Don't Pole Vault Over Rat Shit

By: Marlene Affeld

We all live in a chaotic world beset with family obligations, career challenges, professional pressures, budget woes, schedules, deadlines, relationship issues, and seemingly overwhelming obstacles and goal-distracting diversions.

Most days, I manage to cope. I tell myself if I can just get through until next Tuesday, next month, or make it past the gray and rainy days of winter, I will get myself together. I will stop feeling like I'm living life behind the 8-ball. Wrong!

Time passes. I am not alone. It happens to everybody. The days slip away, until smacked in the face with a dark feeling of dread, we wonder. What if, what the world expects of us, is more than we can deliver?

Overwhelmed, we feel depleted, unable to meet the avalanche of demands placed upon us. We experience stress, feeling like we are fighting a war on all fronts and the enemy is advancing.

Types Of Stress

In a balanced life, stress is a good thing. Stress prompts us to stay focused, aware, and alert. Stress boosts our productivity. A type of stress, eustress, is an integral part of a joyful, satisfying life.

Eustress is the stress we experience riding a roller coaster, falling in love, or participating in a risky business investment or extreme sport. Eustress brings sizzle and spice to our experiences; we feel vital and alive.

Problems present when life's demands exceed our limitations and negate our ability to cope. This type of stress, known as distress, becomes an ominous threat to both our emotional and physical health, negatively impacting our bodies, thoughts, emotions, relationships, and behavior.

Flight or Fight

Whenever our personal safety or emotional equilibrium becomes threatened, our bodies instantly react with a "flight or fight" response. Bring it on! We are ready, or so we tell ourselves.

Stress is both a psychological and physiological reaction to situations or events that disrupt our personal sense of balance.

What Triggers A Stress Reaction?

Fear-provoking situations, regardless if real or imagined, trigger stress reactions; when danger presents itself, the body's defenses activate automatically. Prepare for a tsunami-sized tidal wave of greater than 1400 internal reactions to occur when our bodies are faced with an emergency.

Reactions include the dumping of a diverse array of stress hormones, such as norepinephrine, cortisol, and adrenaline, into our systems. These powerful chemicals race through our bloodstream, empowering us to react rapidly to the perceived threat.

Everyone has at some time experienced the body's response to stress: fluttering, faint, or rapid heartbeat, shallow breathing, muscles tense with anxiety, blood pressure soars, and all our senses on full alert. It isn't a pleasant feeling and is often terrifying. Many people feel desperate, out of control, falling, and bracing for what can only be a dreadful crash.

Everyone's Reaction To Stress Varies

The "flight or fight" response is primal in everyone who encounters stress. However, the threshold that puts us in distress differs from person to person. What aggravates or saddens me may not bother you. What terrifies me; you may meet with resolve, confidence, and assurance.

For primitive man, this response was life-saving in that it enhanced his stamina and increased his ability to react to danger and physical challenges.

In response to stress, heart rate and blood pressure escalate to increase the flow of blood to the brain to improve awareness and improve decision-making. Blood clotting occurs more rapidly to prevent blood loss. Blood sugar rises to provide additional fuel for energy. These and a host of other actions in our bodies persist as long as the threat continues. When danger disappears, our adrenalin-charged bodies return to normal.

Today, stress tends to be more insidious, more persistent, and more pervasive than our forefathers endured. Modern-day stress most often activates from psychological triggers rather than physical threats.

However, our bodies do not recognize the difference. Our bodies respond with the identical "flight or fight" response to every situation that upsets our personal balance. When we experience a bad day at work, problems in our personal relationships, or we are stuck in traffic, we react. Physical responses that are meant to support and protect us are, instead, potentially damaging and injurious to both our physical and emotional well-being.

How Do Your React To Stress?

If you, too, live a fast-paced life with a lot of pressures, worries, obligations, and responsibilities, it is more than likely that you are running on stress the majority of the time. Do you escalate into an emergency mode with every looming professional deadline, family crisis or a past due bill that shows up in the mailbox? If so, then you know the drill.

Repeated or extended activation of the "flight or fight" response is especially dangerous as the more times it activates, the harder it is to shut it off. Instead of leveling off once the crisis is over, heart rate, blood pressure, and stress hormone production persist at an elevated level.

Continuous or prolonged exposure to stress increases our risk of short-term memory problems. Anxiety, depression, panic attacks, strokes, cardiovascular disease, infection, or reduced immune function, as well as obesity, diabetes, and stomach ulcers, may occur.

Due to the life-threatening damage stress can cause, it is imperative that we learn how to handle stress in a more positive manner and reduce its corrosive impact on optimum health.

Symptoms Of Stress

The symptoms of stress often mimic other medical problems. Lack of energy, stamina, endurance, less productivity at work, fatigue, and abdominal discomfort are common. Severe headaches, reduced libido, erectile dysfunction, backache or neck pain as well as chest pain, breathlessness, heart palpitations, and cold, clammy skin present symptomatic of the body's reaction to stress.

Managing Stress

It is imperative to our pursuit of health and happiness that we make dealing with stress a priority in our lives. Not only can stress severely affect our health, but we also may not even realize it until the damage occurs. To be proactive in the pursuit of optimum health, it is important that we understand stress, recognize the symptoms and then take affirmative steps to manage the predictable stress reaction triggers in our daily lives.

There are multiple ways to manage and reduce stress. First, try to find a caring and supportive doctor. Share with your physician the emotions you are experiencing and the physical symptoms your body exhibits when you are exposed to stress. Open communication is a vital step in securing the help you need.

Cognitive therapy, a short-term type of psychotherapy based on the belief that we can change how we feel by changing the way we think about things, is often quite effective.

Actively pursue stress-relieving techniques that work for you. Healthcare providers suggest increasing your amount of daily exercise and physical activities. Support your body with adequate rest and proper nutrition. If you need to drop a few pounds, do it.

Stress reduction techniques, such as meditation and yoga, can be beneficial. Talking with family, friends or joining a support group can be emotional lifesavers and help offset our feelings of social isolation. A burden shared is lighter than one carried alone.

When Stressed - Decompress

Medical practitioners tell us it is helpful to withdraw from the situation, evaluate our feelings from a distance and gain perspective. Try to breathe deeply, take a walk, re-focus, and attempt to think of something else. I find it helpful to remember my father's sage advice. "Suck it up, buttercup! This, too, will pass."