The seasons are changing, midterms are here, our kids and our parents are getting older, the bills keep coming, bosses are asking more of us (often without incentive or compensation), we’re more diagnosed than at any other time in history, and the economy is… what it is. And for many of us and our clients, that’s just the beginning.
Take five minutes to watch this music video by Queen from 1982. Listen to or look up the lyrics. Notice the imagery. Does it feel like much has changed? Do you feel like things have gotten better? Worse? Both? Did it stress you out just to watch?
The Concept of Stress
“Stress can be defined as any event in which environmental or internal demands tax our adaptive resources”
Elizabeth D. Hutchison
Stress can impact our body systems (digestion, immune, hormone, etc.), our cognitive and emotional states, and stress can be social. Hutchison describes 3 catagories of stress: positive, tolerable, and toxic. Positive stress is usually temporary changes in heart rate, blood pressure, and stress hormone levels caused by any one or combination of daily frustrations like traffic or minor injuries. Tolerable stress usually comes from more serious or significant events, like the death of a loved one, and is also usually temporary. Toxic stress can have serious impacts on the nervous system and is characterized as strong, frequent, and prolonged activation of the body’s stress response. Experiencing abuse, neglect, violence, or other instability over extended periods of time exposes people to toxic stress.
With positive and tolerable stress, protective relationships and appropriate adaptive responses can help the stress response system to return to its normal levels. However, with toxic stress, the prolonged disruption to the nervous system functions can lead to fragile stress management systems throughout a lifetime. So basically, positive and tolerable stress can be addressed and remedied often easier and faster than toxic stress, especially with a good support system*. Toxic stress can make it hard to even build or maintain a support system*.
*support systems can take many forms, but in this blog post the term means having the support of one’s friends, family, and/or community along with individual coping strategies such as mindfulness, artful expression, or other non-harmful ways of coping.
Psychological Stress
Lazarus(2007) discusses 3 types of psychological stress: harm, threat, & challenge
HARM
Threat
Challenge
When a damaging
event has occurred.
perceived potential harm
or
anticipated harm
an event seen as an
opportunity rather than
cause for alarm
The main difference here is that when harm has been done or a threat is anticipated, the body and mind respond defensively; whereas with a challenge, there may be a feeling of unsteadiness, but there is also excitement and a positive association between what the challenge is and what we are capable of. Say a client is struggling with asking their partner for help, but loves to be helpful when the roles are reversed. They may have a sense of threat that their request will be met with hostility based on past experiences, but feel as though providing help as something they can do well, even if it’s a difficult task or timely commitment. Both instances involve stress, but different kinds of stress.
Stress and Crisis
“A crisis is a major upset in our psychological equilibruim due to some harm, threat, or challenge with which we cannot cope.”
James & Gilliland, 2013
A crisis happens when we have to face a serious stressor that we have never had to face before. It can take the form of physical illness, the unexpected loss of a loved one, or be a major environmental change like a natural disaster or suddenly losing a job.
Traumatic Stress
“The term traumatic stress is used to refer to events that involve actual or threatened severe injury or death.”
Elizabeth D.Hutchison
Traumatic stress can be initiated by natural or nuclear disasters or exposure to or involvement in war. Traumatic stress can also be initiated by experiencing more personal or individual harm, such as rape or abuse. While this is not an exhaustive list of what can initiate traumatic stress, these types of events seem to be among the most common.
The experience of trauma is often a state of emotional discomfort when having memories of an event or experience which destroyed a person’s sense of safety. Trauma can start with a single event, long term and repetitive events (known as complex trauma), and even as a secondary event- which is when someone we care about is harmed and we experience harm, as well.
Different events impact different people in different ways, so five people experiencing the same event or situation will have five different responses. The potential to successfully cope is often related to a person’s support systems, and access to additional support and other resources.
This hour long video actually goes by pretty quickly and does a great job at explaining how stress impacts the nervous system, including the brain, and the rest of the body. (You can start it at the 4 minute mark and not miss much)
Coping
Coping includes the thoughts, feelings, and actions that people use to master the demands of stress. Our bodies try to cope with stress by sending, receiving, and responding to signals being send to and from the brain in order to regain equilibrium. Psychologically, we try to cope with stress in many ways; we may avoid stressors, deny their existence, intellectualize them in an effort to remove emotion from decision making, or we may try something else. In the end, coping happens both in the body and the mind. People who have experienced traumatic events can benefit from interventions that address both the cognitive and emotional aspects of mental life.
Social support can also play a huge role in coping success. Social support can be material, such as providing food, clothing, or other tangible forms of support; emotional, such as listening or sitting with someone who is struggling to cope; instrumental support, such as services provided by grocers or landlords; or other ways people can be there for each other.
