Stress: How to De-Stress without Doing Less (11 page)

 

Do you recognize any of these tendencies yourself? Well, I would be surprised if you didn't, because all of us think in some of these ways sometimes, particularly on a bad day or if we are stressed. And the chances are that most of us
also carry some of those rules or beliefs that can also cause problems. On the whole, those things do not cause any serious problems. However, when we are under stress, it is as if someone turns the heat up underneath our thought patterns, and sometimes under that extra pressure they can then start to cause problems. If you have started to have some emotional problems – related to stress or not – the chances are that some of these patterns of thinking are making things worse. Tending to think in these ways is like having a mind full of kindling, so that negative emotions catch fire, last longer and grow.

What can you do about it?

So, what do you do if this does describe you and you know, or suspect, that the way you think or the things you believe about the world are part of your problem with stress? The first step is to spend some time understanding better why you react the way you do. This may involve identifying unhelpful thinking patterns, or even starting to understand some of the underlying beliefs and goals that might be affecting you. Now, you might wonder how this can help – surely it is not changing anything? But the truth is that once you understand why you react in a certain way, you also inherently become aware of the option of doing something different. Without understanding, you are just reacting instinctively and automatically. Understanding is the first step towards being able to make changes. It's a bit like those old computer games where we had to work our way across a giant world, solving puzzles and finding objects. Often in those games there were whole areas of the ‘world' that we couldn't get to unless we were holding the right object or
had found a certain key. If we did have the right thing in the right place at the right time, suddenly doors opened or new bits of screen magically appeared! In a similar way, once we become aware that something inside us makes us react a certain way, we also suddenly see other options – alternative ways to react, different actions we could take instead. Another analogy is to think of the way our mind normally works as doing a dance. We have learned certain steps to the dance and we automatically dance them without thinking. Only when we become aware of the steps we are taking can we then start to think about learning a different dance – perhaps one that leaves us less prone to stress or experiencing fewer difficult emotions.

In fact, looking in more detail at these kinds of thing is what Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) does – something you may have heard about as it is becoming a very popular form of psychological treatment for many different illnesses. CBT explores the way in which thinking patterns can affect the way we feel, act and react, and looks at the beliefs that underlie them. We'll take a look at some of the approaches that CBT uses in Chapter 14, but if you think that you might benefit from a course of CBT, do talk to your doctor. Another option, and one open to almost everyone, is to look at one of the free websites that take you through a course of CBT, examining your tendency to think in certain ways and helping you to challenge that.
¹

Often when we are looking at problems with stress, we look outside of ourselves and blame or try to change the situations we are in. This chapter has looked at some of the ways in which we might be our own worst enemy, thinking and reacting in ways that are not actually helpful and might worsen our vulnerability to stress, so that we struggle to cope
where others may not be affected. If reading this has made you determined to look at the way you think and make some changes, remember that it does take time! You have spent all of your life so far learning to think this way, so give yourself time to change it. You might find too that you do need some support, particularly if the reason you have certain rules or put certain pressure on yourself comes from something in your past. Challenging what are often automatic thoughts is not easy, so get some help. Remember also that sometimes that pressure comes from things outside of you – a difficult boss with very high expectations, or a job where you are asked to do things you are just not capable of or don't have the time or necessary authority to do. If that is the situation, don't take all the blame yourself. Do look at your thinking, but also think about how you can make some changes to the situation that is placing you under so much unnecessary pressure.

Before we move on from looking at things that can make us more vulnerable to stress, we need to take a more detailed look at self-esteem. Self-esteem is something that you will have heard mentioned many times. Over the last decade it has become one of the most often discussed psychological issues, as research looks into its impact on issues as far separated as family life and violent crime. Self-esteem seems to be a very important part of who we are as human beings. But what exactly is it, where does it come from, and how does
your
self-esteem have an influence on how you respond to stress?

As you would expect for such a widely discussed and debated phenomenon, there are various definitions of self-esteem. In essence though, self-esteem is a measure of the person we think we are, of what we feel our value is, and something to do with what we understand about our place in the world. Self-esteem affects the way we act and react to things, and our confidence and belief in ourselves, as well as practical things such as how successful we are likely to be in both work/academic achievement and in relationships and social challenges. Some people would separate the concepts of self-esteem (how valuable or worthy we feel we are) and self-identity or self-image (the detail of
who
we think we are). However, I am deliberately going to merge them because, in a practical sense of the way they influence us, they very much overlap.

