Thinking about stress as a process & strategy driven occurrence helps you realise that any part of the process can be changed to give you a better outcome. It gives you your power back.

Stress is a biological response that occurs after a stimulus

The biological response refers to the hormonal and chemical changes that occur in your body to let you know you’re in a situation that needs addressing. (There’s more on this in my article What does your stress say to you?)

The stimulus refers to things you see, hear, feel, touch, think, imagine or smell that cause your stress hormones to be triggered.

Personal Response

After the earthquake in Haiti, you probably noticed a big difference in responses from the people around you.

On one end of the scale, people are responding to it as just another piece of news and getting on with their day. On the other end of the scale, people are completely distraught, in tears and unable to focus on or function effectively in their job.

This is typical behaviour – based on our own personal belief systems, associations, involvement, perceived repercussions and a whole host of other factors, every single one us reacts in our own individual way to the events around us.

Chain of Events

This is where strategies come in. Continuing with the example of Haiti:

Bob has an important job interview tomorrow. He’s waited a long time and cleared his family out of the house so that he could spend all day preparing for it. He finishes a study session and switches on the TV for a bit of light relief, thankful his family are out and he has peace. He sees the footage of the earthquake and immediately falls into a slump. His mind is swimming with the images of what he has seen and he’s becoming quite agitated. His interview is no longer important as the stress hormones flood his body.

Bob’s strategy of stress could be something like:

State of mind = Busy active mind, totally focused on his interview. Content. Inward looking. Mental chatter saying “Right I’ve done lots of study, time to relax. It’s important to relax and stay calm so I can do well”

Primary Stimulus = He’s expecting some light entertainment but what he gets a full onslaught of horrific images and an urgent running commentary on the disaster.  It’s unexpected.

Secondary Stimulus 1 = He pictures his own family and imagines if they were taken away from him.

Secondary Stimulus 2 = He remembers shouting at his son for playing loud music earlier. How he wishes he hadn’t done that. He’s a good kid.

Secondary Stimulus 3 = He starts grieving over the loss of his own family. In his mind they are already dead.

I could go on with this chain of stimuli. Even though these are fictional examples, you get the picture of how one thing leads to another.

The chain of stimuli is fleeting and takes place in nanoseconds in the depths of our subconscious. Our conscious mind works too slowly to process all the information around us so most of normal, daily processing takes place in our subconscious.

Our subconscious is efficient. It doesn’t bother us with specifics – it processes the incoming TV pictures, makes it associations (secondary stimuli) and instead of feeding us back with the content of the secondary stimuli, it feeds us back with the emotions.

So Bob ends up feeling lousy and doesn’t quite know why. He attributes it to the earthquake when in fact his body is producing stress hormones in response to grief over the loss of his family.

The Strategy of Stress

Bob’s strategy of stress started with a mental state conducive to allowing stimuli in. If he’d been in a different mood, perhaps the news would not have triggered the same sequence of thoughts. You’ll notice yourself that certain moods leave you more susceptible to stress than other moods.

The strategy continues with taking the news and processing it in a way that causes stress over an imagined disaster and takes the focus away from immediate real-world priorities.

By understanding the steps leading up to the stress response, it’s possible to take action to stop suffering from pointless stress.

Next time you feel stressed, retrace your mental steps and identify all the various stimuli causing you to react in this way. When you’ve done this a few times, see if you can identify a pattern between your strategies of stress.

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