Coping with Stress and Anxiety is a Life Skill Worth Learning
You leave your home for a walk to the Starbucks and as you stroll you encounter a massive pile of shit.
This is no ordinary lump of fecal matter. This is a work of art and came from something huge. It's a mound. Like a poop emoji statue. It's so big, you can't step over it but must walk around to avoid soiling your crocks.
At the very moment of the encounter, you are faced with three choices: walk around the embankment and leave it there, go back and get a shovel to clean it up, or stand there in agony unmoving and paralyzed.
You can choose to walk around it but it'll be there the next day.
You can stand there, immobile, and allow the shit to keep you in place for an undetermined amount of time, effectively ruining your day.
Or you can fucking clean it up.
There’s a fine line between stress and anxiety. Both are emotional responses, but stress is typically caused by an external trigger. The trigger can be short-term, such as a work deadline or a fight with a loved one or long-term, such as being unable to work, discrimination, or chronic illness. People under stress experience mental and physical symptoms, such as irritability, anger, fatigue, muscle pain, digestive troubles, and difficulty sleeping.
Anxiety, on the other hand, is defined by persistent, excessive worries that don’t go away even in the absence of a stressor. Anxiety leads to a nearly identical set of symptoms as stress: insomnia, difficulty concentrating, fatigue, muscle tension, and irritability.
Stress is physical. Anxiety is psychological. Both can cause a near paralysis of action. Both trigger the flight part of that instinctual fight or flight response to stimulus.
Both can make us stupid.
When we’re stressed, our brain releases hormones that damage our higher brain functions and stymie our mental performance.
The prefrontal cortex is where we derive our intelligence.
It’s responsible for the invention of vaccines, video poker, and both the real Eiffel Tower as well as the fake one on the Las Vegas Strip.
The prefrontal cortex enables social intelligence. Without a defined sense of that, you instantly become Donald Trump. No one wants to be fucking Donald Trump, right?
Stress and anxiety disable these high-order functions. They make you stupid and prone to making stupid decisions.
Research also shows that stress hormones weaken your immune system as well as damage your heart. The irony for those of us (everyone) having dealt with a year+ of COVID anxiety is that the very fear of COVID makes us more susceptible to COVID.
From an evolutionary perspective, stress is merely an expression of fear. In our collective past, fear of danger was a useful thing: without a healthy sense of fear, velociraptors would not have needed the hunting thing and just stroll up and snack on us. In 2021, the dangers are far less likely because dinosaurs only exist in movies and we are the über-predators on the planet. Our biggest danger is ourselves and our over-active imaginations.
A study at Cornell University, in which subjects were told to write down their worries for two weeks and then track which actually came true. They found that the vast majority of their worries—85 percent—never ended up happening. Of the 15 percent that did actually happen, it often wasn’t that bad: in fact, 79 percent of the time things went better than expected.
All in all, the study suggests that around 97 percent of our worries are either exaggerated or complete fabrications.
How much of your day is wasted conjuring problems that haven't occurred and may never come to fruition? How much of your day involves becoming stressed out because of finances, family issues, work problems?
Dealing with physical stress is just a matter of further physicality. Meditation, yoga, running, weight-lifting. Hell, the physical activity of cleaning your home or washing your car (like, actually washing it rather than running it through a car wash) can help relieve stress.
One of the things that does not help reduce stress is eating. We love our concept of comfort food but the simple physics of stuffing our faces with carbohydrates, sugar, and whatever faux-food that Cheetos are only burdens your body.
Anxiety is a bit more complicated.
This is not as simple as positive thinking. An optimistic attitude certainly comes into play but there's far more adjustment required to manage true stress and serious anxiety. A shift toward letting go of things beyond your control (which comprises most things in the world) and actively understanding how much time and energy is wasted predicting a host of potentially awful outcomes are both necessary.
What truly makes the difference is the decision to see your choices as wholly yours to make.
At the casino, which can be a true Petri dish of humanity, I used to walk among some folks who seem helpless. They blame the machines for taking their money. They blame the corporation for not fixing up certain things on the property. They blame other employees for not doing their jobs. They stare at their phones to watch the clock advance so they can leave and go home and bitch about how much they hate their jobs and if only they could be paid more and how boring it all is and convince themselves that they work really hard but it’s okay to not put too much effort into things because no one else does and who gives a shit anyway?
I’m talking to a guest playing Roulette. He’s a regular and we see each other on most days.
“You are almost always in a good mood around here. I think I’ve only seen you look tired or out of sorts once or twice. Always a smile, always dancing in between the slot machines. I wish I had an ounce of what you have.”
“I guess the knowledge of my freedom to choose my day is that secret sauce, you know?”
“Freedom? What freedom?”
“I dunno. I look at it this way: I could strip down naked right now, run to the pool outside and take a swim. Sure, there would be consequences...”
“You’d get canned...”
“Yeah, but I have that freedom to choose that action and no one in the world could stop me. When I look at my life as entirely my responsibility, my job as an agreement to work the floor for the money offered, my day as my own, it feels like I’m in charge of my destiny. I’m happy to be here, wearing a Marvel tie, in a smoky room filled with people chasing the dragon of financial windfall and drinking for enjoyment or escape, because I got up this morning and chose to come. If it’s my choice, it’s up to me to make the best of it, right?"
Choice. Every time you make a choice (even if it is a choice between two bad things) it is entirely you to be rewarded for it or face the music if it turns to shit.
You choose to wake up. You choose to live where you live and with whom. You choose to eat or not, to exercise or not, to read or watch Netflix, to create or consume. Every breath you take is the result of a choice.
This is the same for your choices to live with stress and anxiety or choose to live without them.
Choice. All yours.
You can choose to walk around it but it'll be there the next day.
You can stand there, immobile, and allow the shit to keep you in place for an undetermined amount of time, effectively ruining your day.
Or you can fucking clean it up.
