Stress: How to De-Stress without Doing Less (5 page)

So far we have looked at the various physical problems that stress can cause. But many of these are things we might not notice or things that build up over time. The most common visible sign or symptom of stress is often something to do with emotional or psychological factors. Here the impact varies along a spectrum, with minor changes in irritability at one end, right up to major breakdown and burn-out at the other.

In fact, to understand how stress affects us emotionally, we need to return to the happy and unhappy categories that I talked about in Chapter 2. To reiterate, many people like to think that where emotional problems (and certainly what we might call ‘mental health' problems) are concerned, there are two sorts of people in the world. Most of us are lucky enough to be in the ‘happy' group, people who do not have those kinds of issues and who consider themselves to be normal. Mental health crises are things that affect other people – the unlucky few who are in the other box, the ‘problem' or ‘not normal' box. We tend to think that these people, as a result of some quirk of genetics, personality or difficult start in life, will always have this tendency – this ‘weakness' – to struggle with whatever the problem is, be it depression, anxiety or something more serious such as bipolar disorder or psychosis. Perhaps some people are unlucky enough to experience something extreme that can
then catapult them from the healthy box into the unhealthy one for a time, but on the whole we can continue through life safe in the knowledge that mental health problems are things that affect other people.

Stress and mental health

In fact, the uncomfortable reality is that, although there are conditions such as schizophrenia which seem to affect certain people and have their own biological characteristics, in general, mental health is much more like a line, with ‘healthy' at one end and ‘unhealthy' at the other. Whoever we are and wherever we come from, life can sometimes throw things at us that we do not know how to cope with. This can push you down the line towards the level at which we might start to say that you have some kind of mental health problem. Some people have had experiences or a difficult start in life that might predispose them to struggle, but many mental health problems such as anxiety and depression are incredibly common, even in those people who have never had symptoms before. Statistics would tell us that in any given year one in four of us will develop a problem of this kind. Even looking at suicidal feelings – which you might consider to be a marker of a particularly extreme form of psychological distress – reveals that this kind of intense emotional pain is more common than we might think, with one in ten adults admitting that they have seriously considered suicide at some stage in their life.

Stress has been linked to almost every kind of mental health problem there is. In fact, it often precedes the development of depression and anxiety. (More about anxiety later, as it is one of the most common emotions to
start to cause problems if you are operating under high stress.) Stress is a common cause of problems such as panic attacks or the kinds of psychological problem that can have a serious impact on everyday life – severe phobias or obsessive compulsive disorder, for example. If you are living on the edge of your capacity to cope, everyday stress can trigger emotions that feel very extreme and may feel out of control. Stress leads us to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things that we are trying to keep on top of, and as a result we end up having to cope with a lot of negative emotions such as anxiety, as we desperately try to keep all those plates in the air. We have to accept that even for the strongest or most psychologically healthy of us, stress is one thing that can push us down the line towards problems if we are not very careful.

Part of our vulnerability to stress comes from what happens if we are simply bombarded with too many emotions. Emotions are complex things and very much a part of what it is to be human. They are a necessary and vital part of the way our brain is designed and we need them to help us to get through life successfully (see Chapter 7 for more). Very often, however, in our modern western lives, emotions – or, to be more specific, negative emotions – can start to cause very real problems. Being constantly inundated with negative emotions can cause us to turn to unhelpful things in order to try to help us to cope with them – an addiction or self-destructive behaviour, for example; something that actually makes us feel worse. Serious conditions such as eating disorders and self harm can develop as we desperately try to find a way to carry on with life in spite of difficult emotions. Stress, of course, is one of the major triggers for these kind of overwhelming emotions. It can cause an increase in emotions
and also affect how vulnerable we are to them, making things feel more overwhelming and out of control.

Suppressing negative emotions

One of the reasons that we tend to struggle with the negative emotion thrown at us is the way that we often instinctively respond. Particularly if they are under stress, many people have a tendency to suppress negative emotions rather than deal with them in the moment they occur. Of course, suppressing emotions is something that all adults have to do to some degree. Some people would even argue it is a necessary skill to gain with maturity. In adult life, it can be inappropriate to react immediately and vocally to every emotion we experience. We have to be able to control our emotions in certain circumstances. In the short term, this can even be a positive coping strategy to deal with a difficult situation – in effect, to put that feeling to one side and deal with it later when there is more time and when it is more appropriate. Some jobs in particular require this kind of emotional maturity – jobs that involve working with children such as teaching or childcare, jobs where you support people who are themselves struggling with difficult emotions, or jobs where certain behaviour and standards are very important. However, the very same tendency to suppress emotions that can be a good thing in those contexts can quickly start to be a problem if we are experiencing a lot of stress.

The problem with chronically stressful situations is, in a nutshell, that there is never any time to give ourselves a chance to deal with an emotion or to work through what happened and how it made us feel. Most people in our current culture admit that they struggle to find times where
they can wind down and take time to think through and assess things that have happened during the day or week. Indeed, one third of adults say that they never experience any time that is truly private and gives them the chance to think these kinds of things through. Meanwhile, although friendships are increasingly important as families now live further apart, many people find that their friendships are starting to lack the kind of depth that they really need in order to get support from them. So, although they might have loads of friends they would get together with for a laugh or a night on the town, many people struggle to think of who they would turn to if they were really in need. This lack of social support leads us to feel even more under pressure to find the solution within ourselves.

The problem with suppressing emotion is that it just doesn't work. In fact, a tendency to do this – and the extreme where people start to become unaware of the emotions that they are experiencing – has been linked to a whole host of emotional and psychological problems. Suppressed emotions tend not to stay suppressed. So, at moments when we feel vulnerable (often when we are on our own, tired or trying to rest and relax), those emotions re-emerge. This means that people often find themselves struggling with what can be called ‘free floating' emotions – emotions with no apparent trigger in that moment. This constant low-level negative emotion then affects our thinking and can lead us to start to make irrational leaps in our thinking that emphasize the negative and ignore positives. All of these things can trigger a new problem or worsen an existing tendency towards a mental health issue.

The vicious cycle of stress

So, one way in which stress has its emotional impact is related to the way it makes us more likely to act or think in certain ways. There are also physiological reasons why our brains, under stress, are more likely to react in certain ways. Stress hormones can affect the parts of the brain that moderate and regulate mood, and there is good evidence that chronic stress can genuinely affect the way our brain responds to the world around us, making us more prone to low moods and problems with motivation. Stress also contributes to other problems such as insomnia (see Chapter 17) which can worsen psychological disorders, and it is very easy to end up in a vicious cycle. Imagine, for example, the following situation:

 

Alex is 38 and works in what you might call a pretty normal managerial job. However, recently she has been under a lot of pressure and given new responsibilities which she struggles to get done alongside her usual work. Because of this she has found herself starting to struggle with anxiety and she finds it really hard to switch off from her work and not to worry about it when she should be doing other things. She used to use other things to help her switch off – things such as going to the gym, cinema or meeting up with friends. But now her job means that she has to spend extra time working in the evenings, and if she does arrange to go out, she feels guilty for not working so she just doesn't go. She often intends to work in the evenings but is too exhausted so ends up slumped in front of the TV watching whatever's on and eating. She's also noticed that she is drinking more than usual on her own at home – what used to be the occasional glass doesn't seem to help her relax any more, and she notices with alarm how easy it is to be getting through several bottles of wine a week. Recently she's started feeling kind of odd – very
tearful and emotional. She finds herself having thoughts that she cannot cope and sometimes she just wants to run away and hide – but she knows she can't. On top of everything else, she is now having trouble sleeping, which is just making everything worse. She really wonders how long she will be able to keep going like this.

 

Does that sound familiar? It is all too easy for a stressful situation – be it at work or elsewhere – to trigger difficult emotions and very quickly push us into a position where we find we are struggling to cope. Often our own reactions to that then make things worse. So, a stressful job causes stress and triggers emotion, but the same stressful job means that there is never time for us to deal with or express that emotion. The same stressful job means that when we are not working, either we are frantically keeping up with the other chores that life presents – shopping, cleaning, basic things – or we are out trying to have fun. And that is not exactly a time when we want to be having heart-to-hearts and going over all the things that made us feel so dreadful that week – we want to escape it all and forget. So, we go out, we have fun, maybe we end up drinking a bit too much or trying something else in order to get away from the realities of our day-to-day life. All too soon it is time to be back at work, often worn out as a result of lack of sleep over our hectic weekend, and those emotions simply become part of the pool of things we have not had a chance to deal with. But at the times when we are vulnerable – perhaps those moments after a long busy day when we are finally on our own, perhaps the long hours at night when we are lying awake, unable to switch off and get to sleep – then those emotions can come flooding back and leave us feeling totally overwhelmed and out of control.

Of course, this also means that people experiencing chronic stress can be at a heightened risk of slipping into unfortunate strategies to try to cope with all of that emotion day to day. The occasional glass of wine to relax can quickly become something more serious, or people can start to develop a problem with self harm, which so often begins in someone desperately trying to cope with what they are feeling and go on as normal. Meanwhile, disruption to appetite, combined with this need to find a way to cope with what life is throwing at them, can contribute towards the development of eating disorders. On top of all that, chronic stress can seriously affect sleep. As well as causing its own problems as we get more and more tired, insomnia tends to magnify any existing problems and again increases the risk that we might turn to something else in order to try to cope.

In essence, chronic stress pushes our capacity to cope to the absolute limit, and as a result reveals any inherent weak points in our personality, relationships, thinking style, beliefs or the way we deal with difficult emotions. If we're honest, most of us would admit that although we are normally fairly stable, a bad day can push us so that we behave like someone we barely recognize! Stress does this, pushing our resources and forcing us to the very edge of what it is to be us. Even though this often resolves in time as the source of stress goes away, the risk is that for some of us – who for whatever reason are particularly vulnerable (more in later chapters) – all of this goes on to trigger a serious emotional or psychological problem.

Remember, these things are much more common than you might imagine! Don't make the mistake of thinking you are immune to emotional problems. Just as we take measures to think about our physical health and try to make changes
to keep ourselves healthy, it is vital that we do not neglect our emotional well-being. And just like issues relating to our physical health, this is particularly important if we are under a lot of stress. Stress is like a magnifying glass: it takes any potential weakness in our psychological make-up and makes it seem much bigger!

Here's the experience of one woman who knew all too well the impact stress was having on her emotions. Mary is 32. She's single and works as a PA.

 

‘I think for me stress has always been something that has affected me. Even when I was in school I struggled with it – I remember having to take time off during exams, and having panic attacks a lot. The teachers always said I was “highly strung” and I guess I have carried that label with me all my life. In work situations, I have always avoided stressful stuff because I know I don't handle it very well and I am worried about flaking out. I have missed out on promotions and so on, and although I have been in this job for ages and watched other people move up the ladder, I have never been offered anything. But that's not their fault because I think I took the job because I knew it wouldn't be too much for me.