A New View On Stress: How to Turn on Your Capacity for Renewal
Stress is widely understood to be a leading cause of negative health outcomes and if you asked anyone off the street, I’d wager that they would prefer to feel less stress in their lives. It is believed that Americans spend an average of $960 annually on attempts to reduce stress but at the same time, two-thirds say that they’ve never felt more stressed in their lives. When we are running in circles chasing an elusive outcome, I believe, it’s time for a reframe.
Let’s begin by defining what we’re talking about. When people speak of feeling stress or being stressed, they are usually talking about their stress response. A stressor is any stimulus that is threatening to the receiver and the stress response is how the body-mind system reacts. The stress response is actually an adaptive technology. For millions of years of evolutionary history, our species’ survival rested on our ability to detect danger and escape it. Our ancestors that survived those conditions were more likely to have subtle danger detection capacity and robust fight or flight response. That really helped a lot when survival relied on stress hormones dictating a physical response but is not optimal when confronting a full inbox of emails.
There is also a distinction between acute stress and chronic stress. The fight or flight response is designed to deal with short-term stressors that require immediate action. Many of us live in a state of feeling chronically stressed, the morning inbox sets you up for a long day of feeling anxious and clenched, which is at best a drag on your performance and at worst, a drain on your long-term health.
The Opposite of a Thing Is Not a Lack of The Thing
We tend to focus intently on stress reduction but it is often much harder to eliminate something we view as negative than it is to replace it with something else. For example, if I want to eat fewer chips, I can either focus intently on not eating chips or, I can replace my snacks with fruits and vegetables. In this analogy, the opposite of stress is renewal. If our notion of feeling stressed is associated with fight or flight and the sympathetic nervous system, then renewal is associated with the rest and digest or parasympathetic nervous system. If we want to feel less stress, the easier way to alter the state of being is to spend more time in the renewal state. Stress and renewal are two sides of the same spectrum just as the fitness community might talk about activities as being catabolic (to break down) vs. anabolic (to build up). The goal is not to get to zero, it is to build one’s resilience for managing the inevitable.
Make Peace With Stress
What if the word stress didn’t call up negative associations? What if we could see stress and its inverse, renewal, as tools that both have value in different environments. As a first step, I suggest we change the language and refer to the state of being stressed, contraction, and the state of renewal, expansion. Couple that with the acceptance that your stress response evolved to help you, and you might start to see the different use cases for each state. For example, I would rather feel expansive when I’m parenting, brainstorming, or socializing with friends, but when I am up against a deadline and need to activate myself to bring a task to completion, I need to contract. If we can accept that stress is not inherently harmful and the outcome is dose and timing-dependent, we gain the power to thoughtfully direct these energies and intentionally transition in and out of each state.
Master Your Energy States
Here are three things to try in your day-to-day life in order to turn insight into action.
Ask yourself, what is in my toolkit that I can use when I need to shift energies. If I am contracted, what actions can I take to promote expansion? If I am too expanded, what actions can I take to promote contraction? What other tools are out there with which I may want to experiment?
What does your energetic bank account look like? Everyone has a set point where they would optimally be on the stress-renewal spectrum. Let yours be individual to you and what’s currently going on in your life. Each day you will spend some energy in stress and recoup through renewal, the key question to ask yourself is: where did I come out at the end of the day, am I in the black or the red?
After a period of experimentation, you can build a practice of intentional design. Based on your individual circumstances you may decide what it is you need at any given season (your set point) and make decisions based on that which is in your control (your toolkit). Once you have had the chance to evaluate over time where your reality is showing up against your ideal, you can then adjust accordingly.