Let’s face it, most of us hate change—even good change can be downright stressful. Nonetheless, change and the stress that results are facts of life. It’s worth taking a look at the role stress plays in your life. By examining how stressful change affects you, you can learn better ways of handling the emotions stress causes, and that includes handling anger. Stress and anger are kissing cousins—your stress level directly contributes to your anger level. This chapter helps you identify some of the many different types of stress that may be affecting you and the techniques to control that stress.
Do you feel that stress is taking over your life and making you feel overwhelmed? Just remember that the cognitive management of anger and stress is predicated upon your having some power and some choices about how they affect you and your life. The following exercise will help you define stress and how it may be affecting your life.
Once you have a better understanding of what stresses you out and how stress operates on your behavior, you can take the first steps toward responding in less unhealthy and negative ways.
EXERCISE
How Stress Affects Me
1. What is your definition of stress?
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
2. Rate your current level of stress:
a. Low
b. Medium
c. High
d. Off the charts
3. Are there things going on in your life that are very stressful for you? List some of them.
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
4. What do you do to manage your stress?
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
5. How do you respond to stress?
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
Positive and Negative Stress
Stress will be around as long as you are, and like anger, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Stress is just a nonspecific response to any demand that your environment places upon you. Every time you give your kids a bath, get your haircut, or sit stopped in traffic, you have to adjust to changing situational demands. Stress keeps us aware and functioning. Like an alarm clock or a crying baby, it wakes us up and gets us moving. Without it we’d veg out all day. Without stress, our systems become inactive. Inactive systems are unproductive and inherently fall apart over time. If nothing much is happening to keep them tuned up and running, things tend to fall apart like old cars in a junk yard.
If stress stays at an optimal level, individuals function very well. We each have a personal “perfect” stress level. When we operate within the limits of that stress level, we perform at peak levels. For example, if you have a career that provides you with interesting challenges or achievements, you are likely to be performing at a peak level. On the other hand, if your work situation constantly overwhelms you or your job bores you to tears, your performance is likely to be spotty at best and disastrous at worst. Becoming aware of how much positive stress motivates you is important. Stress keeps us peppy. As we continually adjust to environmental influences, we are forced to adapt or accommodate new information and challenges. In this regard stress can always be seen as positive; it keeps things interesting and stimulating.
Stress can be positive stress or negative stress. Positive stress is the result of a situation that, in the normal scheme of things, is considered to be a “happy” event. Pregnancy, Christmas, vacations, and the like are occasions of positive stress. But sometimes even these occasions don’t seem very positive. For instance, you may be reminded of horrible pregnancies complete with raging hormones and endless morning sickness. Or Christmas, normally considered a time of happiness for many, might evoke for you those awful Christmases at Aunt Bertha’s where Uncle George invariably got smashed and passed out in his green-bean-and-French-fried-onion casserole.
The point is, even things that make you happy by changing your life in positive ways can also be stressful in a negative way. Left to run amuck, even good things have the potential to put you at risk for anger due to the stress on your system. True, there are two sides to the stress coin, but once again, awareness is key. Remember, you have a choice about how you handle stress.
Work on the following exercise to assess how much stress you are experiencing in your life. Then we’ll talk later in this chapter about how to handle the various events that have caused your stress.
EXERCISE
On Again–Off Again Stressors
Look over this list of intermittent stressful situations. Each one is rated according to the level of stress it produces, 10 being the highest. Add up the total point values of all the events that occurred in your life in the past twelve months.
| Intermittent Stressor | Points |
| 1. My spouse died. | 10 |
| 2. My relationship ended. | 10 |
| 3. A close friend or family member died. | 9 |
| 4. I or my spouse went to jail. | 9 |
| 5. I suffered a serious injury or illness. | 8 |
| 6. I got married. | 8 |
| 7. I experienced sexual difficulties. | 7 |
| 8. I or my partner got pregnant. | 7 |
| 9. I reconciled with my spouse. | 7 |
| 10. I got fired. | 7 |
| 11. I changed jobs. | 6 |
| 12. I had a child leave home. | 5 |
| 13. I moved. | 5 |
| 14. My income greatly increased. | 4 |
| 15. I began or ended going to school. | 4 |
| 16. I took out a large loan or mortgage. | 4 |
| 17. I had trouble with friends or neighbors. | 4 |
| 18. My income greatly decreased. | 4 |
| 19. My spouse started or stopped working. | 3 |
| 20. I changed my eating/drinking habits. | 3 |
| 21. I stopped smoking. | 3 |
| 22. I had trouble with my boss. | 3 |
| 23. I gained a new family member. | 3 |
| 24. I had legal problems. | 3 |
| 25. I had a significant car accident. | 3 |
| 26. I was promoted. | 3 |
Total your score to determine your current stress level. If you scored over 100, you’ll benefit from learning some of the management techniques you’ll find in the next chapter.
