SGM March 2014 Weekly Message One: “Understanding the 3 Stages of Stress”

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Welcome to the March 2014 Edition of Spiritual Growth Monthly. I’m Kevin Schoeninger. It’s great to have you with us here at SGM.

This month, you’ll learn what science has discovered about your stress response and what you can do to master the stress you feel.

Specifically, we’ll explore the three stages of stress and why it’s vitally important not to let yourself get to stage three—and how to return to health and well-being if you do. You’ll learn three inner skills that can take you from a victim of stress to an empowered creator of your life. We’ll practice the four cues of inner body meditation that you can use to shift into a relaxed, positive, clear inner state no matter what is happening around you. And, we’ll discuss the four stages you’ll naturally move through on your way to growing what is most important to you in your life.

Let’s begin with some essential facts about stress.

If you’re like most of us, you probably relate the stress that you feel to all the demands in your life that are pressing upon you. You’ve got work and family responsibilities, endless To-Do lists, countless emails, texts, and social media invitations to respond to, as well as a constant bombardment of information, noise, and demands of others all day long. If you are trying to counter this with a little self-care time, doing meditation, exercise, eating well, and attending to your spiritual practice, these might feel like just that many more things to do on top of it all.

Life these days is moving at warp speed and intensity—and it takes a strong committed effort to manage your time, energy, and resources well so you don’t get overwhelmed and swallowed up by it all. However, did you know that there’s one key ingredient that creates your stress that you can learn to master? Learning to master that one simple thing will release you from the mountain of pressures that are weighing you down.

You’ve probably heard me quote this psychological definition of stress before, but just as a reminder, and in case you’ve just joined us, here it is again:

“Stress is the perception of a threat combined with the perception of your inability to handle that threat.”

I originally heard this definition from psycho-neuro-immunologist, Dr. Myrin Borysenko. Basically, what it means is that the stress you feel is an “inside job.” The stress you feel is not so much about what is happening out there in the world around you as it is about how you are relating to all of that, how you are perceiving what is happening. The thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that you are engaged in at any given moment determine the amount of stress that you feel.

For example, if you perceive something as a threat to your health, well-being, and success and you doubt if you have the time, energy, skill, or resources to handle that, you’ll feel stress. If you are looking at what you’re facing as a “should” or “have to,” you’ll feel more stress about it. If you are looking at events, other people, or yourself and thinking that those events, people, or you “should be different,” you’ll feel stress. And, if you look at the challenges you’re facing and think that you have to do it on your own or all by yourself, you’ll feel more stress.

In contrast, when you look at the challenges you’re facing and think “I have what it takes to handle that,” “I can’t wait to get to it,” “Everything is set up perfectly for what needs to happen,” and “I have abundant resources to handle this,” you’ll feel relaxed, positive, energized, and empowered about tackling those challenges.

So, the bottom line is this: How you are thinking about the demands you are facing makes all the difference!

Now, if you find yourself constantly thinking in ways that create stress, research has found that you’ll move through three stages of stress response: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion. It’s critically important that you don’t let yourself get to Stage Three: Exhaustion—because it’s hard to recover from that. It is absolutely possible to recover (given that you recognize and understand where your body and mind have gotten to), but it will take a real committed effort—a real strong intervention on your part.

So, let’s talk about those three stages in detail. Understanding them will help you identify where you are at any given time, so you can take appropriate action. These Stages were first identified by stress researcher Dr. Hans Selye.

Stage One: Alarm

When you first perceive a demand as a stressor and wonder if you have the ability to handle that, your mind and body go into “Alarm mode.” This initiates a cascade of physiological effects, including your sympathetic nervous system activating, hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline releasing into your bloodstream, your heart-rate, respiration, and brainwave frequencies elevating, muscle and connective tissue tightening, and blood shunting to your limbs for action and away from digestion and other maintenance processes such as immune response. Your ability to think at a higher creative level shuts down in favor of “survival” reactions and oversimplified “black and white thinking.” And, emotions such as doubt, self-judgment, fear, paranoia, and anxiety tend to ramp up.

