Stress: release the vise

Working meetings on weekends and holidays; sms in the middle of the night and calls from early morning; ever-burning projects and reports that had to be submitted the day before yesterday; sick nanny; boss who got up on the wrong foot; traffic jams and crowds in the subway … Decidedly everything around us becomes a source of stress: from minor troubles like a dead phone to global cataclysms – just remember the flood in the Far East. Carried away by the continuous flow of information, torn apart by the ragged rhythm of life, we lose the idea of ​​our own values ​​and priorities.

“The intrusion of the outer world into our inner world has disrupted our habitual way of life,” says anthropologist David Le Breton. “Each of us has several social roles, and before the course of life allowed us to change them smoothly.” Indeed, on the way home, we quite managed to “reincarnate” from bosses and subordinates into wives and husbands, fathers and mothers. Now everything is mixed up: in the middle of a responsible meeting, a loved one can call us, and at the time of a date – the head or an employee of the bank. According to the anthropologist, this constant fragmentation of existence “accelerates the passage of time in our minds and moves us away from understanding ourselves.”

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Double vicious circle

Psychologists and psychiatrists talk a lot about the epidemic of “burnout” (in English burn-out), which has gripped a huge number of men and women: they suffer from a syndrome of emotional exhaustion and loss of meaning caused by stress. The constant need to stay “in good shape” and “in touch” distorts our relationships with others, interferes with teamwork, and ultimately impoverishes our inner world. “The number of connections increases to such an extent that complete dedication becomes impossible,” states the philosopher Alexander Filippov. – In none of the hundreds of emerging connections we can – or we don’t have time, we don’t want to, or all together – invest our “I”. As a result, there is nothing left to invest, continues Alexander Filippov: “Our truly valuable “I” was both the cause and the result of deep, genuine relationships. The constancy of family, love, friendship ties, as it were, overturned back into the inner world, giving it stability, shape and depth. Which we today are depriving ourselves of.

But the complexity of the world and high speeds are not the only reasons for escalating stress. People are not concerned with things themselves, but with the opinion of things: this remark of the Stoic Epictetus, who lived in the XNUMXst century AD, remains valid. We experience stress not only from events that have already happened, but also because of the expectations, always negative, that the facts we know cause us to. The feeling of powerlessness is added to the physical and psychological stress – we cannot reduce traffic jams, cancel unjust sentences, influence the incompetence of doctors or legislators, prevent inflation or an economic crisis.

Coming to terms with impotence?

Stress squeezes us in two vicious circles at once. At the level of physiology, stressful situations lead to increased production of the hormones cortisol and catecholamines. This reaction of the body has been formed for thousands of years and was certainly useful when our distant ancestors were stressed by a sudden encounter with a tiger or a bear. “Stress hormones” aggravate the reaction, allowing you to act quickly, at the limit of possibilities. Such situations, of course, still happen today. But much more we suffer from constant stress, when you don’t have to run anywhere and fight with anyone, but it would be best to stop and think things over calmly. Alas, physiology itself prevents this. In society, more and more phenomena cause stress, despite the fact that we are less and less able to endure discomfort and put up with our own impotence.

But perhaps, instead of spending the last of our strength in dealing with stress, we should have more confidence in our ability to adapt to the circumstances of life? Are there ways to stop replaying bad scenarios in your head, make negative emotions recede, and release the merciless grip of stress? Yes, there are such methods, but in order for them to work, we have to find and use our internal resources. And the first step on this path is to get rid of common misconceptions, both about stress itself and about the possibilities to overcome it.