Stress: How to De-Stress without Doing Less (10 page)

Personality cannot on its own create a problem with stress. And even if your own personality has a role to play in why you do struggle with stress, it's important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Remember, your personality might mean you are more vulnerable to stress problems, but the same personality also means you have that great potential. So, if you have recognized something of yourself in this chapter, the same things can actually be very positive characteristics: that urge to push yourself to achieve just that little bit more – that fuels little things but also means that you are probably very driven in what you do. Don't feel down about yourself because of who you are. We all need to learn to be aware of the potential weaknesses of our personality – our Achilles heel – which might mean that our personality causes us some problems. This is not about needing to change your personality – not about trying to be someone you are not. In fact, it is about releasing you from the impact of stress so that you have more chance of being everything you were made to be. Remember, you were made unique as the person you are – so be aware of the potential weak points that your personality gives you where stress is concerned, but go out and be that person the best you can be.

The last few chapters have taken us on a journey of understanding the ways in which our emotions and personality can be part of a problem with stress. We've looked at what emotions are and what they are designed to do, and how they act like sparks to trigger our attention and help us analyse things going on around us that may or may not be significant. We've also understood how certain patterns of thinking or types of personality can result in something that works like kindling – thoughts and beliefs which can catch fire when an emotion spark is triggered and result in an emotional blaze. What all of this has shown us again and again is that there are two ways in which specific things about our thinking and beliefs can leave us prone to having lots of difficult emotions to deal with.

Challenges to our world view

The first occurs if we have in our minds certain goals, rules or ideas which we try to live by, but which are very often challenged by the world around us: beliefs that we have
about ourselves or others, or simply as a result of the natural uncertainty that life often throws at us. These can be things we have learned in childhood or things that other people have taught us about ourselves or the world. As children we have no idea how the world works, so as we grow we start to put together these beliefs and rules which help us to understand better – rather like the brain's basic ‘how to' manual for the world at large! On the whole, problems occur when we learn a rule or belief as a child that either simply isn't true for the adult world or ceases to be helpful once we are adults.

So, let's say that as a child we were taught that life is basically fair – good things happen to good people and we make our own luck. This has become one of the rules we expect the world to fit in with. In reality, of course, life isn't always like that, so we might find that as an adult this belief is challenged frequently as unfortunate circumstances, bad luck and really difficult and painful things happen to the people we love and care for. So, our best friend loses his job, a colleague struggles with bad health, or even smaller difficulties we are having – all these things are experiences that clash with a basic idea we have of how the world
should
work. Those people seem like good people to us, and we try to be good ourselves, but bad things keep happening. Each time that clash is identified by our brain, an emotion will be triggered.

What about another example? A few years ago I worked with a woman called Christine, who had grown up with very highly achieving parents. She was the eldest of three children, and to most people looking at her she had been pretty successful in her life. She had a good job in a big company, a nice house and was married with two children.
However, Christine could never shake the thought that she wasn't good enough. Even in work situations in which her colleagues thought she was the most skilled for the job, she felt unsure and worried a lot about underperforming. She admitted to having a dreadful fear of failure that haunted her and she used to lie awake at night worrying about what people would think about her. She had come to me because she was struggling with stress and felt she was near a breakdown. She was starting to have to take time off work and was struggling with some medical problems.

For Christine, one of the most significant things we did was work on understanding why she was experiencing so much stress. She had grown up in a family where the most important thing was not just to achieve but to be outstanding – one of the best, if not
the
best, at whatever she did. Her parents had put a lot of pressure on her and she had been to a school where success was everything. Even though she had done well, it simply hadn't been enough in her parents' eyes; they always seemed disappointed with her eventual career and criticized her openly for all kinds of aspects of her life. Christine admitted that she pushed herself very hard and that she never allowed herself to stop or take a break, even if she was exhausted. Christine had grown up with the rule that she must always do everything she could to achieve extremely highly. Indeed, she had learned from her parents and her school that if she didn't, then she wasn't worthwhile as a person. Now in her adult life this belief was triggering an avalanche of anxiety as she worried about failing or felt that her achievements might not be good enough.

