Coping with stress how do we do it? Why do people react differently to stress? The threat may be the same, but the response is different, as we have seen during the Coronavirus pandemic. Some people were able to see it as an opportunity, while others became fearful and anxious.
Stress is a message that something is not right – that something we care about is at risk. Stress focuses our attention on the problem and motivates us to take action. So threat is not unhelpful, in fact it may be necessary to keep us alive, but our reaction to it can be damaging.
To explain this, we can divide threat into two categories: threat stress and challenge stress. Lets take a look at each one.
Threat Stress
Threat stress is where we feel the situation exceeds our resources and we cannot cope. We focus on the negative and there is the potential to cause damage to our wellbeing because we feel we will not be able to succeed. Our bodies react to threat stress by increasing heart rate and blood pressure, and we produce cortisol which increases blood sugar to give us energy for ‘fight or flight’. This response is appropriate in the face of immediate danger, but chronically high levels of cortisol can lead to weight gain, anxiety, depression, fatigue and our immune system suffers. Prolonged threat stress can also lead to impaired decision making, cognitive decline and increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
Challenge Stress
Challenge stress is the response to a situation that we feel we can handle and we have the resources to cope. We focus on the positive, on the rewards or personal growth we will gain when we succeed. With challenge stress, our heart rate will increase but our blood pressure will not. A shot of cortisol is released initially, giving us energy, but then drops back to normal. We rise to the challenge and then relax. We have more favourable emotions and our performance increases as we become more focused, accurate and better coordinated. Our immune response is enhanced as even our cells become stronger and more resistant to the stressor.
Often we are dealing with a combination of threat and challenge stress as we go through life.
What Can We Do When It Comes To Coping With Stress?
Happily our brains are ‘plastic’ – this is termed neuroplasticity – and we can change the way we think about things. We can retrain our brain to look at threat differently, to make a better, more helpful, more positive assessment of the situation. ‘Reframing’ threat as a challenge is a common technique in the area of sports performance and it is the difference between saying to oneself “I am anxious” and instead saying “I am excited”. Reframing a task to an opportunity, a perceived danger to a potential for achievement, for example.
This changes the threat from being unhelpful to being motivational, and aids in developing a toughness, a resilience. You conquered something like this before, so the belief is that you can do it again.
It brings to mind the famous quote by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”.
Sometimes life is hard and we need a little help coping with stress. I have helped a number of people learn to manage stress.
“Your help has given me the techniques and inner calm to deal with and enjoy life’s ups and downs.”
If you need a some help please get in touch.
P.S. If you found this post useful to read you might also want to check out my post about “Building Resilience to Stress“.