Next, do the following exercise to see if you have ongoing stressors and rate how much they affect you.
EXERCISE
My Ongoing Stressors
Place a check next to any event that occurred in your life in the past twelve months. Some of these items may be positive and others negative, but they all are stress provoking and potentially angering. Rate each item that is true for you on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 having the most impact.
If you scored over 100, you’re at high risk for stress-related problems and you’ll benefit from the techniques covered in this chapter and in Chapter 7.
External and Internal Stress
Stress can come at you in two ways: externally and internally. I’ll talk about external stress first. External stress can be provoked by external impersonal stressors and external personal stressors. The exercise you just completed contains examples of both.
External impersonal stressors are, generally speaking, things that are served up to you, or thrown on your plate, as it were. These are things over which you have no control because they are random acts of the universe. Examples include the attack on the World Trade Center, floods, gas shortages, hurricanes, and wars. In most cases you have no choice over whether or not you experience external impersonal stressors; with the proper stress management tools, you will be able to acknowledge two very important things:
1. You are not responsible for creating the specific situation.
2. You have very little control over the situation.
So far so good—that is, if you can always recognize these externally caused situational stressors as random acts of the universe outside of you’re control. But based on where you’re coming from and even what kind of day you’re having, external impersonal stressors can develop their own gestalt and a meaning far greater than the sum of their parts. So, even if you experience a bunch of little stuff that starts gnawing at you, after a while these occurrences can eventually build into an extremely angering situation. As a result, you may begin to take personally those situations over which you have no control, translating an external impersonal stressor into an external personal stressor. This can lead to trouble because then you’re just one step away from turning them into internal stressors that operate on your belief system.
Internal stressors eat away at your sense of mastery and self-esteem and are difficult to deal with. There was a TV commercial awhile back that made this point beautifully. The scene opened on a nattily attired young guy waiting to cross a street in a busy city. The camera showed his full body at first, but then went in for a close-up of his face. In the meantime, background music like the kind in Jaws began to build. The strident notes added to the comic and dramatic effect of the guy’s rather horrified facial expression as he looked up to the sky. There, above, circled some type of bird of prey, a raven or hawk, a bird of omen. The shot focused in on the man’s face again and then quickly cut back to what he was looking at; it was his car! The camera flashed back to the sinister bird. Finally, the man began to run, hell-bent-for-leather, across the street, disregarding all the traffic, flinging himself protectively on the hood of his vehicle. His paint job was saved from the evil intent of the circling bird. Hurrah!
Silly? Yes, but effective nonetheless. Why? Because we can all relate to just this type of thinking. But the logic of this scenario and the young man’s reckless behavior does not make sense in the “real world.” This commercial effectively demonstrates how easily we can turn an external impersonal stressor into an external personal stressor. This is exactly the kind of behavior that we should avoid.
Sometimes it just seems as if, from the minute you wake up until the minute you nod off at night, nothing in the day was meant to go smoothly. But it’s important not to let your perception turn into an external personal stressor, because negative belief systems can be very strong, not to mention very seductive. After a couple of lousy days in a row, it’s no wonder you begin to feel an angering sense of futility and lack of mastery. But take heed: Your ability to identify the stress you are dealing with and determining its source can become powerful allies in managing your emotions.
Take a minute to go back over the list of stressors in the last exercise. Try to identify external impersonal stressors and differentiate them from the more personal stressors. Which ones do you have more of in your life? External stressors are generally managed with stress management techniques, such as exercise and meditation, which we’ll get to a bit later in Chapter 8. Unfortunately, external stress that is not dealt with can lead to internal stress and turmoil. Fortunately, internal stress is within your domain to do something about; over this internal kingdom you have total power and control. It’s all about your belief system! And you can learn to manage that! In Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10 you’ll learn how.
