Thread by @EmmaLK

March is here. It is now officially a full year since my family and I were all diagnosed with Covid. A year of nerding out on the psychological literature surrounding trauma so I could understand what was happening to me. So, here it is. Your latest thread...

I’ve been thinking about stress. Because who hasn’t. Stress is my life. I have been called sensitive, a worrier and other things I don’t feel comfortable repeating in polite society. Over the years, stress has become my biggest foe.

But over the past couple of months, I have learned something that I wanted to share with you, in the hopes that it would help you as much as it helped me.

Over the past year, we have all become intimately acquainted with the stress response. The racing heart, the sweaty palms, the whirling brain. And so we do our best to tamp it down, make it go away. Yoga. Chocolate. Scented candles. Wine.

After all, when an entire world of information is telling us just how bad stress is for us, OF COURSE we want to stop it.

In essence what has happened is that we have learned to treat the stress response as a threat. And so we become stressed about being stressed. And that threat interpretation has an effect, not just psychologically, but also physically.

It changes the way your body functions, making you less efficient. The stress as a threat mindset means that we perceive it as something we need to avoid. That avoidant state triggers you to pull away from the world.

The other thing it does is create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once we have decided that something is a threat, we look for evidence to support our conclusions. That means we are primed to seek out the negatives in our environment and are more likely to overlook the positives.

When we are in a state of threat avoidance, our thinking becomes more limited, less creative. We struggle to problem solve and become more rigid in our interpretations of the world.

And round and round we go.

But…what if you did something different? What if, instead of feeling that racing heart and brain and calling it stress, we called it excitement. Same symptoms. Different conclusion.

I can hear you rolling your eyes, but bear with me…

By changing the label we apply to the stress response, we actually do something quite remarkable. Rather than interpreting stress as a threat, if we interpret it as a challenge. That simple tweak in our mindset can actually nudge our body into behaving differently.

It doesn’t reduce the physiological stress response. In fact, the ‘challenge’ response leads to an increase in cortisol levels. But cortisol gets a bad rap. Labelled as the stress hormone, it would be better thought of as the approach hormone.

We get it when we are preparing to tackle the world head on.

People who label stress as a challenge perform better in exams, in social situations, they report feeling better adapted, have higher self esteem. That’s because the challenge interpretation is an approach state. These people are primed to approach life, not run from it.

The stress response is, and always has been, a tool. Evolution inherently leans towards adaptation. Giving us skills that will help. And, for all of the trouble it causes, the stress response is fundamentally one of those skills. It was designed to help us run from tigers.

Or, if you're my children, from showers. But I digress…

When you feel those early signs of adrenaline, remind yourself that far from being something designed to ruin your life, this uncomfortable feeling is here to help you deal with those things that must be dealt with.

We have all learned this past year that disaster can come for us whether we are ready for it or not.

So use what tools you have. Yes, you are stressed. We are all stressed. We are stressed because our bodies and brains are gearing up to do impossible things, day after day.

We are stressed because Mother Nature knew what she was doing when she built us. And because we are stressed, we can handle whatever life has to throw at us.

Here is the signup form if you would like pandemic psychology direct to your inbox. There will occasionally also be photos of baby penguins, if the nerd stuff wasn't enough to tempt you.
eepurl.com/holqCn