One by one, the twenty or so participants in the stress workshop I was conducting for the employees of a major Canadian corporation, introduced themselves and shared their favourite stress reduction activity.
I smiled. This was an exercise I'd had groups go through many times before. It had a two fold purpose. By encouraging members to talk, I was preparing them for greater participation later on; and, of course, it was an opportunity to share information others could find useful. The response I was getting at this workshop was very typical. There seemed nothing here I couldn't have predicted. The stress relief provided by the kinds of activities that were being mentioned, was usually thought to be due either to the fact that they provided a diversion from life's real problems, or because they induced a mild meditative effect. On the desk before me, I had overheads illustrating techniques of considerably greater sophistication and effectiveness.
However, as we went around the room, something was beginning to bother me. There was a factor contained in the very predictability of these responses that I was missing. An idea played teasingly around the edges of my awareness.
Worthy? Worthiness? The idea hidden in the brush at the back of my mind had shown itself for a moment in the middle of Razia's answer. I was listening to the participants much more intensely now. Getting excited. Interesting connections beginning to form as more and more people rose to speak.
People were warming up to the exercise now. I began to wonder, when I was last under stress, how did I handle it? Did I meditate, do deep breathing, yoga, tune into my self-talk, identify my errors and replace them with healthier and more realistic judgments? Well, yes I did. But first I went out into the backyard and spent an hour mowing the lawn. Had I spent so much time burnishing up my more elaborate techniques that I had been blinded to the importance of everyday stress management tools? Was there, as well, something behind these activities lending them a potency I hadn't appreciated?
The idea that finally evolved that day, proved to be as simple and obvious as the activities themselves. There was, indeed, a factor common to all of these everyday behaviours that explained their surprising effectiveness as stress management tools. But to fully understand the concept I stumbled upon that day, we need to take a closer look at stress, its nature and effects.
The importance of stress as a factor in human affairs was brought to the world's attention by Montreal researcher Dr. Hans Selye. As he defined it, stress is merely the response of an organism to its environment. If the environment is healthy and the response is healthy, then stress is healthy. However, if either the environment or the response is unhealthy, then we get distressed. Distress, according to Selye, is the activation of the Fight or Flight response. The hypothalamus and adrenal glands are activated, pumping a hormone cocktail into our systems that raises our blood pressure, redirects our blood supply to the large muscle groups and basically prepares our bodies for vigorous and possibly violent activity. However, neither physically attacking your unreasonable boss nor running screaming from the office, activities your body has now prepared you for, are considered extremely bright career moves. Therein lies the dilemma.
Too much distress over a protracted period of time accelerates the rate of aging of the body and is indicated as a factor in many serious medical disorders including arthritis, peptic ulcers, high blood pressure, heart attacks and cancer.
If you can think of stress levels on a ten point scale, where 0 is the amount of stress experienced just before drifting off into a peaceful sleep and 10 is the most extreme stress you have ever experienced (see figures 1 & 2). Somewhere along that scale is a threshold that divides stress from distress. The most important factor in determining where along the 10 point continuum that threshold lies, is your level of self esteem. If your level of self-esteem is high the dividing line between stress and distress might be around levels eight or nine. In other words, you can tolerate a great deal of stress before you become distressed. However, if your self-esteem is quite low, it might be around a level four, meaning almost anything is potentially distressing. We can, therefore, deal with distress in one of two ways: we can lower our level of stress, or increase our level of self-esteem. Or, preferably, both.
Techniques for reducing the level of stress were the areas focused on that day in my workshop. What I was overlooking was the area of self-esteem. Self-esteem can be thought of as our estimate [or esteemate] of ourselves. The higher that estimate proves to be, the less distress we experience. Psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden has defined self -esteem as the composite of two elements--our estimate of our self worth and our estimate of our competence. If we view ourselves as basically honest, trustworthy, and deserving of respect, then our feeling of self-worth is probably high. If our abilities meet or exceed our needs we are likely to view ourselves as basically competent. And correspondingly our self-esteem should be in good shape.
But what does having a bath, ironing, going for a drive, going shopping, or any of the other responses given by workshop participants that day, have to do with self-esteem? Knitting socks is surely unlikely to raise our self-esteem level sufficiently to cope with, for example, the bank foreclosing on our home. It might be a great way to feed denial, but it is not likely to do much for anyone's self-esteem!
As it turned out, that line of reasoning is exactly where I was making my mistake. True these activities neither create nor enhance self-esteem. However, they do do something of equal importance. They are simple activities that remind us of our basic competence and our basic self-worth.
Stress affects our ability to concentrate, erodes our ability to remain aware of all the resources we have to bring to bear on the problems confronting us. One of the most important assets we have available to us is a healthy self-esteem. In its own individualised way, the activities mentioned by each of the workshop participants served to remind them of their fundamental competence or self-worth.
That is what I became aware of during the workshop. All of the stress reduction activities the participants were giving were reminders of those two defining areas of self-esteem.
The activities that helped participants reconnect with the experience of their personal competence were--playing racquetball, driving a car, ironing, woodworking, knitting, golfing, model building, cooking, baking, playing almost any sport, computer games, crossword puzzles, washing dishes, cleaning the car or house, having sex, gardening and lawnmowing.
Activities that helped participants reconnect with the experience of feelings of self-worth were--shopping, having a long bath with scented oil, going out to dinner with friends, visiting the hairdresser, relaxing by the fire with a good book, going to a dance, or to the theatre or to the movies, praying, listening to favoured music, enjoying dessert and making love.
All of these activities allow us to get away, to take a break, from pressing concerns and engage in behaviours that are rewarding or that celebrate our ability. Activities that say, you've done it in the past, you can do it again in the future. Congratulations, you deserve it. Because these behaviours reconnect us to our self-esteem, they have a potency far beyond their everyday facade. More extreme or persistently high levels of stress may require some of the more elaborate techniques I was sharing with the workshop participants that day. Or may even require the services of a support group, psychotherapy or even medical intervention. However, activities similar to those indicated above remain for most people, the first line of defence against distress.
Now there are two potential dangers associated with relying on these common activities. The first I've touched on earlier, these activities can be used as tools of denial. If, every time there is a family crises, you run out to the garage to work on your car, you're not reconnecting with your sense of personal competence, you're hiding from life.
The second danger arises from the fact that self-esteem is of vital importance to our mental health. In the absence of a healthy self-esteem to be reminded of, there is the temptation to use these activities to create the illusion of self-esteem. If you are not doing well at work and you run to the mall and buy clothes you can't afford, it's not self-esteem you are creating, but self-aggrandizement. In the long run, the stress required to support an illusion is going to be far more than that with which you started.
These dangers aside, having a deeper understanding of the motivation behind the common stress relievers we all use can help us to use them more effectively and with greater skill and precision.
I recommend them to you. And now, if you will excuse me, I think I hear the lawn mower calling.
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