One final example. One thing about children is that on the whole they like life to be predictable. Children have a basic belief that everything happens for a reason – simple
cause and effect. But for some, life is actually very out of control or unpredictable, perhaps because their living circumstances change a lot or because someone significant in their life is struggling and emotionally volatile. In those circumstances children often take responsibility themselves for the emotions and reactions of someone else, even though they are nothing to do with them. It's less scary to a child to do that than to admit that actually the world is not a safe, predictable place. So, a child with a parent who can be violent will desperately try to understand what they are doing to trigger it. As a result, they often grow up believing that they should be able to keep other people around them happy all the time. They are often very good at picking up on other people's emotions because in their childhood they had to be in order to try to avoid frightening or even dangerous situations. But imagine how they would feel if a person they care about is experiencing something that is making them miserable but that no one else can change. To someone who believes they can and should be able to keep everyone around them happy, a situation like this is very hard and will trigger some difficult feelings. They might try all kinds of things to attempt to help and exhaust themselves or annoy others in the process. It isn't easy to accept that some things in the world are just not the way that they learned they would be.

I like to call emotions triggered in this way ‘echo emotions'. It's as if we have the emotion itself – the emotion anyone would have experienced in that situation – but we also have the echo of something else – the memories that caused the rule or goal we carry with us as part of who we are. If something around us contradicts that rule, risks that goal or challenges that belief, we will have an emotional reaction. Of course, more often than not we are completely unaware of
these rules and goals that we live life by. This means that the emotions they trigger can feel out of our control or illogical. We might worry that we are reacting irrationally but, without an understanding of where these feelings are coming from, we are powerless to deal with them. The emotions can also be very powerful, especially if they are linked to very painful memories or traumatic episodes that happened in our past. Of course, the more of these kind of rules and beliefs we have, the more emotions we will find triggered day to day that we have to deal with – and that can leave us very vulnerable to stress.

Emotional kindling

As we have already learned, the second thing that can leave us vulnerable by triggering these negative emotions is if there is kindling around in our minds that can be ignited by those emotion sparks when they occur and go on to create emotional fires. So, what exactly is thought ‘kindling'? Research has shown that there are certain kinds of thoughts that can be very unhelpful in that they can make emotions ‘grow' and become more powerful. These kinds of thoughts are generally not based on fact and may be more likely in people who have certain personalities or certain beliefs about the world around them or about themselves. Read the following examples and see if any sound familiar to you.

 

Negative styles of thinking
: These are thinking styles that would be held by the classic pessimist! They are about focusing on the negative things that have happened, while ignoring anything positive; they predict negative things in the future no matter what; they play down any success
but play up any failure. So, someone might find themselves thinking, ‘What a dreadful day,' concentrating on one or two things that happened that were not so great but ignoring the many good things they did achieve. They might worry about things that are likely to happen in the future, predicting negative outcomes: ‘I bet that meeting tomorrow will be a total disaster too.' Even when they do well, they will play it down: ‘I think my boss must have been feeling sorry for me'; whereas if things go badly, they take all the blame: ‘I was totally useless today, I'm such a disaster, I never get anything right!'

 

All-or-nothing thinking:
This pattern of thinking is very common, both in teenagers and young people who tend to see the world in more of a black and white way, and in adults who are prone to perfectionist-style thinking. All-or-nothing thinking describes someone who tends to think of things as either one thing or the other with no grey areas between. Something is either good enough or it is not; it is either right or wrong. People who think in this way tend to set very high standards and do not allow for any margins when they – or other people – are working towards those aims. So, if they write a report and feel that they have not done it to their usual very high standard, it is a total failure, even if it is still very good. Sometimes people with this tendency will actively look for signs of failure and then declare their work useless and feel totally dissatisfied with the outcome. They may also apply this strict rule to social occasions, feeling, for example, that an evening they have planned was a total disaster just because one person was suddenly unable to come at the last minute or because one small thing didn't go according to their precise plan. This style of thinking can combine with catastrophizing (see below) to lead people to feel extremes
of emotion when things do not go 100 per cent well for them. It should be noted that it can also cause problems in relationships because working for, or being in a relationship with, someone who expects these kind of exacting standards can be very challenging. You can spot someone who is prone to this kind of thinking by their use of a lot of words such as ‘should' or ‘ought to'. They might say or think things such as ‘I
should
be able to get this done' or ‘I
ought to
make sure I get that right', and they often struggle with a lot of guilt when they fail to meet the high standard they push themselves to achieve.

