Stress: How to De-Stress without Doing Less (7 page)

WHAT MAKES SOME PEOPLE PARTICULARLY VULNERABLE TO STRESS?

In part 1 we looked at some background information about stress: what it is and what it can do to us. Stress can come from a number of different sources, and what might be stressful to one person might not be to another. This section is all about the things that make us different from one another and, importantly, how those things can make some of us more prone to problems with stress. We'll start by looking in more detail at an issue we explored in Chapter 5: the way we respond to and deal with negative emotions.

How emotions are supposed to work

In order to understand exactly how our emotions can start to cause us problems, it is important to have an idea of the way emotions are meant to work. People often think that emotions interrupt good rational thought and make us behave in less sensible ways. So, we say things such as ‘Don't be so emotional', and scoff at those who ‘go by their emotions'. Characters depicted in films and TV who do not have emotions (think Spock in
Star Trek
: ‘Emotions are alien to me, I'm a scientist'; or the Terminator: ‘I know now why you cry, but it is something I can never do') are often
supposed to be more logical, more wise, more able as a result. Emotions are seen as something faintly quaint, a let-down to the human species. The reality is far from this. In fact, emotions are critical to the way our brain works.

Think about the last time you felt a certain emotion – say, anxiety. Chances are there are four things that you were experiencing, which all together make you identify it as a time when you had that emotion. First of all there was some kind of
physical feeling
. Some emotions have stronger and more obvious physical characteristics than others. Anxiety, for example, tends to involve feeling fidgety, butterflies in the stomach or maybe feeling sick, whereas other emotions such as sadness are harder to define in terms of the physical feelings they trigger. The next thing is that an emotion affects your
thoughts
. Each emotion tends to have characteristic thoughts that go with it. These might be different for different people. Anxiety tends to trigger thoughts linked with uncertainty – worries about what might happen. The third feature of an emotion is that it tends to
make us
do something
– or at least
want
to do something. So, continuing to use anxiety as an example: if you are feeling anxious, you probably find it hard to sit still. Anxiety makes us want to move around, and it might trigger feelings of wanting to escape or run away. Finally, an emotional experience has a fourth characteristic – something really quite hard to put your finger on or explain –
that elusive thing
that just makes us
know
we are experiencing an emotion.

It's interesting to note that different emotions have these different components in different measures. An emotion such as anger or frustration is very much about what it makes us want to do. We might find ourselves feeling totally out of control as we give in to the urge to yell, hit someone or just
stamp our feet! Meanwhile, an emotion such as anxiety is very physical – and not in a very pleasant way. We might feel overwhelmed with the feeling of butterflies in our stomach to the degree that we feel sick. Some emotions are very strongly controlled and maintained by the thoughts that go with them, so it is impossible to imagine being worried without linking that to something you were worried about, to the thoughts you were having. In general, negative emotions tend to be quite clearly defined in terms of one or more of these four features. It is interesting that positive emotions such as happiness or joy are so much less specific. These emotions have that strange fourth factor as the dominant thing we notice. We can clearly say when we have felt happy or joyful, but it is hard to define exactly what it was about the way we were feeling that makes us say it was happiness or joy.

All of these different features of emotion give us some vital clues to what their overall role is. The study of emotions is a field where psychology, neuroscience, sociology and many other disciplines all come together, and one area all have questioned is what emotions do – in particular negative emotions, which are those that tend to cause all the problems. On the whole, there are three functions for those emotions that most experts agree on.

The first thing is that emotions are about
drawing our attention to something
. Our brain is constantly scanning the world around it, looking for things going on that might be significant to a goal we have – a general one such as staying alive, or something more specific such as getting a report in on time. If our brain identifies something significant happening – say, we have stepped out into the road and a bus is coming right at us – then it triggers an emotion as part of drawing our attention to the fact that something
is happening that might need us to take action. This is particularly true about emotions that have a strong physical component such as anxiety and anger. In fact, one expert, writing in the nineteenth century, went as far as to say that what we call an emotion
is
our experience of those physical changes.
¹

The second function that emotions have is to make sure that we
do something
. Emotions are a bit like special kinds of reflexes. If you reach into the oven to get something out and part of your hand not covered by the oven glove accidentally touches the metal side, you will automatically and without thinking jerk your hand away. This is a physical reflex response. Emotions act in a similar way. Listen to the way one expert put it: ‘The human body has at its disposal two methods by which it can change its circumstances. It can do so by altering behaviour, causing for example shivering or reflexes. Alternatively it can resolve the predicament by inducing physiological states that lead individuals to act in a certain way.'
²
So, an emotion changes something about our physical state that makes us much more likely to act in a certain way – a way that is likely to resolve whatever the significant situation is. When we have walked out in front of the bus, the emotion anxiety (or more likely panic!) makes us instinctively want to jump back out of the way. In fact, there is evidence that in the case of strong emotions triggered by very significant or risky situations, the brain can actually bypass the part where thinking occurs and just trigger a physical response. So, without thinking about it, we jump back to safety, responding without having to waste valuable time thinking about whether we should. This physical push to act in a certain way can be very strong – just think about how hard it is not to run away if you are scared of something –
and is often what makes certain emotions so hard to ignore.

