EXERCISE 14.1

Stress Tolerance

The EZ Stress Buster

Purpose

To give people a simple but more thorough understanding of stress and an easy practice for managing stress

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30 minutes

Stress concepts are explained, and participants put easy steps into practice with movement, drinking water, and telling jokes.

Outcome

Audience

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Easy

Materials

Time Matrix

Activity Estimated Time
Distribute handout, discuss, climb stairs, or otherwise move 20 minutes
Discuss and commit to practice 10 minutes
Total Time 30 minutes

Instructions

1. Distribute the EZ Stress Buster Handout and ask everyone to read it. Discuss. Practice. Send everyone out to climb two flights of stairs or walk around the block; just use what’s naturally available. When they come back, have a glass of water at each place and instruct them to drink it. Then ask for people to tell (clean) jokes they know. As a back-up plan, have some jokes available and distribute copies for people to take turns reading.

2. Have fun! Ask for commitments to put the concepts into practice.

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What is stress? Stress is the numb sensation in your lips and face from drinking out of a fire hose all week (all month? all year?). It is the hair trigger on your temper that everyone you work with understands but your four- and six-year-olds are completely oblivious to . . . even when you do your best to give fair warning!

Stress is the exhaustion of the physiological systems that we use to pay attention, gather enough data, gather the right data, analyze it correctly, find the loopholes, plug the loopholes, make decisions, monitor their effectiveness, do it again, deal with an unforeseeable crisis, start a new project, do it again, 24/7/365. These kinds of expectations are completely unrealistic, and human beings are not built for this kind of a race. We are, in fact, racing against our own technology, against machines that do not need to eat or sleep or throw a graduation party or visit parents in a nursing home or love up the four- and six-year-old little rascals we think we’re doing all this for.

Under conditions such as these, there are only three things you can do. Well, four if you count collapse. You can use Reality Testing externally to challenge the expectations of the people whose unrealistic assessment of what’s valuable and what’s possible is causing the problem. If you are successful you may well help create a more sustainable workplace in which people and profits can both thrive. This is often a bit of a long shot, because usually those people have invested heavily in the belief system that happiness is the result of consuming the things that money can buy . . . and its really scary to call that—and consequently all of our popular media—into question. But it’s usually hard to get their attention anyway, because they are just about to succeed and finally prove for certain that they’re right . . . or they’re desperately scrambling to avoid some kind of catastrophe.

If you don’t succeed in your challenge, you may be fired, or sidelined and abused more than before, but then you can apply Option 2 and use your Reality Testing internally to reprioritize your values and adjust your behavior and your daily and weekly and yearly schedules to align with them. You should be warned in advance that reassessing what your core values are at any point in your life may be a little disruptive and stressful in and of itself; however, the net result of such an extreme makeover will be exceptionally worthwhile and may save you X number of additional years of suffering your way down a path you really don’t want to be on.

Option 3 is that you can GET STRONG! At the physiological level, stress tolerance results from a balance that allows us to shift between tension and relaxation in a sustainable rhythm so that our nerves and muscles and life-support systems can rest, recharge, and provide resources for our bodies to deal with the typical postmodern demands to process large amounts of complex data while under a great deal of pressure to decode the meaning accurately, and then persuade other people who are similarly stressed to do whatever it is we need them to do.

Stress impacts our muscle tension, connective tissue, skeletal structure, circulation, respiration, nervous fatigue, and neurotransmitter balance, as well as more obvious things like how we smell and how much fun we are to be with. The chemical byproducts of stress such as cortisol and the catecholamines can build up to toxic levels that make it as uncomfortable inside our bodies as the high-pressure situations we’re confronting on the outside. If they could be eliminated directly through the urinary system we could just drink several beers, and that would be that—but no such luck! It requires the significantly increased oxygen levels and increased circulation that can only come from increased physical exertion.

That brings us to the real title of this exercise, “Stair Therapy.” Now don’t start whining and act all discouraged. This is still an easy stress buster. It turns out that if you work in an office with more than one floor, it’s actually a world-class Olympic training facility in disguise—or at least a way you can easily take a big bite out of stress on a several-times-a-day basis. It’s really not that hard; in fact it soon becomes enjoyable, and every little bit helps!

If you’re really serious about feeling better and living longer, here’s all you need: nothing. Just go climb two or three flights of stairs halfway between when you arrive in the morning and when you go for lunch, and then again halfway between lunch and when you leave at night. Amen! Easy shmeazy! All done, no excuses!

That’s the bare-bones version of the stress buster, but if you are a more self-aware individual who wants something a little more sophisticated, for the intermediate level you need two additional things: a glass of water to drink when you’re done and a joke book. Seriously, obtain a joke book—we suggest a clean joke book because those writers have to understand the more complex aspects of human nature better, so consequently they’re often funnier, but that’s up to you. Basically, you need to laugh more. Laughter helps reduce cortisol and, much more importantly, it makes life more enjoyable! So climb your two or three flights of stairs and drink your water while you read five or ten jokes a couple times a day. They won’t all be funny, but some will be, and the neurotransmitters that you release while laughing will help reset your synaptic potential so your nerves can fire harder and faster and longer than they ever did before!

That’s a joke. We personally have little or no idea what you’re neurotransmitters will do, but we do know that laughter is good for you and bad for stress, so find a joke book or find some clean jokes online, climb some stairs, and have a drink (of water!).

The advanced level includes all the intermediate steps plus this ancient dietary secret from our Tibetan guru. Eat more fresh fruit and vegetables and less junk! That’s not a joke! Eat them raw, because chewing crunchy stuff reduces stress. If you don’t believe us, then you’re clearly not ready for the advanced level or, if you want to try to prove us wrong, just try chewing celery and carrots and red bell pepper slices and cucumbers and see! One day we watched our guru chewing and chewing a single bite for what seemed like half an hour. Finally, we asked him what he was chewing. He spit out a mouthful of something. “Sand,” he said, wiping his beard.

“But why are you chewing sand, Master?” we asked him. He looked at us sternly and said quietly, “To practice chewing.”

Maybe we missed something by not trying that practice (maybe even enlightenment!), but since we didn’t try it, we can’t and don’t recommend it. Actually it was Gil, our alternative health professional, who gave us the very best advice for stress tolerance, and it kind of sounds like the way a guru would talk: Eat less, move more!

Now get out there and bust some stress!