If you end up handling the situation effectively, your body returns to homeostasis (natural balance) as your parasympathetic nervous system takes over, initiating a relaxation response throughout your body. This initiates a series of balancing physiological effects, including the release of good-feeling neurochemicals such as serotonin, calm coherence returning to your heart-rate, respiration, and brainwaves, relaxing of your muscles and connective tissue, blood returning to your digestive organs, and heightening of your immune response. Your mind returns to being able to think positively and creatively and feelings of confidence, self-esteem, and trust tend to increase.

This is the normal rhythm of a healthy life: you experience demands, find the resources to handle them, and then return to relaxation and recovery. An empowered, expansive, fulfilling life has a nice rhythm between periods of healthy stress and recovery.

Now, what happens if a situation overwhelms your ability to handle it? What if an experience is so traumatic that it leaves a lasting mark? Or what if stressors are so persistent and frequent that you never get on top of it all?

Any situation that goes unresolved gets stored as tension in your body. This tension may go unnoticed as you move on to other events and experiences, yet it stays with you subtly influencing how you think, feel, and behave in the future. As unresolved stressors pile up, your body moves into the next stage of stress response.

Stage Two: Resistance

In the resistance stage, your body fights to keep up with what it needs to do to maintain your health and well-being, while still handling the levels of stress that are stored in your system. Current research is beginning to show how persistent stress that is not handled and resolved leads to chronic inflammation that is the precursor to almost all of our serious and life-threatening illnesses.

In the Resistance Stage, you may notice yourself being persistently fatigued, more susceptible to nagging colds, slower to heal from injuries, more emotionally on edge, easier to “fly off the handle,” subject to periods of “brain fog” in which you find it hard to concentrate, caught up in cravings for salty or sweet comfort foods, and at risk for addictions to alcohol and narcotics that numb your feelings.

Getting some extra sleep, eating well, exercising, and consciously relaxing through activities such as meditation, can help you stay afloat in this phase. By doing these activities you can actively manage the resistance stage for quite some time—even for years. Your life won’t feel particularly joyful; it will probably feel more like a struggle, but you can continue doing what you have to do.

If you are able to make life changes to prioritize your time, energy, and resources, engage in appropriate self-care steps, and take actions to resolve the stresses you are facing, you can resolve Stage Two and move back into the normal ebb and flow of stress and recovery that is the healthy rhythm of Stage One.
However, if you fail to take adequate self-care and do not resolve stressful situations effectively—and this happens for a significant period of time—you may crossover into the Third Stage of the Stress Response: Exhaustion.

Stage Three: Exhaustion

If you reach the point of exhaustion, you just cannot keep pushing forward. You’ve become depleted to the point that you must take serious recuperative measures to regain your strength, energy, vitality, confidence, and capability. At this point, self-care measures such as exercise, meditation, and eating well may just feel like too much effort. You may find yourself deeply depressed and unable to muster up enthusiasm for anything. You may find yourself in the grips of a serious illness, as your immune response is also seriously compromised.

Extreme self-care is now your only option. You absolutely must rest. You must be kind and loving toward yourself. You must engage in gentle activities which nurture you and heal your body, heart, and mind. Being open to receiving help and emotional support from others may also be extremely important, as you overcome the thought that you have to do it all on your own.

This is not a time for intense exercise, getting back into work, or trying hard to feel better. It’s a time for quiet reflection and journaling, easy walks in nature, soothing herbal tea and healthy, easy-to-digest foods such as soups, steamed vegetables, protein smoothies, and lots of pure water. You may also benefit from supplements to support and heal your exhausted adrenal system.

Now, as with any system of categories, these stages are somewhat fluid. These are not necessarily firm boundaries by which you can definitively put yourself in one stage or another and you will move between them. However, understanding the characteristics of these stages is important so you see what can happen with unresolved stress and recognize where you might be along this continuum at any given point in time. With that knowledge, you can take appropriate steps to return to a natural balance and healthy flow in your life.

My suggestion for you this week is to monitor the stress you feel. Rather than rushing forward and pushing harder, take time to check in with yourself every day, recognize how you really feel, and monitor the thoughts and behaviors associated with those feelings. Notice how you are thinking about the demands you’re facing and how this is adding to the stress you feel.

In next week’s message, we’ll explore three inner skills you can use to transform any stressful situation into an empowering opportunity.

Until next time,
Honor what you need to return to healthy balance,
Kevin