A recent article in the New York Times explains how exercise allows you, or at least the rats dunked into cold water to deal with stress better.

There is a catch. My clinical experience is that this does not hold true and in fact has the opposite effect if the person is exercising from a place of exhaustion. At my clinic and our Mindfulness Stress Reduction company we saw many athletes who where in what I called the Jim Fixx phenomenon. Jim Fixx with his book The Complete Book of Running help put running on the map. He had us believing it was a panacea for the problems of the day.

Fixx’s autopsy revealed that atherosclerosis had blocked his coronary arteries between 50% and 95%. The man was fit, but he died of a common stress illness – how is that possible? I assuming he was like many of the runners I saw, he was tense and exhausted.

Exercise for a body that is not only tense, but exhausted from too much exercise and stress is a stressful for the body. The body doesn’t have the resources to take the exercise and apply it to building the body. This body is not resilient; it is as if it is in a state of posttraumatic stress, much like the soldier that never can come down from constant stress of war.

I had runners who would take their pulse as they lay in bed every morning. If it was fast, it told them they were tired, so they would run less or slower or not at all that day. These runners understood exercising tired stresses the body.

You thought it was bad before, but it’s getting worse. According to a new American Psychological Association (APA) study, a third of us are experiencing extreme stress: “œnearly half [of Americans] believe stress is damaging their health, their relationships, and work productivity, and that it has got worse in the last 5 years.”

As our society evolves, the effect of stress increases. Being constantly assaulted by information from the media, pressing decisions, and unending stimulation (which we mistakenly believe is an escape from the other stressors) is causing our stress to grow. All this is occurring as we experience a decrease in resources of time, energy and possibly money. We are squeezed.

Decrease the Irritation

Your first tendency is to change your external world – you try to remove or reduce the stressors in your life. Go for it. Unfortunately, experience has taught me that manipulation of these variables have a limited effect. What you need to change is how you respond to stress, or how you frame it.

A secret to generating a new stress response in yourself is this: give up an old believe or behavior pattern. Maybe you created myths that are not serving you. A common one is: “I should have it all.” This begs the question, what is “all”? If you can redefine your “all” based on what you really need and want, your stress will change.

The myth that “I have to know” or “I must stay informed” sets you up to fall prey to the media’s constant barrage of stress stimulation. Implicit in this myth is that there is always more to know, so you are hooked to your media dealer. Recent research on dreams and stress support this as well as how the news sets up post traumatic stress for children. Because most of society operates under the effects of these myths, it’s easy to miss something insidious: the constant media exposure keeps your nervous system on alert.

By addressing these myths and their behaviors, we remove irritating stimuli from our lives.

Operate from New Beliefs

Go beyond focusing on what you don’t want to what you want. Create beliefs that serve you. Tim Ferriss’ popular book, The 4 Hour Workweek is one of many advocates of leaving quantity of things for quality of life. The rapid growth of the Slow Food movement supports you leaving fast food to enjoying the experience of eating.

Focusing on being rather than doing is a simple statement. The faster you travel through life, the less aware you are of your experiences. The more hyped you are, the more you look for the next extreme experience that you can really feel. As you allow yourself to go through withdrawal from over-stimulation and constant arousal, you need less intense and less frequent stimulation to feel alive. If you constantly over-salts your food, you never get to experience the true flavor of what you’re eating.

A difficult belief to leave behind is one the belief that you don’t deserve healthy relationships. Do a survey of you relationships and ask yourself, “Am I losing or gaining energy from this relationship?” If you’re putting more in than you’re getting out, make a shift in that relationship. Speak what you truly feel and want. As you hold true to yourself, the relationship will either shift, or end. But either outcome is for your benefit.

As you take risks to speak your truths, take risks to pursue your passions. Yes, this can be stressful. The stress from moving forward in life tends to have a different effect than being at the mercy of life. It’s analogous to the stress of getting in shape – painful at first, perhaps, but the process becomes fun, and the results are always enjoyable.

I invite you to transform your extreme stress into extreme pleasure. Find role models for this; there may not be many, but they are out there. Often these are people who walked away from “success” to pursue a deeper desire. Ultimately, you may prove to be role model for others.

When you are driving down the road and someone cuts you off – do you salute the person with your finger as you shout your feelings to them? If you do, you may be one of the 10 million men in the United States who are so angry that, according to a 2006 Harvard study, they have their own illness – intermittent explosive disorder, or IED. Rage is now an official disease. 

This article is included in three posts. 

How anger becomes rage

Anger is a healthy emotion, just as fear and sadness are. Anger becomes unhealthy when it stops being a natural response to violation or possible violation. Instinctually, we have anger as a means to vend off threats to our boundaries. 

You might observe your dog growl at your cat when it looks like she will be eating some of his food. As a father, you protect your kids. If a stranger comes up to your daughter and starts to take her away – your anger will kick in. 

Over the course of anyone’s life, there are many situations where anger is experienced but not expressed. As a child, anger is often not allowed. As an adult, there are many social situations where you learned to do the right thing and kept your mouth shut. The accumulation of unexpressed feelings impacts your physical body as stored stress, much like throwing your unwanted junk down in the basement. 

A minor irritant occurs and then suddenly you are raging. Your head is possibly saying this shouldn’t be a big deal, yet you are screaming at the sales clerk because a bag ripped. The repressed anger from past events starts to release some of its charge as you rage. For a few moments, you feel better, as if you just had a cigarette. Then the shame comes from expressing unjustified anger. 

