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Self-care and stress management

What is stress? Stress is made up of stressful thoughts and images in the mind, a rush of adrenaline, and corresponding sensations and tensions in the body. Anxiety and fear are other words for stress. Fear is as natural and healthy a response as the pain we feel when we put our hands in the fire.

Fear is a helpful message that says, “Danger! Pay attention! Take care!” The question is, is there a real (immanent) danger, or is it an imagined danger, such as the thought, “I won’t be able to do it all,” and the feeling that something terrible will happen if I don’t?

Usually when we talk about stress management, we are talking about ways to get rid of or reduce tension or fear. The only way to reduce fear is to feel safe again. Fear / stress triggers our fight / flight / freeze response so we can get back to safety.

But what happens when we can’t find our way back to safety, such as in our fear of not completing our dissertations or graduating? or fear of losing our loved ones; or fear of losing health, etc. We stay in the fight / flight response longer than is healthy for our bodies, so they start to shut down to conserve energy. This manifests as tiredness, fatigue, lack of energy, loss of motivation, or depression.

To feel safe again in the face of failure and loss, we can come to accept them as inevitable in life and realize that while they are uncomfortable and painful, they are not dangerous. We have all already survived both. They are like a wound or disease from which we heal.

I remember the quote from At will of the body by Arthur Frank, paraphrasing, “Every time we get sick or injured on some level we fear our death, yet we recover from every injury or illness until we encounter the one from which we do not recover.”

This leads directly to our inevitable existential fear of death, which we all too successfully deny (see Denial of death by Ernest Becker), but inevitably and frequently reminded of us.

There is a saying that says: “FEAR can mean two things: Forget everything and run, or Face it all and get up. We can spend the rest of our lives running, distracting and avoiding, or we can find the courage to face our fears and rise above them to do what we love and live our lives fully until we die.We have a choice.Only one of them qualifies as self-care.

Kelly McGonigal found research showing that stress is not bad for us. What is bad for us is the belief that it is bad for us. The people who died of stress were only those who believed that stress was bad for them (see their TED talk https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend)

In short, the urge to manage stress is probably always motivated by our fear and resistance to our stress, which only adds to our stress. It is not stress that needs to be managed, but our response to stress.

When we respond to stress simply by acknowledging, allowing and accepting it, we are turning off our sympathetic nervous system (fight / flight) and activating our parasympathetic nervous system (which restores us to calm). We could call this “permission to be stressed.”

When I heard about this, I would say to myself, “I get as stressed out as necessary for as long as it takes,” to counter the years of messages telling me that I shouldn’t be stressed. I had no reason to be stressed and get over it. Facing stress with acceptance is self-compassion and is the first step toward our long-awaited calm. This is self-care in the face of stress.

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