You complain that you are stressed-out, that you are tired, that you need to relax, but these proclamations are rhetorical. The person next to you probably agrees that they are, too. You share stories and commiserate with friends on the fact that you don’t get enough sleep and that you are exhausted. The people you talk to may rotate, depending on the day, but the script is the same. And everyone agrees: your hairdresser, coworker, neighbor, best friend. But now I am putting you on notice: you’ve been saying the same things for months, even years. Time to address it.
To add to the problem, our society glorifies being busy. The busy person appears important, and multitasking is something you almost feel a competitive urge to get better at. Then you stress out. The solutions are temporary: massage, a bath, a couple drinks. Or sometimes you just wait it out until your next vacation, or you simply chalk it up to the fact that life will not change because this is just how modern life is: stressful.
Which brings us to the adage, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”59 Right? Wrong. The impact of stress can take years off your lifespan, and even if it doesn’t, it does diminish the quality of life.
Check your breathing when you are listening to a disturbing news story. Whereas you are nowhere near the event and might never have experienced that trauma, your body tightens and your breathing gets shallow. Worrying has the same effect on your body: it tenses, as if getting ready for a challenge. All this takes energy from your body; all this makes your breathing shallower. Imagine the effect after hours, days, or weeks of living this way. It is time to change that in order to have more energy, to oxygenate and relax your body, and to take better care of it.
Some folks find the impact of stress on their lives hard to believe. They look around, saying, I feel as stressed-out as everyone else, then they shrug it off. Well, yes, our society has in effect convinced people that a lack of sleep is normal, that not being able to turn off the chatter when they try to fall asleep is normal, and that lying in bed watching news, writing texts, or doing quasi-social things like responding to a Facebook post keeps them current. And then there are the beeping, honking, and buzzing appliances that require immediate attention.
Each year, you make some kind of formal or informal pact with yourself that you’ll prioritize better. Relax more, stress less. Take care of yourself. Carve out more “me time” in your nonstop schedule. And each year this resolution lasts between seventy-two hours and a week at most, until you stop trying to meditate, keep a journal, take walks, be in “the now,” and just go back to what’s easiest—being stressed-out.
So how much stress is, in fact, brought on by you? How much does stress actually drive you? Are you one of those people who did best in school by cramming and writing papers the night before? Do you feel pride in getting more done today than yesterday? If so, then you do have some of the stress addict in you, and if you’re succumbing to another one of the common ailments that have to do with stress (e.g., acid reflux, trouble sleeping, fatigue, and anxiety), you may want to reevaluate your perceptions of stress so you will be able to make some real changes.
Your body and mind can tolerate a certain amount of stress, as long as there’s an adequate amount of downtime to rest and recharge. Watching “mindless” TV or spending time on Facebook is not really time out. In fact, for many people, just sitting still without any kind of input (music, background TV, etc.) has become hard to do.
If the compulsive part of you thrives under stress,60 and the other part of you knows it’s hurting you and is trying to find peace and balance, the addicted side, the one with the strength of years of habit, is going to win. To start to make a change, you need more insight, and a good place to start is by noting which of the following behaviors resonates with you. These are the top ten patterns that define a stress addict:
1. You feel pride in having completed an imposing daily to-do list. Whether it makes you feel like Supermom or just genetically superior to your friends, there is smugness underneath the complaining.61
2. You get a rush from running. Whether it’s running to the supermarket, the dry cleaners, or the gym, the pressure of coordinating tasks and achieving goals gives you a rush.
3. You get excited about the idea of multitasking and thereby being more efficient. You want to pat yourself on the back when you’re able to do four things well at the same time (which can also lead to a love of gadgets that profess to help you multitask better).
4. You feel important. The idea that so many people need you and that your contribution is essential leads you to feeling wanted and useful. Just think of the chaos if you weren’t around!
5. Deep down inside, you believe that stress-related problems are brought about by genetics or are accident-related.
6. You feel uncomfortable, worried, and nervous when you don’t have something you must do right away. And what you “need” to do becomes absolute.
7. You depend on and look forward to the buzz of a caffeine high.
8. At times, you wish you could survive on less sleep or take a food pill instead of “wasting time” eating and sleeping.
9. You thrive on taking shortcuts and closing the deal, meeting the deadline. You find yourself saying (or thinking), “Get to the point!” more and more often.
10. You find it difficult to be in the present. You’re always either planning for the future or mulling about something in the past. When looking at time, it seems to have flown by.
If any one of these behaviors rings a bell,62 it’s time for you to change your lifestyle, because they’re all part of a larger pattern of stress addiction. That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you’ve gotten this far in this book, you’re on the path to changing your life. Read on!
Stress yellow: You’re starting to have trouble sleeping because you can’t turn off “the chatter.” You might have been told that you grind your teeth at night. You think about work long after the day is done. You find yourself grasping for strategies to help manage whatever it is you have to do. The weekend passes away too quickly, and there never seems to be enough “me time.” You remember a time when you were less stressed and maybe happier. You’re taking less care of yourself simply because there aren’t enough hours in the day.
Stress orange: All the characteristics of yellow have become the norm. Plus, now you find yourself irritable, and occasionally experience disturbing episodes such as road rage when you lose control. You snap at people you love, then feel intense guilt. You’re often angry with yourself for not getting everything done. You fantasize about vacations or just getting up and leaving town. These fantasies are replaced by those in which you go postal. You may be taking medications to sleep or relax, and are drinking way too much caffeine or energy drinks in order to stay alert during the day.
What happens when you experience stress? Powerful hormones are released throughout the body, elevating blood pressure and putting the senses on high alert. Glucose is driven up to the brain and into the muscles. Your evolutionary preprogrammed response is fight or flight. You’re probably in a mild to moderate state of fight or flight all the time, as a “normal” thing—but it definitely isn’t normal.