Self-esteem in childhood

The roots of self-esteem are developed in our early childhood. In fact, that is one of the most fascinating things about self-esteem because something that can have such a huge impact on our adult life is actually developed in the years that, as adults, we may have little or no memory of. When a child is very young, they have no idea of who they are. At first they do not even understand that they are separate from their mother or main caregiver. As they get older and start to understand this, their concept of themselves as a separate person starts to develop. Alongside this, their brain gradually matures and they start to gain the ability to form what will later (much later!) become their adult self-esteem.

So, our self-esteem developed when we were very young. In fact, studies suggest that for most people our self-esteem at age four or five is a pretty good indicator of our adult self-esteem. At this age we are hugely dependent on the significant people around us to help build our self-esteem. Children are like a blank canvas, with no idea of who they are, what they are good at or what their character is like. So, when adults comment on things (‘You're
really
good at that, well done!') or when children hear things said about themselves (‘Amy is very good at getting on with other children'), all of those statements and snippets of information are gathered together and start to form that very naive self-esteem. Much has been made, therefore, of the importance of praising young children and giving them lots of good and positive feedback. Actually, however, the most important thing is that we get both a positive and also a reasonably accurate idea of who we are. Children also get feedback from how they perform in various skills, and parental comments, no matter how enthusiastic, will not cancel out the fact that a child knows that they are not
very good at something. This is particularly the case for very intelligent children, who tend to be quite hard on themselves if they feel they have not performed well. One teenager I worked with recalled becoming suspicious at a very early age of her mother's always effusive praise: ‘She always said everything I did was amazing, and I started to get suspicious. So one day I drew something really useless, deliberately. It was just like a line on a piece of paper. I took it to her to see what she thought and she said it was brilliant and put it on the fridge. I never really believed the things she said again after that.'

One thing at this age that can be very powerful is the impact of labels on small children. Because they are such sponges for information about themselves, and because the only source of information they have is the people around them, they can be very vulnerable to labels or comments that are made. They will even start to act in a way that fits with those labels. So, the child who is always reported to be ‘the quiet one' learns quickly that being ‘quiet' is part of who they are. Instinctively, then, on some level they start to act in a way that fits with that – because being quiet is something they have learned about who they are. Labels can come from all kinds of places, but often stem from where we were in the family we grew up in. If we have an elder brother or sister who was always quite demanding, we may have been the second child who was always ‘so much easier and well behaved'. Or, the opposite may be true: we may be the child who was ‘always a nightmare, never sat still'! These labels can be very powerful, particularly if they are negative, and it can be interesting to think back (or to question our parents!) and find out what sort of child we were. One person I worked with in their adult life had never really got over going to the same school as her older siblings and enduring several years of hearing
‘She isn't as bright as her sisters'. Labels at this age can be very powerful because they are so readily taken on board as part of that self-identity. So, if they are used a lot and taken on board by the family, or by other prominent adults, they can then go on to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The child who is a ‘nightmare' continues to be one and is a behavioural challenge both at home and at school, whereas the child who is always ‘as good as gold' always conforms, perhaps too much, never really feeling they can be themselves and express what they feel. Even apparently jokey labels – throwaway comments or family jokes – can be surprisingly powerful for children who are learning every day about who they are. Comments that we were the ‘unplanned child' or that our dad ‘was really hoping for a girl/boy', if repeated consistently throughout a childhood, can easily become part of our self-concept.

Once the naive basis of self-esteem has formed, it tends to be fairly stable throughout childhood, and, in the most part, fairly positive. Children have a baseline self-esteem that is generally positive, and even in the situations where there are some negative seeds planted, or where life is very traumatic, they have a remarkable resilience. But this is the foundation of adult self-esteem, and if there are weaknesses there, often they do not become apparent and develop further until the next time self-esteem is challenged. This happens during adolescence as part of the barrage of changes that comes once we hit puberty.

Self-esteem in adolescence

It used to be thought that the brain only dramatically changed and developed during early childhood, but with the
advent of technology such as PET scanners and MRI we have been able to understand a lot more about the way the brain develops. Now scientists have shown that in adolescence the brain changes almost as much as in toddlerhood. The changes are in a different region though, and just as toddlers are tentatively, hesitantly and sometimes not very successfully learning basic skills such as speech and how to walk, run and hop, teenagers are learning the adult skills linked with things such as emotion (particularly more complex social emotions such as jealousy and love), motivation and, of course, self-esteem. As the teenage brain develops, adolescents start to acquire an abstract concept of who they are. Details such as what they are and are not good at, what they look like and how other people react to them become very important.

