Stress: The Choice We Forgot We Made

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Health Viewpoints

I often fail to handle certain stressful situations well. I get curt, self-centered, and easily frustrated.

But sometimes I stay perfectly calm and considerate.

The reason I go one way or the other relates to the key truth about stress that we rarely talk about: that it’s often a choice.

Consider the stress universally recognized as healthy: hormetic stress. This is typically a physiological stress that makes you stronger, like pushing your muscles too hard which forces them to adapt and grow. Stress can play the same role with our minds, but it rarely does.

That’s because we don’t really know how to handle psychological stress.

This is the stress that comes on when your car blows a tire on the interstate. It activates your sympathetic nervous system, which pumps cortisol into your bloodstream and accelerates your heartbeat. It turns down executive functions like long-term planning and impulse control and makes you more reactive to your immediate surroundings.

In some situations, this stress is a critical boost to our survival. Though, typically it’s not.

If stress doesn’t subside, it becomes long-term or chronic stress. This is the stress that comes with too much debt and not enough time to unwind.

If we don’t make a real effort to escape chronic stress, it depletes us. We are like a car with our engine always revving far too high.

The last few years have left us more stressed than ever and Americans are among the most stressed people in the world.

Beyond well-studied health effects, stress has other consequences, like triggering compulsive and escapist behaviors, such as eating poorly or watching too much TV. Any addict will tell you that few things can trigger a relapse as easily as stress.

That’s because stress is our warning and action system. It demands resolution. Instead of resolving it, people use coping mechanisms like shopping or drinking to temporarily quiet it and that only compounds the problem.

In a country racked by rising personal debt, obesity, and addiction this is worth considering.

But even psychological stress can become hormetic and make us psychologically stronger. This is the process of building resilience.

The reality is that psychological stress is something we create in our minds. While outside events may trigger our stress, it is our own internal response that maintains it.

After Viktor Frankl survived 18 months in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944, he came to an understanding that made him one of the most influential neurologists and psychiatrists of the 20th century, best known for his 1946 book, “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances,” he wrote.

The power to control our own thoughts and attitudes is one of the most powerful abilities a human can gain. In some ways, it is the defining quality of a dignified human life. The more we exercise this power, the stronger our minds become.

It lets us escape the endless triggers of stress and find a better way to resolve difficult challenges—with the full benefit of our best mental capabilities.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Epoch Health welcomes professional discussion and friendly debate. To submit an opinion piece, please follow these guidelines and submit through our form here.