Anger, Schmanger—Context Is Key
In terms of what makes you angry and what stresses you out, it is crucial to examine how you interpret what is happening to you. You have to look at the context in which the event occurs in order to discover if the stressor is indeed something that is truly a threat. Context is key!
Imagine that your workday is over and your spouse has called you just as you’re leaving your job and asked you to stop at the market for a carton of milk. You’re beat, but you’re willing. You’re just about to park when you notice a transient is panhandling by the door you had intended to use. Since you would rather avoid this potentially irksome person, you take a little calming breath and go around to the side entrance.
Once in the store, you locate the milk and find the express line. A tiny, fragile old lady comes up and asks if she can go ahead of you. She has a little can of cat food and tells you she’s not feeling well and would like to get home as soon as she can. Hoping the cat food really is her cat’s dinner and not hers, you tell the lady, well sure, and feel maybe only slightly put off.
Here’s another scenario. This time instead of the lady, it’s two burly tank-topped and tattooed types who shove past you as if you’re not there. Not so clean smelling, they plunk down a few bottles of Colt, some bean dip, and tortilla chips. One of them says, hey man, you don’t mind do you? It’s likely that this pair is going to bug you more than the little old lady.
The little old lady may annoy you or you may sympathize with her. You may let her go ahead of you simply because you don’t want her to pass out in back of you. You may see the existential finality of life in her or you may just like cats. Whatever the reason, she is unlikely to be someone whom you find to be stress or anger provoking. And what the heck, in reality you probably do have a little more time than she does—in the cosmic sense. On the other hand, those two guys, well, several adjectives come to mind—obnoxious, rude, crude, dangerous if crossed, scary. Certainly the approach of the two guys is more anger evoking than that of the little old lady. Maybe you feel pushed around by the men or that they have taken advantage of you.
Hopefully, this example demonstrates how two situations, which have a similar impact (you probably will get home with the milk at about the same time either way), might trigger two very different belief systems. It’s all in the context. Your reaction will be due to your beliefs about the two situations and the impact they have on you.
Adaptation and Accommodation— The Way I See It
Every time you encounter a stressor, you are forced to cope with it in one of two ways: adaptation or accommodation.
Adaptation is an outside coping strategy that requires you to change yourself in some way. For instance, the temperature in the theater changes and the lights go dim. You put on a sweater to warm up and use your glasses to see a little better. It’s kind of like saying, “Okay, I can go along with this. I guess I have to if I want to be comfortable.”
Accommodation, on the other hand, is an inside coping strategy that you can use to combat stress. It requires that you incorporate the new stressor into an underlying conceptual framework that you already have in place. For example, say you’re a fanatic alpine skier, and your belief system tells you, “Alpine skiing is the best winter sport.” One weekend your friends insist you try snowboarding. You do. After three days of mortification, you get pretty good and discover you really enjoy it. Because of your new experience, you’re forced to add a new concept to your old conceptual framework and adjust your belief system to: “Alpine skiing and snowboarding are the best winter sports.” You haven’t really chucked the old idea; you just tuned it up a bit. Voilà, you have successfully accommodated a stressor!
All Those Gadgets and Information Overload
On top of the daily stressors we must endure, the boom of the Information Age may have actually increased our stress levels. It’s called “information overload.” Although we may love (and in some cases almost worship) our laborsaving gismos, at some level they may be causing us more stress than they’re worth. Have you ever felt like bashing your computer screen in frustration when you can’t get those annoying pop-ups to go away? Have you ever felt like throwing your telephone at the wall after wasting time listening to endless electronic options and never getting a human on the line?
It makes sense for us to look around at our environments and decide what we really want in our lives. We can make active choices to moderate the effects of all the tools we now take for granted and utilize to keep up with the Joneses, stay knowledgeable, stay current, and one step ahead of our competitors—all of the things that cause unnecessary stress.
The relatively recent marvels of fax machines, PCs, answering machines, cell phones, and pagers serve as surrogate servants, secretaries, and answering services. They are essential in many instances, but their contributions can be a double-edged sword. In keeping us in touch, tuned-in, and on call, they don’t allow us the opportunity for any downtime. The notion of being “unavailable” has become taboo. One fed-up client has tried to take a stand, sort of. His e-mail address is leavesamalone@hotmail.com.
