How To Reframe Stress For Growth
Manage your stress with a few easy steps
Stress.
What if it wasn’t a bad thing after all? What if there was a way to make stress work for us? To help you and me become better men and women.
With all that is going on in the world right now it would be no surprise for anyone to feel a bit on edge or anxious. As I write this I have been in isolation for nearly three months. There are certainly days that I feel the compound effect of that much family time in a negative way.
In order to understand stress though and how to make it work for us there are a few terms and ideas that need to defined.
Homeostasis: A state of healthy, balanced, rest
The first is homeostasis. This is quite simply our state of rest or peace. Imagine a yogi in lotus position, resting his hands on his knees and chanting ommmm. A more realistic proposition would be the dream life of a perfect job and perfect family. Grass that is always cut to the perfect height and children who always respond with “yes, father” and “yes, mother.”
As idyllic as this may seem, none of us can live that way. Eventually your legs go numb and muscles would atrophy from lack of use. Also, relationships would be severed and emotional maturity would be stunted.
Homeostasis is peaceful yes, but truthfully not healthy when it is carried out unchecked.
What we need is stress. Stress is anything that disrupts that peaceful state of homeostasis. Typically, when we think of stress we imagine a negative event. Maybe job loss, the death of a loved one, anxiety or worry, or even physical injury. All of this is stress, but it is a certain type called distress.
Distress: Any stressor that causes lasting harm or injury
Think of the effects of smoking on the body. Aside from the ability to get away with more breaks from work there are no benefits of smoking. It causes long-term damage to your respiratory system, can lead to infertility and stains your teeth to look like Jim Carrey in the Grinch.
There is no upside to smoking. Other examples might include heavy drinking, consistently over training or over eating, and even not getting enough sleep. There are countless ways we can distress our bodies and build up a debt that we will have to pay for sooner or later.
Eustress: Stress that promotes growth and health
In contrast to distress there is eustress. As mentioned above when discussing homeostasis, none of us are able to maintain that state of being forever. Life happens.
Marriages take effort and work. Raising children is tiring. The most enjoyable job includes activities that aren’t ideal and if we don’t exercise or exert any effort we will never get stronger.
Eustress is stress that is done in a controlled way which contributes to our health. In contrast to smoking, training in high altitude will actually strengthen our respiratory system and allow us to work harder due to the increased stress load on our cardiovascular system.
There is a reason that a disproportionate number of ultra runners live in the mountainous western part of the United States, Colorado in particular. The added stress of living at such a high altitude is beneficial for the goals they have. Stress in this case is such a good thing that many people relocate for that specific reason.
What does this mean though for the normal person going about their day to day? Most of us are not professional trail runners and we don’t need to make it through a 100 mile run. We just need to make it through the week.
Define Your Baseline, Find Homeostasis
First, evaluate and define your baseline or where you are when in homeostasis. Without understanding what life looks like when you are free of stress and in a relaxed, comfortable state it can be easy to misinterpret stress.
Define Your Stressors
Second, it is helpful to define our stress as either distress or eustress. Some examples are obvious, such as the negative distress of excessive drinking and the positive eustress of learning a new skill. Write out everything that could be considered stress in your life and consider whether it has a more positive or negative impact on your health.
Surprisingly most of what qualifies as stress falls somewhere in the middle.
Consider the quarantine that is being enforced where I am living in Portugal.
What the government decides to enforce and require of its citizens is out of my control. Up until now they haven’t bothered to call me and ask my opinion and I doubt that will change.
What I am left with is the order to stay home and limit my interaction with others, only going out for necessary activities like grocery shopping or exercise. The isolation, restrictions, information overload and lack of purpose or drop in productivity can all lead to a surprising level of distress.
This can easily happen if one chooses to frame the experience in a negative way and focus only on the negative aspects of it.
The opposite can also be true. We have the power to think positively just as easily.
Reframe Your Stress In Light of Your Personal Goals
I recently went through the process of starting a company here in Portugal. It is safe to say that my sociology degree from Texas public university did not help me out much in that process.
I had to talk to banks, the local business office, set up social security payments, register the name and activities performed and make all the necessary connections with accountants, suppliers, contractors and others.
My Portuguese is decent but most of this vocabulary was not anything I was familiar with and at times I felt like I was back in language school. I knew little to nothing about what I was doing and there is no place that explains the process of how to go about it.
To say that the process was stressful would be an understatement. Sleepless nights and anxiety were the new norm when I allowed myself to give into them and try to figure out what I was doing lying in bed at night.
My long-term goal however was to integrate more fully in Portuguese culture and find a way to both better serve my community while also providing financially for my family. This was a necessary step in that process.
Rather than focus on the negative stress I had the opportunity to see it as a form of eustress. I was going through the growing pains of awkward conversations and risking the embarrassment of seeming unprepared but in the process I was learning new vocabulary, making important connections and learning what needed to be done in the future.
I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Once I gave myself permission to be a learner and not demand perfection from myself the whole process became slightly more enjoyable. There were still days that I don’t want to repeat but that is how stress works. It is uncomfortable for a time but when handled in a healthy way it serves to make us stronger and increase what we are able to handle.
Whether it be increased weight in the gym or more complicated conversations in a foreign language, stress is necessary to keep moving forward. Keeping my perspective focused on the ultimate goal, the need to pass through some challenges to arrive there seemed not only required but beneficial.
The stress would make the end result only that much more enjoyable. Would I want to go back and do it all again? No, but I am glad I did it once and know that part of my reward is a whole new set of opportunities of eustress in order to keep growing.
In conclusion, none of us can remove stress from our lives. It would actually be unhealthy to do so and only serve to make us weaker. What we can do however is reframe what we are experiencing and find a way to make the most of it.
- Define our baseline or state of homeostasis
- Define the stressors in our lives as either distress or eustress
- Reframe our situation, our stress, in order to make it positive and see it as an opportunity for long-term growth and health
The perfect life doesn’t exist and living stress-free is a pipe dream. By naming and reframing our stress we can however take control of the stress we deal with and use what could be interpreted as bad for our ultimate good.
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