Where does stress really come from?
Stress, fear, worry, insecurity, and anxiety - it seems like this family of related feelings are front and center for all of us these days.
Whether it's in the news, on social media, in our conversations, or in our quiet solitary moments, stress and anxiety are on the rise like never before.
In what follows I’d like to explore the deeper drivers behind these experiences, not to fix or explain them away, but to provide a practical framework with which to respond skilfully to the rising tide of stress in our lives.
Two pretty profound questions are crucial to our discussion: Who are you? And where do your experiences really come from?
In the context of stress and anxiety, just learning to pose these questions can be of immense benefit. And when you’re able to answer them directly for yourself, the benefit is even greater.
You’ll begin to experience more freedom from worry and fear, and you’ll start to enjoy a greater sense of peace, presence and possibility in all aspects of your life.
This works because if we are able to tune into the first principles that underpin experiences like stress, we’re then able to deconstruct the emotional/conceptual infrastructure that holds those experiences in place.
It’s precisely because these first principles are universal and incontrovertible that they can have such a powerfully corrective effect on our experience.
Who Are You?
The question ‘who are you?’ has a bunch of superficial answers. You’re a certain age and a certain sex. You have a certain job and various professional and personal roles. You have certain likes and dislikes, and you have certain habits and traits.
But at a deeper level you are a miraculous instance of Being. You are composed of trillions of complex cells - all working together in harmony - and you’re preloaded with millennia’s worth of species-specific data about yourself and your place in the lived environment.
Within each of us therefore there is actually a kind of default structural tension. As an individual instance of the miracle of Being we possess almost unlimited potential. But we also possess a whole host of inherited behavioural presets that may not actually serve us at all.
We always have a choice about which aspect of our makeup we tune into and develop - but unfortunately we can easily miss that choice altogether.
And crucially, how we relate to ourselves - as limited or limitless - will massively impact our experience of stress, and our capacity to respond to it skilfully.
What is Stress?
Most of our genetic inheritance - including our default stress responses - draws from millenia of living in the wild. In the wild, stress was a natural and useful reflex designed to help us in life-threatening situations.
In his book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky details how zebras in the wild tend not to suffer the kinds of stress-related illnesses that are prevalent amongst human beings in the modern world.
Despite the ever present threat of being eaten by a hungry Lion, Zebras don’t suffer from heart attacks, diabetes, weight issues, arthritis and so forth. In fact, the average zebra enjoys a fairly relaxed and chilled existence.
From a physiological point of view the stress response consists of an increased secretion of adrenaline, increased heart rate rate and heightened vigilance and so forth.
These are intended to make it easier to save your life in a specific dangerous situation. But they’re only intended to come into play once every 24 to 72 hours, for a total of up to 30 minutes.
So although the body itself produces the stress response, it’s not intended to be a sustained experience. It’s designed to function in occasional spikes or short intentional bursts.
In reality then we are built to support stress response ‘in the wild’ or in real life-threatening danger, but not the prolonged, chronic stress that is increasingly common in the modern ‘civilized’ world.
Fear in the body and fear in the mind
So that natural stress response is designed to meet the challenge of a genuine threat in the real world. It’s a response to something that exists physically.
The chronic stress and anxiety that many of us suffer today is very different. It arises not from a physical threat but an imagined conceptual one.
In a way, that’s why the stress response doesn’t stay limited to an occasional burst - because the threat we’re relating to isn't something with defined spatio-temporal coordinates that we can use that energy to get away from.
When the chief causes of our stress are mental - in the form of projected ideas of the future or preoccupations with events in the past - we can’t use the energy of stress to get away from them.
We can’t use that anxiety to outrun the threat or to fight back, and because the threat doesn't ever recede into the physical distance the stress response is sustained - producing untold damage to our mental and physical health.
First Principles
So explored in this context the rising tide of stress and anxiety in our lives takes on a very different complexion.
In a situation of stress, take a moment to reflect on these profound questions.
Question: Who are you?
Answer: You’re a person with limitless possibility who’s subject to feelings of anxiety in the moment.
Question: Where is your experience coming from?
Answer: The stress is either a helpful response to a genuine external threat. Or an entirely unhelpful response to an conceptual projected danger.
Conceptual fears are not served or solved by the body’s stress response because there is no external threat to escape from. So at such times releasing and relinquishing that stress response is the most beneficial course of action.
So many chronic degenerative diseases like autoimmunity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and so forth are linked to the habituated stress response. And all this is a function of a misunderstanding of where our experience is coming from and of who we really are.
So the cure of unhealthy stress is to gain this deeper understanding - to arrive at an insight or embodied understanding of the deeper forces at work.
We’ll continue our exploration in the next article.
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Sovereign Tea Time Live
On Sunday 19th June, join me in creating a new narrative of health and healing in the resplendent setting of Mariage Freres Tea Emporium in London's iconic Covent. This in-person half-day workshop includes powerful talks, insightful tips and tools, and Q&A - over fine tea and patisserie. For further information and to book your place, click on the link below: