About Stress
On the nature of Stress, and a few pointers towards reliably managing it
Understanding and Managing Stress
I have met someone who has decided to work on something they find very important. I see them incurring stress and acting worse as a result.
I have a lot of thoughts about stress. People have found them useful in the past. I was thinking that I might as well write it down for once.
What Is Stress?
There are many aspects of stress. There's one aspect that I believe is worth keeping track of, and this is what I am going to call stress here.
Stress is the tension that results from doing things we don't want to do.
If I don't want to work, and I work, I incur stress. If I don't want to exercise, and I exercise, I incur stress. Simple as that.
The Psychology of Stress
Stress is eminently psychological.
If I start thinking about a part of my exercise routine that I look forward to, or if I add a minor pleasant thing to it (like listening to music, or drinking a zero-calorie drink), I can greatly reduce the stress that comes from it.
Finding such tricks is both a habit to develop and a pragmatic skill to learn.
If I connect my work to helping my family, my community, making money for things that I care about, or moving forward on my projects, then it feels meaningful and acceptable!
Conversely, if I don't feel why I am doing what I am doing, then I will incur stress.
There's a reason for why we do what we do. Finding that reason and keeping its meaning in mind is also a skill.
That skill is a bit harder than the one above because it is less concrete, but moderate introspection can get one there.
Psychology is not always winnable. We can easily find ourselves in situations where we'll incur stress regardless of what we do.
My favourite example is when I want to both work and play video games. If I work, I incur stress because I'd rather just chill and play some video games. If I play some video games, I incur stress because I could instead move forward on my projects.
A less fun example is a work or payment deadline: we don't want to be subject to it, and we'll incur stress for as long as we are.
Dealing with this psychologically is a skill, but one that is much harder to train alone (without a teacher) than the ones above.
Physical Manifestations of Stress
Stress manifests itself physiologically.
With some regular introspection, it becomes possible to develop more body awareness around stress. This lets us notice lower and lower levels of stress within ourselves, which helps us deal with it earlier rather than later.
As stress symptoms become more serious, they become more noticeable by others who pay attention to us.
Light head tension is one of the first symptoms of stress, and is usually hard to notice from the outside.
Muscle tension comes next. To people who have not developed body awareness, it's one of the symptoms that is hard to notice. But the skill of noticing muscle tension can be developed fairly quickly.
Then, we get into the visible symptoms.
The slightly more ragged breath. The higher heart rate. The jumpiness. Most people will notice them. Those who exhibit these symptoms will be less fluid than usual when they speak, their tone of voice will fluctuate much more, their movements will be less controlled, and others will feel less at ease around them.
Finally, we get into stronger forms of stress. It starts with the irascible tiredness phase of stress. We become much less patient, much more jumpy, we want to snap at people, we may even have fits of anger.
It continues with headaches, stomachaches and other forms of somatisation. This usually happens when we "hold our irascible tiredness in". Like, if we repress the stress and force ourselves not to snap and get angry.
And it ends with the infamous burnout.
For the record:
I am not good at biochemistry. But people who talk about this will usually say something like "Hmm, yes, indeed, as someone confronts more and more stressful circumstances over time, one may observe a commensurate increase in levels of cortisol and pyroxadrenaline."
I do not care much about evolutionary psychology. But people who talk about this will usually say things like "These symptoms are just your inner child and body energies trying to fight back against your environment. As you quash it more and more, it fights back even more until it gives up."
I think biochemistry and evolutionary psychology are largely superfluous here. There's a reason why I haven't paid much attention to them lol.
Stress Relief
Stress can be relieved. And the way stress relief works is quite strange.
Let's say we incur stress through some source, like a bad argument with a friend or looking at taxes.
Well, in that situation, we can relieve that stress through a completely unrelated way, like drawing, taking a nice shower or cleaning.
Stress reliefs can of course be more self-destructive (even stress inducing), like smoking or binge-eating.
I strongly recommend having a nice panoply of stress reliefs, and leveraging them to deal with short-term stressors.
