subject: How A Little Stress Leads to More Stress …and what to do about it [print this page] How A Little Stress Leads to More Stress and what to do about it
A little stress goes a long way, because it leads to more stress, until you don't know how to stop the whole process. But there is some good news.
An estimated 10% of stress is due to what happens to us such as job loss, accidents, major damage to our home, to ourselves or to a loved one.
Here's the good news, though: 90% of stress is created by our reaction to that 10%! And those reactions can be under your control.
Here are some of the ways stress leads to more stress:
Sleeplessness: Probably the first reaction to stress is loss of sleep, either through having difficulty going to sleep, or waking up in the middle of the night. When this happens, your threshold for reacting to something unpleasant lowers. Even a loud noise will result in a bigger startle response than when you're relaxed. Sudden changes in plans, minor disagreements with family, friends or colleagues, all seem more serious. Your stressed emotional state may result in your damaging valuable relationships, and when you are really stressed, you may find it difficult to repair those relationships. Even minor changes at work may seem more than you can handle. You escalate your negative reactions, such as frustration, anger, or depression, which in turn lead to more sleepless nights. Prolonged sleep deprivation is even associated with major illness, such as a heart attack.
Solution: Guard your sleep as if it were your greatest treasure. Pick a bedtime and stick to it. Avoid vigorous exercise or stimulating foods, such as coffee, in the hour before bedtime. Alcohol may make you sleepy, but it won't let you get into the deep stage of sleep that you need to feel refreshed. Heavy foods, especially meats such as steak, which are hard to digest, should be eaten well before bedtime. Try warm milk or a cup of cocoa instead. And a warm bath is a great relaxer.
Poor Food Choices: As your stress level rises, you start to crave fats, sugar, and salt Foods high in these substances may initially dampen the stress response but then increase your stress level. For example, sugar may give you a quick spurt of energy, followed by even less energy than you had before you ate it. Furthermore, they increase your craving for more of the same foods. You've gotten into a vicious circle.
Solution: Beef up your diet with complex carbohydrates. Have a big bowl of satisfying oatmeal, a bran muffin, or whole wheat toast for breakfast. It will keep you comfortably full and calm all morning. If you must have a bedtime snack, make it light and full of complex carbohydrates.
For snacks, try a cup of green tea (even the caffeinated variety has a calming effect), and pick fruits, fresh or dried, to accompany it. And a great comfort food/snack are pistachios, which actually relax the blood vessels so prominent in the stress response.
At mealtimes, make sure that half of your plate is filled with vegetables. A balanced diet will help you fend off those cravings for fat, salt, and sugar.
Rushing to nowhere: As the stress level builds, you feel rushed all the time. You make little mistakes, such as rushing to the post office and then finding you have left the package on your desk. So now you have made extra work for yourself.
You do more multi-tasking, such as sorting and opening mail while talking on the telephone, making you feel hurried. Once again, you are more likely to make a mistake, such as throwing away an important bill, which will cost you more time, making you feel more hurried and irritated. Or you get into a "head down, elbows out" style of walking that is exhausting, even though there is no race and no prize.
It's as if life consists only of a series of emergencies.
Solution: Periodically take a deep breath, exhale (that's where the relaxation comes) and ask yourself, "Is this rush really necessary?" When going someplace or starting a new activity, pause, take that deep breath, and ask, "What do I need to do or to take with me to make this activity work?"
Exaggerated importance of everything you do: When you hear yourself repeatedly saying, "I have to do this", and "If I don't do it, it won't get done right", you should recognize that you have lost sight of the idea that you have choices in life. You are now deeply into a stressful life.
Once you no longer recognize that you do have choices, you no longer respond flexibly to new situations . You are locked into automatic patterns of behavior that don't necessarily fit the new situation.
For example, you may hear a helpful comment made by another person about a job you are doing, hear it as criticism of you, and become defensive. You experience stress, and you find yourself unable to switch to another, more efficient way of doing the same job.
As your stress level builds, you may start to feel helpless, and prolonged helplessness is an extremely stressful state that can make you vulnerable to serious illness.
So: how do you interrupt this cycle? Guard your sleep, make food choices that contribute to a healthy, slow-burning energy level, and slow down enough to distinguish what is really important from what is not.
Remind yourself periodically that it's not what's happening to you, it's how you are thinking about what's happening to you. That you can change!