 

Catastrophizing
: This refers to a pattern of thinking that tends to happen when we are under stress, anxious or worried about something. Sometimes called snowballing, it describes the way in which our mind can make great illogical jumps between something that has happened now (or we fear may happen) and things that may or may not be true or may happen in the future. So, we might accidentally say the wrong thing to a colleague. This leaves us feeling bad and triggers thoughts such as ‘Oh no, they will tell everyone I was horrible to them'. This then leads us to start worrying – ‘Everyone will think I am a horrid person… no one will like me… no one will want to know me' – and before we know it we have moved on to worrying about future things –‘I will always be alone… I'll never get married… I'll die all alone!' Although reading a typical thread of catastrophizing thoughts may seem almost comical, in the moment it feels as bad as that last thought – as if something we did inadvertently, a throw away remark to a colleague, may have sealed our fate for life that we will live and die alone. Catastrophizing triggers strong feelings such as anxiety and fear, as well as
hopelessness and depression as we feel that there is nothing we can do to stop these dreadful things coming true.

 

Emotional reasoning:
We've looked at how important emotions are, acting a bit like smoke alarms, warning us of possible issues we need to pay attention to. But sometimes we make a basic mistake about what we think emotions are. Rather than understanding that they warn us of possible problems, we assume they mean actual problems! So, if we feel anxious, we feel the thing we are dreading really
will
happen. Or we feel guilty and therefore assume we
are
guilty. This is like hearing a smoke alarm and assuming it always means there is a fire, when, in fact, everyone knows it usually just means the toast is done! It is a very common problem where negative emotions are concerned.

 

Personalization:
This is an interesting one because it is a very common tendency but one that also has an obvious positive side to it. This describes someone who tends to take responsibility for things – things that may not even be anything to do with them. They are great people to have around because we can really rely on them, but it also means they are prone to feeling very guilty about things that just weren't their fault at all. They might feel very guilty or upset because someone else struggles to make any friends at a social event, or feel bad if something wasn't done, even if it wasn't their job to do it in the first place. They are the person who felt guilty at school if the class was told off, even if they had never done the thing they were being told off for! They find it hard to know where their responsibility ends and someone else's begins, and may be prone to running around other people who might take advantage of this apparently
very caring side to their nature. Spot this thinking pattern by thoughts such as ‘I should have done that' or ‘I wish I had known she felt like that', or the constant feelings of guilt.

 

Negative mind reading:
This last common unhelpful thinking pattern describes someone who would probably describe themselves as being very good at ‘reading' people. And to some degree it is true, for they certainly spend a lot of time reacting to things that they have ‘picked up' from other people. The trouble is that they tend only to pick up on negative things they think others are thinking, and they may not always be very accurate. This thinking style often occurs in someone who is struggling with feeling quite insecure and is not very confident about themselves, particularly in social situations. They feel very anxious about what others are thinking and sometimes project their worst fears on to people without any actual evidence to support their conclusions. They might think, ‘Those people are laughing at me,' or ‘Well, he obviously doesn't want to talk to me,' or ‘She thinks I am a real idiot,' without any real reason to think this. Something as simple as people laughing when they enter a room, or stopping talking when they walk by, can be enough to push them into a cycle of worrying about what those people were thinking of them. This thinking style can be a real problem because it ultimately pushes people into isolation as they start to avoid the social situations that trigger these kind of thoughts and feelings.