Dealing with stress

Sure, a little stress is healthy and often necessary to motivate us into doing something and achieving more. It also helps us to deal with tough situations, keeps us alert, prevents us from becoming complacent, prepares us better and makes us proactive rather than reactive. So we don’t want to eliminate all stress because without it, in the healthy sense, we won’t break records, achieve more and make life more interesting. However, there is a point where stress can become unhealthy and this is normally when we feel unable to manage it.

Cause and effect

There is a common misconception about stress and the causes, but what stresses one person may not necessarily stress another person. So it may not be specific things that stress everyone out, but rather our interpretation or perception of that experience. For example, let’s take two athletes who have worked for months towards getting chosen for some team. For one athlete it may be the end of the world and a huge concern not to get chosen, but for another athlete this may be perceived as not being that bad; maybe something better may come of this or it was just not meant to be. In both instances, the experience is the same, but the interpretation is very different and accordingly affects their stress levels and attitude.

It’s important to remember here that it’s not what happens to us that hurts or stresses us, but how we choose to view and perceive it that does.

Latest research points to the fact that our perception of stress is what impacts our health, emotionally and physically, and not the actual stress itself. Therefore, we need to learn to be more optimistic about our experiences and in doing so, this will affect us accordingly.

Causes of stress

Stress comes from many different places.
• From your parents, friends, mentor or coach. “Don’t disappoint me, try harder, practice more, finish this, do better, practice, I told you.”
• From your friends. “How’d you do on the test or event, try this, you could do better, don’t do that.”
• Even from yourself. “I need to lose weight, build my muscles, make the team, get a better time.”

And from other things such as:
• Feeling pressure to achieve more.
• Thinking about the future.
• Not having enough money.
• Not being good enough.
• Worrying about the next sporting event.
• Feeling guilty.
• Placing your identity and sense of worth on the achievement.

How our body handles stress

There are hormones and our nervous system that affects our physical response to stress. Hormones are chemicals made by one part of the body, which travel through your blood to send messages to the rest of the body. Your nervous system is made up of the brain, spinal cord and all the nerves. The nerves send messages between your brain and the rest of your body. The body is an amazingly fine-tuned machine that changes and does what it needs to respond to any changes, like stress.

The body has two nervous systems; one being voluntary and the other involuntary. The voluntary system does what you choose to do, such as walk, talk and move. The involuntary system keeps the body running without you even having to think about it, such as breathing and digesting. Within the involuntary nervous system, the body actually has two different nerve pathways. One works while we’re relaxed and the other works when there’s an emergency.

In times before us, our ancestors relied on the involuntary nervous system to react to the stressor and survive. Today’s modern world, however, is made up of different stressors and we are no longer necessarily hunting for our food and being faced with dangerous wildlife on our way to the malls. Our biggest worries aren't usually about life or death, so we don’t have to flee from our problems. The problem today, however, is that when those same stress hormones are released, they remain in our bodies, unused and confused, unlike our ancestors who ran off their excess hormones. The result is we feel awful and are not always able to burn or work them off through exercise.