Children are very egocentric – that is, they genuinely believe the world revolves around them. This is one of the reasons why children struggle to appreciate that significant changes in their life, such as parents getting divorced, are not their fault, because to a child everything that happens is in some way connected to them. Teenagers start to realize that other people have a whole different perspective on the world, and as part of this their self-esteem starts to be influenced by much more than just what their parents think. Their friends and peers become crucial as they start to compare themselves to the people around them. In essence, they are asking themselves the question ‘Am I normal?' and their self-esteem development can be profoundly affected by the results of this comparison. This is why it is so important for teenagers to wear the right clothes, have the right gadgets; even why it is so crucial that their parents are the same as other parents and don't do anything too embarrassingly different.

The other thing that affects teenagers' self-esteem is the
second abstract concept they form in their brains. Alongside what they think of themselves, they also start to think about what others think of them – and therefore what they think they
should
be like. This is influenced by many things – for example, the media (studies show that teenagers are the most susceptible to images in the media of very slim or beautiful models, and the most likely to feel bad about themselves as a result of those images) or parental or teacher expectations (so being the student most likely to get straight As can be a difficult pressure to bear). They are also influenced by their own personality. Teenagers who are more prone to perfectionism tend to put more pressure on themselves and are more likely to set very high standards (which, being human, they probably won't meet) or be very hard on themselves if they do feel they have ‘failed'.

We can start to see now where problems with self-esteem can come from. Teenage development is when the final touches to adult self-esteem occur – the house built on the foundation laid in childhood. So, things that affect our self-esteem as teenagers really are important. Most teenagers (particularly girls) go through a dip in their self-esteem in the adolescent years – not surprising given the scrutiny and pressure they endure. But for some, that low self-esteem never resolves and they go into adult life struggling with who they think they are. Issues that date as far back as early childhood can start to become a problem as we try to build an adult self-esteem on a foundation that just cannot carry the weight. Or some of the classic experiences that so many of us endure as adolescents can genuinely challenge our concept of ourselves. Being very different to others, not fitting in at home or at school, being bullied or being the odd one out, struggling under the pressure of a parent who sets very high
goals and is never satisfied, a teacher who constantly criticizes, or a home life that is generally chaotic and non-supportive – all these things can be really difficult for teenagers trying to put together an adult self-concept.

Self-esteem in adulthood

As adults, what we all hope for is that we carry with us what I call ‘good enough' self-esteem. Low self-esteem is an obvious problem, but sometimes having too high a self-esteem can also be an issue. Many of the people I work with worry terribly about becoming arrogant or selfish if they think too much of themselves. But actually thinking
enough
of ourselves is terribly important, and if we do not, it can trigger problems such as negative emotions or make us more prone to some of the unhelpful thinking patterns outlined in Chapter 10.

 

Figure 9: The six sources of adult self-esteem

So, what about your self-esteem
now
? As adults we tend to get our self-esteem from roughly six areas, which you can see in figure 9. In a way, we can visualize our adult self-esteem as a pie chart, with each of these things giving more or less to the ‘pie' (see figure 10). Most of us have a reasonably good balance; we get our self-esteem from a selection of these things – some more, some less, with some variation throughout our life. Remember, the ability to successfully build that ‘pie' depends on what happens to you as a child and as a teenager.

Figure 10: One example of adult self-esteem balance

Where do problems with self-esteem come from and how can we recognize them?

If we think of that self-esteem ‘pie', there are basically four things that commonly go wrong or cause us problems as adults. The first, and perhaps most common, is the question of whether, as teenagers, we have a foundation that gives us
‘good enough' self-esteem
. If that foundation is strong enough, that teenager is likely to be reasonably confident
and happy and be able to weather the many challenges of adolescence successfully. This gives them the opportunity and necessary confidence to build up further self-esteem, as they have the belief in themselves to try new things, take some measured risks, and generally learn more about who they are and what they can do. In contrast, the teenager with a poor foundation often struggles; they will already have doubts about who they are and difficult labels and beliefs about themselves restricting who they can be. They encounter problems with relationships, in school and elsewhere, and may withdraw or give up completely. Often even outstanding ability in one area such as academic work is not enough to counteract this gulf in self-esteem, and even very able young people can struggle as they try to understand why they have any value – often to the confusion of those around them who think they are totally brilliant. Low self-esteem like this can be all-encompassing and affect every area of life. It affects our thinking styles, making the unhelpful patterns in Chapter 10 so much more likely, and often results in us living life believing some very unhelpful things about ourselves. These beliefs result in a lot of negative emotion being triggered and mean we are much more vulnerable to emotional problems and difficulties with stress and anxiety.