Why I Now Put “Stress” in Quotes — and Why You Should To
It’s not about changing life’s messiness, but rather our relationship to it
“True happiness comes not when we get rid of all of our problems, but when we change our relationship to them, when we see our problems as a potential source of awakening, opportunities to practice, and to learn.” — Richard Carlson
Prolific self-help author Richard Carlson wrote a timeless gem back in the late 70’s titled Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and It’s All Small Stuff. My first thought back then was 🤨, cute phrase, but no way!
Richard’s aim was to help others shift their perspective on life’s inevitable inconveniences and believed it was at the core of living a good life. And now, the longer I walk this planet, the more I wholeheartedly agree, it really is all small stuff. This piece is my journey of how I arrived there.
Three Reasons Why I Now Use Quotes Around the Word “Stress”
The first reason for the quotes is that what feels stressful for you, might not feel stressful to me and vise versa. We have our unique lens we view life that is informed by our upbringing, experiences, traumas, our community. For example, in your youth, you may have received the message, feeling fear is weak, so when fear creeps up today as an adult — around your job, marriage, or parenting — you become flooded with a physiological stress response.
Also read: 3 Steps to Owning Your Overwhelm
On the subject of a kid-logic mindset, for me, I grew up spoiled rotten and oblivious to the fact that life holds unavoidable hardship, discomfort, and undesired (surprise?) challenges. Needless to say, my misaligned expectations resulted in me living in a chronic stress response when things started going sideways.
My real first experience with sideways was in college. My parents got remarried to people that weren’t my original people. I wasn’t chosen to be captain of my collegiate volleyball team, a role that had come effortlessly in high school just three years earlier. My GPA was hovering around a 2.0 at a prestigious school that I clearly wasn’t “smart enough” to be attending. I was unprepared, ill-equipped, and became chronically flooded with a physiological response of stress
And it wrecked my health, my relationships, and my joy.
Science now tells us that chronic flooding of a physiological stress response is exceedingly damaging to our whole being. More on this soon.
The second reason for the quotes is, it’s less about the stressor, the circumstance, the problem, but more about how we react to it, the perspective we wrap around it.
Trauma expert Gabor Maté says it beautifully this way,
“Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.”
The third and final reason for the quotes is this: I have reframed my definition of stress as simply a meaningful, purposeful, community-filled life. Being human is messy, relationships bring conflict, we are all in the midst of our living process of becoming and for the most part, trying to do our best. Can we call it stress if it’s normal experiences in a typical human life?
Stress is life; life is stress.
The more we see the messiness and challenges as possibilities instead of problems, the less flooded we feel in all our layers — physically, mentally, emotionally. When we begin to see that life is actually for us, not against us, our soul finds rest. We settle into the fact that the chaos, losses, and traumas are refining us into our best next version of who we are destined to be.
And the sooner we can change our relationship to our experiences, the more freedom and forgiveness we will find, the more resilient-bounciness we have with life’s bumps that might have previously sunk us.
Reframing Stress: A New Perspective
Once I realized my response to life was in fact killing me and the root cause of my intense physical pain, I became an insatiable learner of the how and why. Here’s a brief summary.
Our nervous system response to threat and danger is natural, it’s actually a brilliantly designed resiliency system if we utilize it well. In the short term, hormones like cortisol are produced when needed to get us through a hairy situation or a short-lived event. Then our system is designed to return to rest.
When we live in a stress response loop — whether that is traumas or the small stuff we are making big — the cortisol faucet doesn’t turn off. If this happens, our entire system begins to wear down on a cellular level and inflammation sky rockets (not good).
This can manifest as the classic symptoms of muscle tension, insomnia, persistent pain, and headaches, but science also points to bigger issues such as digestive conditions, heart disease, susceptibility to cancer, high blood pressure, and stroke.
“One of the things many diseases have in common is inflammation, acting as kind of a fertilizer for the development of illness. We’ve discovered that when people feel threatened, insecure — especially over an extended period of time — our bodies are programmed to turn on inflammatory genes.” ― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
Changing Your Beliefs About Stress
As the old saying goes: whether you believe something is true or false, you’re probably right.
A study published back in 2012 titled Does the perception that stress affects health matter? followed 30,000 adults for years, tracked how much stress they experienced and more importantly looked at what they believed about stress.
Their findings? What we believe about stress is more important than avoiding stress itself. Case in point, living a meaning life simply cannot be devoid of “stress.”
Both groups in the study had the same physiological response — elevated heart rates and breathing —however, the biochemical profile of the group who believed stress is helpful mirrored the profile seen in moments of excitement and courage rather than unhealthful for our cardiovascular system and beyond.
Unsurprisingly, those who believed stress was detrimental had a 43% increased risk of premature death. 😬
“One of the mistakes many of us make is that we feel sorry for ourselves, or for others, thinking that life should be fair, or that someday it will be. It’s not and it won’t. When we make this mistake we tend to spend a lot of time wallowing and/or complaining about what’s wrong with life. “It’s not fair,” we complain, not realizing that, perhaps, it was never intended to be.” — Richard Carlson
Imperfection, inconveniences, and unpredictability is the natural state of being human. Life is a paradox of sorts. Beauty around every corner, yet, pain and suffering is written into each one of our stories. And when we can capture one thought after another and fertilize the garden of our mind and body toward the beauty, we begin to change our perspective on life to truly believe it’s all small stuff.
Right now, today, what might you need to reframe the bigness of and instead see it as “a potential source of awakening, opportunities to practice, and to learn”?
