Mindset
They say that not all stress is the same.
The literature provides us with a framework for understanding stress that may serve us, and stress that may deplete us.
Eustress is the positive interpretation of stress; it’s generally associated with being energized, having higher degrees of performance, and motivation to make change, gives us a positive outlook, and helps us overcome challenges and sickness.
Distress is generally associated with a feeling of unpleasantness, hardship, and energy depletion, perceived as beyond our ability to cope, and can lead to physical sickness, disease, and mental/emotional depression.
Sounds like stress is a little out of your control.
On the contrary, although some stress is imposed, and beyond your control, the vast majority of what you interpret as distressful is just that, an interpretation.
You give it meaning.
And the more you engage in the negative meaning of the stress (effectively defining it as distress), the more it creates further investment in the meaning and the more distressful it becomes.
But, you do have control over its meaning.
Understand that the primary role of your brain and neurological system is to keep you safe.
Death is not an option your brain wants to consider.
Your brain is being bombarded every moment of every day with literally millions of pieces of information.
Find that hard to believe?
Just think for a second at all the noises around you at any given moment of the day. Take a second to simply listen.
Take each sound you hear and for a moment, recognize and connect to each one.
Crazy isn’t it?
The sound of the fridge running, the wind blowing, the de-humidifier, a dog barking, a car starting. That’s just a sample of what I heard just during the time I was writing this paragraph!
Your brain has to decide what is worth acknowledging, and what is not.
It manages things so you can cope without you even knowing because if you had to know, you would simply be overwhelmed all the time!
Just think for a minute about the volume of sound at a nightclub. Your brain recognizes and predicts you are going into a nightclub, and so it begins to manage what you actually acknowledge.
It might feel loud, but you are soon talking with the person next to you and using other senses to navigate the conversation. Your brain slowly revises its focus, tunes out the unwanted, and connects with the wanted.
Imagine for a second if a few days later, in the middle of a conversation at breakfast with your friend or family member, sound from your stereo suddenly just started playing at the volume you encountered in the nightclub!
You’d be in shock! You’d cover your ears, and you’d run to find the volume knob to shut the sound down. It would be untenable!
Why the difference in reaction?
Predictive perception.
Your brain is predictive. It needs to operate with a sense of expectation. What it believes is important now, and what is not important. And the most important stuff is the stuff that might hurt us.
The moment you walk into the bar, your brain has already acknowledged it will be loud, and you will be safe. It’s expected.
The moment your stereo begins to blare full blast without your permission, that’s not what was predicted, and it’s therefore evaluated as unsafe.
Now, let’s throw a little curve ball at this concept.
What if you had a really terrible experience at a concert a few years earlier when the sound was just beyond your capacity to adapt, and you were left with tinnitus in your ears for a few months after the concert?
Now, when your friend asks you to go to a nightclub with a live band this Friday night, you begin to feel distressed. Your brain interprets the potential for loud sounds as threatening, and as such, your neurological system begins to prepare for something in the future that hasn’t happened yet but might cause harm.
You begin to feel anxious as Friday night gets closer, maybe you start to have a headache, or you feel overwhelmed, and fatigued. As the night comes closer, you feel distressed, and yet you’re not even sure why. You want to go out for a great evening with a friend, but your brain thinks otherwise.
The interpretation and reaction to sound volume stress has been created by your brain perceiving it as threatening.
Imagine for a second that you add in other life elements that degrade your neurological system’s ability to cope; lack of sleep, dehydration, low blood sugar. You’re in this state when your friend calls to organize your night out…….and you snap and tell them you aren’t going out, you’re done with partying!
Your friend is perplexed by your reaction, and so are you, but this is what feels right, even though it feels wrong!
Your brain has defined what distress is and it’s fully invested in it.
This is but a simple example of how your neurological system manages information, and how you can and do have the ability to manifest different outcomes.
You can acknowledge that sound makes you nervous, you can prepare yourself for what might lay ahead, redefine your relationship with the information, and create a different outcome.
Once you begin to acknowledge that you give meaning to the information coming into your brain, you can choose to give it meaning that imparts safety, or at least you can choose to be more responsive to the information (considering all the facts like you’re in a nightclub) rather than reactive (it’s loud and unexpected in your house).
I’ve talked about some of these concepts in a different way in earlier blog posts.
The concept of the story is how we give things meaning. How everything we see and understand is just a form of story, and how once we acknowledge that we’ve created the meaning, and we become aware of that meaning, we can also be accountable for changing the meaning and creating adaptation through new stories that serve.
The more you understand how your stories inform your interpretations, the more you become the owner of your relationship with stress, what is deemed positive, and what is deemed to be negative.
It’s a liberating truth.
