| The Principles of Stress
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What factors influence our stressful interpretations? The phone rings and jars me awake. It is very late. I glance at the clock - 1.30 a.m. I begin to react. Our bedroom jack is unplugged so it takes me a moment, still half asleep, to realize that the distant sound from the kitchen is a telephone ringing. I figure that out and my body goes into a full-blown stress reaction. My heart is pounding. I can barely get the phone plug into the wall because my hand is shaking do badly. If you think this reaction by a family doctor to a phone ringing late at night is a bit strange, you're right. In fact, the whole incident was quite out of character for me. As a family physician for 17 years, my phone rang in the middle of the night all the time. I can't say I enjoyed it (there's an understatement!) but I never had a stress reaction. However, this situation was different. The year was 1987. I had given up general practice in 1985, so our phone never rang after 11:00 P.M. anymore. But the more significant issue was that a close relative was in hospital. When the phone rang, I immediately assumed something terrible had happened. As I noted in my last column, situations rarely, in themselves, cause stress in our bodies. They may trigger stress, but the real cause is the voice in our head that talks to us, interpreting and giving meaning to events as they occur. As my telephone example illustrates, our interpretations don't take place in a vacuum. They're based on, or influenced by, a number of factors, including past experience and present circumstance or context. When my phone rang routinely after midnight, there was nothing stressful about it. But, for two years there had been no late-night calls - making this an unusual event. The fact that someone close to me was now sick got my mind - and body - immediately jumping to conclusions. Here's another illustration of The Stress Pathway: the reactions people have when a fire bell goes off. The event is a ringing sound which everyone hears. But they don't all react the same way. Some people are blase while others think it's rather exciting. Some welcome it as a break from work where others get stressed or even panicky. Past experience strongly influences these responses. If the only fire alarms you've ever heard were false alarms or fire drills, you'd probably react casually. But two of my patients told me they get very stressed when they hear a fire bell. I asked why. In one case, the person's father was a fire fighter; in the other, the patient had lost a close relative in a house fire. Current circumstances also influence our interpretations. On several occasions the fire alarms went off while I was sitting in our hospital cafeteria. Since I was sitting on the main floor, beside a large window and very near an exit door, I assessed the situation and concluded I was perfectly safe - so I continued to enjoy my lunch, as did all my tablemates. However, we reacted quite differently the day a fire engine actually arrived on the scene. I also responded differently when I was on the 63rd floor of a Toronto skyscraper when a fire alarm went off. I didn't panic, but I took it seriously and moved smartly down the stairwells. Fortunately, the alarm stopped before I got too far. Good thing too - I was starting to feel like a corkscrew, whipping around all those corners. So our stress reactions result not from what happens but from our evaluation of what the event means. We take many things into account in reaching these conclusions (similarity to past situations, current conditions, beliefs, fears, and expectations) and we do so very quickly. The main assessment we make is: am I in danger or not? If it's yes, our bodies react with a stress reaction. If we judge that we're not in harm's way, we usually relax. This leads to an important lesson. If our thoughts produce stress,
can we reduce it by changing the way we think? Absolutely. In fact,
it's one of the best tools we have. I used this principle after my 1:30
a.m. phone call - which, incidentally, turned out to be a wrong number.
After that event, I decided to train myself to automatically assume
any late night phone call was a wrong number. Even if I was in a deep
sleep, my first reaction would be, "Oh great, another wrong number!"
It's worked many times over the years, saving me from a lot of unnecessary
stress. This is an example of how we can reprogram our thinking to reduce
the number and extent of our stress reactions. It opens up exciting
possibilities about ways to control our internal stress even when we
can't change external events. |