Finally, emotions have a very influential role in our
decision-making
. Very few of our day-to-day decisions can be made by mathematical analysis of the facts. Even if they could, who has time to approach decisions in that way? Attempts to create computer models that think like humans find that without something that does a similar job to emotions to simplify decision-making, the computer becomes overwhelmed by simple decisions. In a similar way, humans who have had brain injuries that appear to have impaired their emotions struggle terribly with the simple decisions of everyday life. Emotions seem to colour our perception of an option, so if one option is associated with a negative emotion such as anxiety, we are much less likely to consider it. This is worth being aware of because it can make decisions very hard if one option is associated with a very strong emotion, even though it is probably what we want to do. So taking an exam might trigger a lot of anxiety but be something we need to do in order to pass a course. That kind of decision can become very stressful because it almost requires over riding the warning that the emotion is giving.

Suppressing emotions

So, emotions are automatic things. They are not optional and they are not something we could live without. This is important because too often we treat emotions as if they
should
be optional! We wish we didn't feel an emotion, or we feel it is inconvenient to feel it, so we try to suppress it; we try to deny that it is there. Our response is to criticize ourselves and wish that we didn't feel that way, perhaps adding guilt to the emotional mix as we struggle with the fact that we
reacted in that way. But although we can control how we react and what we do as a result,
having
an emotion is not something we can control. Let's look at example. Say a friend has just announced that they are getting married. What we want to feel is joy and happiness for them but, for some reason that we are not quite sure of, what we actually find ourselves feeling is a very negative emotion such as jealousy or sadness. Now we have a choice about how we deal with an emotion which, if we were honest, we would rather not be feeling. Very often what people do in this kind of situation is try desperately hard not to feel it. They very much wish that they didn't and push it right down in the hope that it will go away. But, of course, it doesn't; in fact, it seems to bubble to the surface more and more, and soon it will become an issue that they will have to deal with one way or another. Suppressing emotions rarely works. The way to work with an emotion like that, uncomfortable as it may be, is to look at why it has been triggered in the first place and deal with the perhaps uncomfortable realities that underlie it. So, if you want to get rid of your uncomfortable emotion, you have to look at where it comes from. Only then, when you have processed the things that are causing it to be triggered, will it start to go away.

In fact, this kind of instinctive suppression of emotions is very often at the root of a more serious problem. If we start habitually to suppress emotions that we do not know how to deal with, this pattern of suppressing them becomes less of a short-term solution and more of a habit. In effect, we start to treat emotions as if they are awkward things that we would rather not have. So, faced with a situation that leaves us feeling really upset or anxious, we take a deep breath, ‘pull ourselves together' and carry on regardless. What
happens to that emotion? If only it did what we wanted and just dwindled away to nothing! Remember, an emotion's job is to get our attention! If we were given the job of getting someone's attention and their first reaction was to ignore us, would we go away? No, we'd keep on catching them whenever we could and reminding them that we were there until they finally paid attention! Negative emotions do not generally go away until we have worked through whatever triggered them in the first place.

Trying to suppress negative emotions is a bit like putting an angry cat in a box. We might manage to get it in and shut the lid, and there might be no outward signs that it is there, but it
is
there, and from time to time we will know it is as we hear angry yowls or maybe see the occasional paw break out. All that time it is in there it gets more and more angry, and at some point, eventually, we will have to open the box. This kind of delayed emotional attack is often both painful and overwhelming.

This is exactly what happens when we are under long-term stress. We start automatically to suppress some emotions – often those that are painful, unpleasant, unwanted or inconvenient. We're even more likely to do this if life is throwing a lot of us, so there are simply too many emotions for us to deal with in the time we have available. As we start habitually to suppress our emotions, we end up with a box full of these difficult, negative feelings that we have never processed or dealt with. They can become a bit like a bubbling pool of festering emotion that we carry around with us. Carrying this has various effects on us. Sometimes those feelings, which do emerge from time to time, can start to trigger worries that we have always had about who and what we are. Of course, this then triggers more emotions
and fears, and can very quickly result in a lot of pressure for us to carry each day as those doubts and worries build up. We may find that we start to change in ourselves, becoming more withdrawn, quiet or subdued as we have to try not to react to anything in case those other feelings come flooding out.

Meanwhile, of course, all that effort is tiring, so we will find ourselves feeling more and more emotionally exhausted and worn out. Sometimes the effort of just talking to someone else can be too much, so we might start to avoid other people and become isolated. Being on our own then leaves us vulnerable to more emotions emerging. Bit by bit things can start to get really hard. On the surface we may look fine but gradually we will become all too aware of what we are carrying round underneath. As someone said to me once, ‘I‘ve just got to a stage where I don't know what to say if someone asks me how I am. The answer isn't “fine” because I am not. But I am still managing just about OK. The thing is there is so much under the surface that not even I know how I am any more – I just get on with being. So I have to avoid other people in case they ask me how I am because I guess the honest answer is that I am not sure that I want to know.'

Emotional sparks and emotional fires

So, something as simple as suppressing emotions can easily cause them to become a problem in their own right. The other common cause of problems with emotions is the way that they can grow. Remember, emotions as they are supposed to work are short-term triggers – like warning flags that signal there is something you need to pay attention to.
I like to think of them as emotion sparks – you can see them at the top of figure 8. Sparks of emotion are not optional. They are designed to grab our attention so that we address the potentially significant thing that is going on around us. They act a bit like smoke alarms, warning us that there might be something serious going on. Once we have realized that, they die out – they have done their job.

The trouble is that many of us are dealing with something quite different – emotional fires. Emotional fires start when we move into the bottom half of the diagram – when that initial spark of emotion seems to ignite something else and start a much bigger reaction.