On Stress

     About fifty years ago a Hungarian doctor named Hans Selye coined the word, stress, as a description of any external demands made on the body which provoked a response. By this standard, if I were sitting quietly and the phone rang, my response to answer it would be deemed a stress response. Simple enough, but over the last several decades our ideas of stress have expanded enormously. Dr. Selye himself helped with this expansion by making a distinction between stress and what he termed distress. According to him distress was a negative response to external demands, which gave it a lot more clout, and I guess we could say that the rest is history.

      We are awash now in concerns about too much stress or, more accurately, distress. We are aware of illnesses due to stress, jobs that cause stress, stressful relationships, and medications for stress. Maybe we ourselves are among those who have heart problems due to stress, or skin rashes, body pain, you name it. Entire professions have been formed around the handling of stress. We understand now that people, things or situations that promote stress are called stressors. I think that even more important is the discovery that we now know we don’t have to be tapped by something outside ourselves at all. We can stress ourselves to the max, endocrine glands cranked way up, by our own thoughts. Who would have thought that the activity of our own minds could be dangerous as well as inspiring?

      There are books out now with titles like Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life, and we ought to pay attention to them or at least to their major ideas. Quite simply, if we continually spend time worrying extensively, being angry, frightened or upset, we will be pumping chemicals into the body systems that will make them work overtime. It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that undue illness and early death can likely result. And we’ll need to figure out as well that the external world cannot help us. It will never calm down and be simple again, if, in fact, it ever was. Short of living in a convent or a monastery, we’ll need to do our own settling. Simple, maybe, but not necessarily easy. We cannot ask of people what they cannot or will not do and expect to come away at peace. We cannot expect our bodies to be good partners if we keep them ginned up through constant mental irritation. Self care and genuine self love---which is not to be confused with conceit---are necessary for personal well being. I believe we really are the tenders of a calm mind, not other people, and what’s more, we owe it to ourselves and all who love us to so tend. We need stimulation, of course, to get us off the couch and into action, but wisdom helps us to discern stimulation from inner assaults on the psyche. The world will always have its share of screaming meemies. Not a good idea to be one of them.