However, relying on stress reliefs to deal with long-term stressors is a very expensive coping mechanism. It is neverending, akin to filling the basin of the Danaids.
I recommend only using stress reliefs for long-term stressors temporarily, whilst one builds a plan to deal with them; whether that is a change in circumstance through real-world action, or growing in self-mastery through meditation.
The Importance of Slack
Having slack is crucial to manage stress.
True slack comes in many forms.
Having some free time, with no external obligations.
Having some free attention, when one can let their mind wander freely.
Having some free emotional energy, where one can put their mind to some new endeavour.
All of them are necessary.
Life is unpredictable, and often so because of accidents. We had a plan, and reality decided to throw a stick in our wheels. We must pay a cost to deal with it, which is stressful in itself.
But if we have no slack, we get a double dose of stress: we have no free resources that we can use to deal with the accident, which means it will have to come out of an existing commitment. This means that on top of dealing with the accident, we also have to deal with breaking an existing part of our plans.
There are many parts of life that are unpredictable beyond accidents. Changes of circumstances are a big one: moving house, starting a new activity, meeting new people. Any change will introduce chaos, which will lead to some stress.
In a very concrete way, people who have no slack can hardly change: any attempt at building a new habit or changing their circumstances will introduce a double dose of stress that they can't deal with.
This is how people who don't save get trapped in dead-end jobs.
This is how people who don't have crucial needs met in other ways get trapped in dead-end relationships.
And so on.
Days off are important. Free time is important. Exploratory hobbies are important. Etc.
Sleep and Stress
There's a funky thing about stress.
To some extent, it lowers a lot after sleep. This includes naps.
The better sleep is, the more the stress lowers.
This makes sleep quite important for stress management.
This also leads to a common vicious circle: as someone gets more stressed, their sleep quality worsens, and their stress benefits less and less from sleep. This makes them more stressed, and in turn, their sleep quality worsens even more, etc.
There are other physiological elements that have similar interactions with stress. Exercising, diet, touching grass, breathing clean air, seeing the sun. But sleep is the biggest and most universal one in my opinion.
Stress Accumulation
Stress accumulates over time.
It may be obvious from what I have written so far, but I want to be clear about it.
The most obvious consequence is that we must manage our stress levels, the same way we must budget our money in our bank accounts.
Both increase and decrease over time, and we can forecast this. Not budgeting for stress is the same as being financially irresponsible.
It's very easy to run a debt and find ourselves paying exorbitant interest rates, culminating with a big beautiful burnout bankruptcy.
This is especially true in times of big changes.
From my point of view, the skills I recommend building are just investments. Finding positive ways to relieve stress, becoming better at measuring one's stress levels, understanding why we do what we do to better derive meaning from it, etc.
The Role of Meditation
Meditation is big. It helps in different ways, and different people may benefit from different forms of meditation at different times.
Some help with emptying one's mind. A lot of stress comes from thinking loops, like ruminations or guilt-tripping oneself.
Learning the skill of emptying one's mind protects one from such thinking loops forever, by granting them the ability to interrupt any arbitrary stream of thought.
Others help with body awareness. Many situations make it easy to notice they are stressful.
However, quite often, it is unclear, and people will not recognise that they are stressed: I regularly demonstrate to people that they are stressed by listing their symptoms and it helps them.
Learning the skill of recognising these symptoms in oneself dispenses with needing me around (and they can actually notice internal symptoms, which I could never do for them).
Yet others help with stress relief.
There are some meditation techniques that are about imagining a pleasant place, about calming oneself, or about directly dissolving a well-identified "stream" of stress.
And let's conclude here with forms of meditation that help with introspection.
Introspection is hard, because it often involves confronting our Shadow, our compulsions and traumas, our Original Sin. As we introspect, we keep flinching away and our attention keeps deviating from these hard topics.
Learning the skill of maintaining our attention on them is crucial to proper introspection.
Conclusion
I have more to say about stress, but let's leave it here for now. I hope it's already useful.
Cheers, and have a nice day!