Not too many years ago, society had some downtime built in. On weekends, most people got together with friends and family and relaxed or went to ball games and picnics. On Sundays, they read the funnies and went to church. Maybe they had a barbeque.
Now, with today’s frenetic pace, you may have to go shopping or to the market or to the drugstore just to get a head start on the week. You may need to use your weekend time to get online to tackle that unfinished work project. At just the touch of a button, you can be connected to work all day and night. But is all this activity really what you need to stay calm, healthy, and balanced?
The list of “convenient” technology is boggling. ATMs may have made banking easier, but now you risk being mugged anytime day or night. Cell phones are a great convenience, but there is concern they can cause traffic accidents and maybe cancer. Every day, through various means of media, we are bombarded with advertising urging us to indulge in the latest trends in fashion, health, and medicine. Heaven forbid we should fall behind in our quest to be trendy.
Even the evening news subjects us to stress. We learn daily from our hometown news anchors all about natural disasters, killings, and babies dumped in dumpsters, not to mention constant reminders about terrorism and threats of war.
Today’s kids don’t escape this deluge of stress, either. Children are primed early for pressure. For some little ones, expectations regarding sports, grades, and popularity start during the preschool years. The pressure continues through high school, where advanced placement classes have become almost mandatory for college admission.
Sure, people probably were concerned about the advance of technology and the quickening pace of life when the telegraph was developed and the telephone came along and loused up the fine art of letter writing, but today’s technology is proliferating at a truly remarkable pace. Improved telecommunications has made many of us totally accessible at all times. Is it healthy for us to be so available? Take inventory of the unnecessary stressors in your life. What can you do to lessen the load and recharge your battery?
Back to the Garden
While you certainly can’t escape or ignore technology, there are ways that you can take charge of the amount of stress you allow your environment to dish out to you. Perhaps you could avoid watching the news or forgo watching TV altogether and read a book instead. Maybe you could job share or work a four-day week. Maybe you’d like to devote some special time to yourself. Perhaps you can think of a hobby you’d like to pursue. Could you ride a bike to work?
Take a minute to think about your situation. Write down one thing that you would like to change in order to get a better handle on your stress. It is absolutely appropriate to allow yourself some choices in determining what stressful situations are necessary. It is also absolutely appropriate to decide what level of stress is comfortable or acceptable in your life and what stressors you can afford to do without. Identification is the first step to stress and anger management. Taking responsibility is the second.
Remember, in managing internal stressors, you are the boss. Take a minute to do the next exercise to find out how responsible you are for your personal thoughts and actions.
EXERCISE
How Responsible Am I
for My Thoughts and Actions?
Indicate by filling in a percent how responsible you feel for the following aspects of your life. Think about whether your feelings of responsibility are appropriate or within your control. Do you find yourself becoming angry, confused, frightened, resentful, or frustrated when you think about examples of these situations?
| Thought or Action | Percent |
| 1. Problems that arise in the family | ________% |
Example:
| 2. Mistakes that involve you | ________% |
Example:
| 3. Acting on your decisions | ________% |
Example:
| 4. Staying optimistic about situations | ________% |
Example:
| 5. Finding things to be happy about | ________% |
Example:
| 6. Finding constructive solutions to personal problems | ________% |
Example:
| 7. Working out win/win solutions to interpersonal problems | ________% |
Example:
| 8. Things that happen to you | ________% |
Example:
| 9. Finding positive people to be with | ________% |
Example:
| 10. Taking care of yourself and your health | ________% |
Example:
| 11. Taking care of business | ________% |
Example:
| 12. Taking care of others | ________% |
Example:
| 13. Managing your time | ________% |
Example:
| 14. Making other people happy | ________% |
Example:
If completing this exercise helped you remember any situations that evoked any negative emotions, now’s the time to start managing your internal stress. In looking over your answers, you may have found areas in your life for which you feel you bear appropriate responsibility. In other areas, you may have discovered that you need to assume a bit more. In still other areas, you may have realized that you have been trying to be responsible for things that are not your problem. Examine your role in them and decide if your position of responsibility needs an overhaul.
Now, take a piece of paper and write down any additional situational stressors, either external or internal, that have come up for you recently. Decide if the situation was within your control. Then ask yourself what you could have done in each case to improve the way in which you reacted.