’ll feel that start to work, your body starting to calm down –
because you’re still in touch with your body from step 1. Those stress
chemicals will take a minute or two to be pulled out of your blood, but
that’s all right. The process has started.
3. Let go. As the feelings start to fade, let them.
Release them in your mind. You might want to say something like “I let
go of anger,” or whatever the emotion is. You might even make a
releasing gesture with your hands.
Breathe out.
You’ve just shifted your body from its activated state back into what
should be its normal situation – with the blood flowing smoothly to the
internal organs, the muscles relaxed and the mind calm.
The Welcoming Practice
What I’ve just described is the Welcoming Practice (or Welcoming
Prayer), created by Mary Mrozowski within the Benedictine Centering
Prayer movement. (Yes, it’s not just Buddhists who can do this kind of
thing.) I use it to calm myself down whenever anger, fear or stress
threaten to hijack my body and brain in one of those not-a-tiger
situations.
The consequence is that I can move on quickly to a state of mind
where I can start to think about how to resolve the situation – if that
even needs doing after I’ve calmed down.
After all, sometimes, my toxic stress reaction was going to be the problem, the whole problem and nothing but a problem.
Are you stressed? Try the three-step detox right now, and tell us about your results in the comments.
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