Comments
8 responses to “Under Pressure”
Life is stressful in general but how we see and deal with it matters. I guess staying positive and learning how to deal with is as well as see it as a lesson should be good enough to hold ourselves together. Good lesson from your blog!
Thanks for reading my blog, Ada! Learning how to cope with stress is so important, and it can be hard to keep it all together without skills and supprt.
The way you started off your blog was so relatable.
You did a great job breaking down the three categories of stress. Now that I’m aware that there is positive, tolerable, and toxic levels of stress I feel like I can identify the way I’m feeling and my body’s response to the stress in a more logical way. When I get overly stressed it can be difficult for me to identify the physical symptoms and the triggers, but if I can revert back to this and understand what I’m experiencing, it can ground me and remind me that everyone experiences stress.
I did my blog on coping and adaption and it dove into the important of social support. It crazy to thinking about how biologically and emotionally- in every sense of the word.. humans are designed to give and receive love and support. It’s essential to development and wellness. I hope you are feeling supported and cared for in this season. It’s hard out here!
I think you did a fantastic job on this blog.
Hi Adrianna, knowing the different kinds of stress can definitely help process and identify what we are going through and help us figure out what we need in moments of stress. I’m glad that section was helpful for you. I love the point you made about the impact social support can make and how essential giving and receiving love and support are to survival.
Honestly, I am feeling an almost overwhelming amount of support right now. I have family and friends in the lower 48 who are being awesome and checking in on me, as well as keeping me updated about what I’m missing at home. My instructors and classmates here at UAF have been incredible this semester and are helping me get my footing as I’m preparing for my final year of my bachelors. And I’m working with a counselor who I have good chemistry with and he’s helping me gain some skills I can use during stressful times. I feel very thankful and very lucky. I hope you are feeling cared for and supported, too!
Hey Charles,
First, you did a fantastic job on this blog! I love the song you picked; I’m a huge Queen fan, but also, wow, not much has changed. I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times but have never seen the music video and it caused me to feel a little uneasy watching it, but also made me realize life is still the same – it’s stressful!
While reading this week’s chapter I became self-aware of one of my coping mechanisms that I didn’t notice prior. It’s been a *stressful* (laughing because that’s what your whole blog is about) week, so I forgot about it until I read your blog. I find that intellectualize my feelings instead of feeling my emotions, in fact for the longest time I couldn’t even tell you how I felt. Gabor Mate talks about this quite a bit and I find his work particularly healing. As you addressed, I think social support is foundational when it comes to coping during stressful periods. Do you think our individualistic society makes it difficult to find a supportive community? If so, how do you think we can change that?
Hi Alexa, I’m glad you saw where I was going with the song at the beginning. It is an uneasy video for sure, but watching it and listening to the lyrics always makes me think about how stressful our society has been for a long time.
I’m with you, I can intellectualize all day but actually feeling has been a challenge. I’m glad Gabor Mate has been helpful for you, his insights and perspective have helped me, too! I think our individualistic society does make it difficult to find a supportive community- especially for people who did not grow up with the kind of supports they needed as kids. But overall, I think the desire to appear as though we are “keeping it together” or succeeding despite hardship creates a situation where we think other people wont understand or will judge us, when often times other people have been through the same things and can sympathize OR may not understand but are still willing to help.
Some ways I think we can change that are looking for opportunities to help each other, showing up to community events with the goal of making connections (even if they’re temporary and surface-level connections), and asking for help when we need it more often. I know a lot of people are quick to recommend being more open and vulnerable, and I think there are definitely times and places for that, but I think it really starts with those random connections with your grocery store clerk or the other coworker who joined the Zoom a few minutes early.
Hi Charles.
What drew me to your blog post, was the title itself. “Stress.” Stress will always be my number enemy in my life. I have found myself surrounded by my own stress, meaning I tend to make it more powerful than my own true self. I let it define who I am as a person. As I read through your blog post, I realized that stress can be in different forms rather than a general word. As I was reading, I thought to myself that maybe because I am not included in this list of examples, then I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. But I recently watched and reflected on one of the videos of this week called “National Geographic: The Science of Stress.” The one thing I want to mention about this specific video is that it states something along the lines of “Stress responses are more dangerous than the actual reason for stress.” This made me realize that maybe it is not what I am stressing about, it is how I am reacting and coping with it. Thank you for sharing.
Hi Carmen! I think you’re right, our reactions to stress are so important. Unfortunately, a lot of us were not raised with healthy coping skills or with examples of how to manage and approach stress. What are some ways you can find and explore different coping strategies that might work for you?