Stress red: You’ve been diagnosed with medical problems that are stress-related (e.g., ulcer or migraine). You’ve been told by your doctor that, as part of your recovery, you must address the stress in your life or you can expect your health problems to be chronic, and that they’ll affect your quality of life/lifespan. Your mental or physical health has been impacted by stress, which could be related to your worry over future stress, your trauma of past stress, or your subjective perception of your current stress. You’ve been diagnosed with an anxiety or depressive disorder, and therapy and/or medications have been recommended. Whereas anxiety or depressive disorders can have physiological bases, stress can significantly worsen both.
If you stay at level yellow for more than a year, orange for more than a few months, or red for more than a few weeks, there can be serious physical and mental health consequences. The number of injuries you’ll suffer—because you didn’t notice an important detail or were distracted—may increase. Self-medicating incidents will augment this. Your body’s immune system runs amok because stress disrupts the body’s ability to heal itself. The time spent on going to appointments and money spent on medications (usually pain medications) will increase.
You may find yourself feeling distanced from and irritated by your spouse, and your relationships with colleagues and supervisors may feel strained. You may find yourself relying more on alcohol to relax. And ultimately, you’ll find yourself living less in the present. You’ll be nostalgic about a “simple” past you once had, or dream about the more balanced life you hope to have in the future. You may get forgetful, because stress affects the hippocampus in the brain, so it’s hard to remember things you once knew perfectly well. Days and months will whiz by.
Women experience stress with greater intensity than men. They process words and body language more quickly by using both sides of the brain (which predisposes them to multitasking), and have a deeper limbic system, the seat of emotions (which connects one more sensitively in all relationships).
Which came first: the anxious, shallow, Upper-body (Vertical) Breathing or the stress? Regardless, you’re in the loop. Breathing badly, you feel stressed, and the stress pushes you to breathe worse—you take small, shallow, erratic breaths. This in turn alerts your nervous system to go deeper into fight or flight, which then constricts your breath even more. Are you in a war zone? Nope, just crouched over your computer, growing more impatient and full of anxiety with every hour, stressed about your to-do list, your project deadline, and all the things that demand your immediate attention.
Changing the way you breathe will lower stress levels within minutes. Faster than a Valium, a double shot of scotch, or a good massage. Yes, you yourself can lower your blood pressure faster (and with fewer side effects) than any medication. If you could hook yourself up to a machine that measures galvanic skin response, heart rate, blood pressure, and brain waves within seconds, all the signs that your body is calming would show up on a screen. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that changing the way that you breathe works without your being attached to machines that measure your body response quantitatively.
Quantify your stress from one to ten. Write it down. Do your exercises and then reevaluate how you feel. You’re probably going to go down one, two, or several points and feel better, and with practice you’ll be able to do it faster each time.
You don’t have to take a meditation class in India or undergo long-term psychoanalytic therapy in order to learn to live in the now and be content. Short “active meditation” breathing techniques can lower your blood pressure, heart rate, and cortisol levels when practiced a few minutes a day. This daily “reboot” is exactly what you need. You don’t need a vacation, you don’t have to bear down and plow through work, day after day, without rest, until you get to your next vacation; you just need to turn stress off at regular intervals. You need to “turn off” so that your immune system can recharge—and you’re about to learn how to do this in the next chapter.
My measure of my anxiety was when I could feel my heart beat. When I am about to have a panic attack, it rises to my throat and I have trouble focusing on anything else, and my vision for things far away and in the periphery gets short. My hands get cold and sweat. When all these come together, I know a full-blown panic attack is on the way. So I made that my measure: The next few times that happened, I put on my earphones and listened to the breath count. I timed how long it took me to feel my heart rate go back down. I realized that I had a moment of “turning the corner” when I would think, “I’m going to be okay,” and the escalating would stop. For the next fourteen days, I practiced “bringing myself down”—it was fascinating to me that it worked every single time. Then it got to be how fast I could bring myself down. Now, when I get a hint of anxiety, I do a few deep LBB breaths to “reset” myself and keep moving. —Roxy, age 25
Apart from better breathing, this has changed my experience at boring meetings. Now instead of being stressed and irritated at the endless meetings, I do my breathing and Kegels and leave knowing I can check that off my list for the day. No one can see what I’m doing, and I just feel like I am multitasking my breathing workout for the day. Now I don’t just sit there seething at all the dumb comments, I look interested but am really thinking, “inhale—expand,” “exhale—squeeze.” If they only knew! —Jessica, age 35
59 The saying, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” appears in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols. While pushing yourself to tolerate more chronic stress will not inoculate you against it, stressful events may make you a stronger person. Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, David and Goliath, examines the relationship between “remote misses” and extraordinary achievement, and how difficult childhoods can foster strength and lead to lives of outstanding accomplishments—another way of saying that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
60 According to research in the field, there is “good stress”—which is called eustress. For more on this subject, see the works of Hans Selye, a pioneer in the study of stress (in fact, he coined the term stress), especially Stress Without Distress. He calls stress “the spice of life.”
61 The Navy SEALs are trained to be “comfortable in chaos” in order to meet unbelievable challenges, but you have not received that training.
62 Dr. Peter Whybrow, director of the Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, explores the rise of stress addiction and the consequences of what he calls “the symptoms of clinical mania” in his forthcoming book, The Intuitive Mind: Common Sense for the Common Good. Two New York Times articles, written five years apart, discuss why hypomania is so attractive to the person experiencing it in the workplace: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/business/19entre.html and http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/22/health/psychology/22hypo.html.