When someone gets that look on their face and tells you they are “stressed”, we all know what they mean. In fact, if you’re reading this book right now you likely are or have been that person in the past. We know stress when we feel it. The sensation that everything is just too much to deal with, irritation with everyone and everything around you, the feeling that life is just one thing after another and what you’d really like to do is run away and never come back…
Stress is a complicated frame of mind to be in. However, it’s even more complicated than most people understand. To put it directly, stress is primarily a physical response to the world around us. As creatures that needed to defend themselves and their families in sometimes hostile environments, human beings have evolved to recognize danger and remove themselves from it as quickly as possible.
Stress is our bodies’ natural way of telling us that something needs to change. We perceive a danger, and our bodies alert us to get out of the situation. But, unless you have a particularly stressful work environment, dealing with lions and snakes and other deadly animals is simply no longer a part of daily life. These days, our bodies react to other perceived threats – the loss of a job or a spouse, for example. While these things don’t directly threaten our survival, we have come to perceive them as if they do.
In the past, the human body perceived a threat in the environment and responded by producing hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones would make it easier for the human to “fight or flight”. Stress was a useful mechanism that prepared the body to stand its ground and defend itself or else hightail it and get to safety.
In today’s world, the things that stress us are subtler, more persistent, and more psychological than a bear lurking in the bushes. Even though we don’t need to run away or fight with our bare hands anymore, our physical response is still the same: our bodies flood with stress hormones. Understanding this evolutionary predisposition to stress helps us understand how to deal with it. First comes the perception of stress, then comes the physical reaction, then, hopefully, the body can return to a normal state after resolving the situation.
As you can probably imagine, the first step is the most crucial. What is stress? Stress is the perception of a threat. This perception causes the body to respond in physical ways. In an elegant example of mind-over-matter, we can see that what allows us to feel stress in the first place is our thoughts.