Post traumatic stress of anger

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is now a common term used to explain how incomplete stressful experiences allow stress to accumulate, creating an aftereffect. The soldier who is under constant stress of never knowing when the next mortar round will come in never experiences the completion of the trauma cycle. We are hardwired to experience stress or trauma, then have the time and space to release that stress by literally shaking it off. When a soldier doesn’t get the chance to shake off the stress, the stress builds. He returns home to safety, but his mind and body are still back in the war. 

When anger becomes its own PTSD, it becomes rage. The soldier jumps when a car backfires; you chew out the sales clerk when the bag rips. The stimulus does not warrant the reaction. 

To be continued….

The stance we take in regard to stress literally manifests in our posture. A
defeated approach to life produces a collapsed body. The body that experiences
life as one crisis after another has a body structure that is tense.

The repetition of subtle behavior patterns produces an entire body/mind
construct that self-perpetuates that stance. We all know this when we see
someone walk into our office with a particularly unique posture. Our awareness
may be more unconscious, yet we somehow sense how that person will perform under
stress. It is a little unsettling to realize others experience a similar
awareness about us.

What can be done?

The self-replicating cycle of stress-posture-stress is reversible
through relaxation. As we become more aware of our posture, we can begin to
choose a different response to stress. If, for example, you notice that your
back is tense and your shoulders are held up, you can begin relax these areas.

I can tell you from years of working with clients that when you seriously
begin to relax an old pattern, your first experience is how often we go back to
it. Until we turn our attention to our unconscious patterns, they are just that
– unconscious. The act of becoming aware allows us to experience how unaware we
were and how tense we were. This is the challenging part – hanging in beyond the
initial discomfort and frustration.

After a week or two of serious effort, you will begin to discover that your
back and shoulders are not as tense. As you continue to practice, you will
realize that even under stress your body remains relaxed. Then you may notice
others respond to you and your relaxed body differently.

Background

What we were told is good posture is actually a tense posture. Shoulders
back, chest out, stomach in … all of these are behaviors of stress. Standing at
attention is not a neutral, relaxed posture. When we find our relaxed posture,
we are more present and better prepared. Any good martial artist will tell you a
tense person is a weak person.

Understanding the importance of the interconnection between our bodies and
our minds continues to grow. Psychology is now placing significant importance on
the effects of stress on our bodies and our minds. The work with post-traumatic
stress. by such people as Pat Ogden,
Ph.D.. demonstrates how the tension in our bodies takes us out of
enjoying life.

Fun suggestions

Watch others’ body posture to learn more about yours. It can be enlightening
to watch people walk by and from their posture discern their life story.

• Increase your awareness of how you hold just one part of your body tense.
Shoulders are something most of us hold up and easy to catch. I suggest you
first do this when not under stress.

• Try on other postures and feel their effects. This will assist you in
understanding others. You can step up and follow one of the people you see walk
by – I suggest at a distance.

• Understand posture from an architect’s prospective – how are you holding
your body up to fight gravity? Discover where you can let go (not hold) to be
straighter.

• Notice your posture while sitting, driving, talking on the phone, or
working on the computer

• Notice what posture allows you to breathe the fullest and easiest.

• Have someone videotape you while you are unaware of “performing”

• Be compassionate to yourself – you can change what you see. There are many
body therapies that specifically work with posture and structure that can
greatly expedite your transformation. Some of these are Rolfing, Feldenkrais, cranial sacral
therapy and some forms of massage.

A new study reviewed 20 years of research on post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to find that women suffer worse from PTSD. We all know men are traditionally exposed to more traumatic situations such as combat, policing and even sports. Consequently, we would assume men would be worse off when it comes to PTSD, but they are not. The variable that shifts the scales is the higher incident of sexual abuse that women suffer.

Essentially, the past history of prior sexual abuse wears on women in such a way that recent events can be minimal, but the symptoms of PTSD are present. The resiliency, or as it is called in the field of stress reduction “stress hardiness,” is decreased over time.

Beyond women suffering more, the bigger point is that PTSD is a cumulative phenomenon. As the study mentions, men who had prior sexual abuse had the same rate of PTSD as women. Both sexes share the misfortune of accumulating trauma or stress to generate PTSD symptoms, it just that women show it more because of additional earlier trauma/stress.

This study supports my clinical experience of 30 years. We humans compound our traumas and stress. Rarely is it the most recent event that creates the catastrophe that takes us to our doctor’s office. We store and build upon other events and tensions to create a body/mind that has no more space for stress. At some point something will break.

No matter how healthy and strong we are, we all have a breaking point. This is not much different than what our military tells our soldiers about being captured – it is not will you break, it is only when will you and what will you say. Will the break be a major illness or will it be increasing blood pressure, what will determined it is the other factors such as what systems are the weakest and what form of emotional stress you are enduring.

The distinction between stress and PTSD is ultimately a relative distinction. The trauma may be one huge event or it maybe a series of what I call micro-traumas which are under the radar. Either way, the stress accumulates to a point where our body/mind can not take it any longer.

We have to thank the authors of this study and women in general for shedding light on how there is no escape from the effects of stress. Stress continues to build like bad credit card debt.

Here are a couple of links that further explain this study: CBS new and Healthnews