Taking appropriate action of some kind both relieves the stress and helps us avoid developing anxiety.
Imagine for a moment that we are our long-ago ancestors, still living in the wild. Our very survival depends on our being ready to react instantly, if a wild boar thunders out of the undergrowth or members of a hostile tribe come over the hill towards us. As soon as we sense a threat, a cascade of bodily events is triggered to help us cope. Almost instantly, the following happens:
Our muscles tense ready for action. Our blood pressure goes up, to increase the circulation to our muscles and heart, which beats faster, to cope with the expected increased demands on it. We breathe faster, to speed up the time oxygen takes to get into our blood, and that makes our anxiety chests hurt and our bodies tremble. To divert as much blood as possible to our limbs to aid action, our digestion is interrupted, making our saliva dry up, and our kidney, intestine and bladder functions stop, causing the muscles at the opening of the anus and bladder to start to relax.
We sweat, to try to cool ourselves. Our bodies are flooded with ‘stress’ hormones that enable all these responses to happen and, as a result, we immediately flee the wild boar or fight the unwelcome tribesmen.
Once the threat is over, if we are still alive to tell the tale that is, our hearts slowly pound less, the shaking gradually stops and the sick feeling passes, as our blood circulation returns to normal and digestion and the other regulatory functions start up again. The stress hormones that were swarming through our body have been burned up during the action we took or else are neutralised as our body maintenance gets back to usual business.
This excellent system has served us well for millions of years. But it was designed to deal with circumstances in which we could take action. The stresses we face today are less often of the life-threatening kind. More usually, we find ourselves in circumstances where we feel psychologically threatened (the boss is critical of our work; someone else is getting our promotion; we’re being bullied at college; a neighbour is continually picking arguments).
Or we feel unsafe (we may fear walking the streets at night or meeting gangs of teenagers; the news is full of gloomy predictions about wars and global warming and deadly diseases).
Or we feel ‘cornered’ – but not by a wild beast that we can flee – we are stuck in a traffic jam; work deadlines are unrealistic; the phone keeps ringing.
The very primitive, early-developed part of our brain (which gives the directions that set our fight-or-flight response in motion) is not able to distinguish between events like those above which it perceives as threatening and those that actually are life threatening. Even worse, it cannot distinguish between real or imagined life-threatening events either. (“I’ll die if I have to get up on that stage and speak!”) Indeed, when the fight-or-flight mechanism first evolved, we didn’t have a ‘thinking’ brain and there was no such thing as imagination. So now, if we imagine ourselves experiencing disaster vividly enough, we can still easily trigger off the fight-or-flight response.
But, when we are being criticised by the boss, sitting stewing in a traffic jam or imagining being trapped in a lift, there is nowhere to run to and no one to fight. And, although the physiological arousal that is switched on when we get stressed in such ways is mopped up quite quickly, an expectation – that something will or should happen – also gets switched on in the brain, and stays switched on, taking up our attention and energy.
This is a cumulative process and, with each additional stress, not only does more and more arousal occur but more and more expectation patterns stay switched on in our brains.
Eventually this puts too much stress on us physically and it is at this point that one person might start to develop anxiety headaches or angina; another will turn to drink; and you may develop an anxiety disorder. Whatever the reaction, it is the body’s message that it has been pushed too far.
Of course, stressful events will always happen. Some will drop out of the blue to scupper our plans, however well we may think we have prepared for every eventuality. At some point, someone we love will die. Companies go bust. Fires, floods and other natural disasters are all out of our control.
But what is within our control is learning how to deal with stress when it arises. By taking appropriate action of some kind, we can dissipate the stress hormones – this both relieves the stress and helps us to avoid developing anxiety.
So, while we can’t prevent a lot of the stressful events we face in life, we can develop psychological robustness.
