3 Steps to Befriending Stress

April 25, 2021 Mike MacConnell

In last month’s blog on Kelly McGonigal’s bestseller The Upside of Stress I summarized her argument that, contrary to popular belief, stress can be healthy, if we shift our relationship to it.

She isn’t suggesting that stress is always good for us. On the contrary, she points out that humans (and all social mammals) are capable of exhibiting a hardwired “defeat response” to extreme stress, typified by loss of appetite, depression and even suicide. Stressors are particularly harmful when an individual feels trapped, depleted and isolated from others.

Yet the same stress that harms you can become a catalyst for growth. McGonigal offers three practical, evidence-based strategies for converting unwanted stress into “post traumatic growth”. The hardiness to benefit from adversity appears to come naturally to some people. For those of us who lack that gift, it’s encouraging to know resilience can be learned.

We met Bridget in a previous blog, a single mother suffering from the stress of working at home while homeschooling her children through the pandemic. Let’s apply McGonigal’s three suggestions to see how Bridget’s stressful challenges could help her become stronger.

Step One: Tend and Befriend

The fight-or-flight stress response makes us want to withdraw from others. One way to build resilience is to cultivate a “tend and befriend” mindset, resisting the impulse to self-isolate and instead connecting and inquiring into the welfare of others and offering them help. When we engage with others, increasing our awareness of their pain and focusing on bigger-than-self goals, our biochemistry has been shown to shift. Studies have regularly shown that social contact activates the body’s production of oxytocin (the body’s “cuddle drug”, an enhancer of sociability) dopamine (a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and vitality) and serotonin (which stabilizes mood, counteracting depression, anxiety and agitation).

Bridget decides to try to overcome her loneliness by organizing a Zoom mothers’ group in the evening after her kids have gone to bed. The moms share best practices for keeping kids meaningfully occupied and exchange easy recipes. Exhausted, they share stories of running on empty, yet often end by telling Bridget how helpful the circle has been for them.

Step Two: Express Your Stress

Many of us have bury our pain and hide it from others. McGonigal presents research showings that it is more healthy to be open about your struggles, sharing your story in all its distress with interested others. We need to be selective, sharing at appropriate times with those who genuinely care. The effort to articulate your struggles provides an outlet that not only helps build connection, it helps you to see your stressors from a different angle, perhaps drawing out helpful perspectives and insights from family and friends.

Bridget becomes close friends with June, with one of the mothers from the Zoom group. They meet online or exchange phone calls once, sometimes twice a week to unload. It isn’t all complaining. Listening to one another’s struggles they realize how much they have in common, laughing at things the children have said and joking at times that their emotional survival skills could fill a self-help manual.

Step Three: Find Restorative Stories

Narratives that reaffirm the possibility of resilience have been shown to improve the ability to recover from stress. We can select these kinds of stories not only by limiting our consumption of toxic media, but by seeking out stories (true and fictional) that portray redemptive struggles. In our personal lives we can pay closer attention to the resourcefulness we hear in the stories told by family and friends, even as we attend to their pain. Also, let’s not overlook evidence of emotional strength and success that is present in the memories from our past.

The calls with June have taken on a new tone. Bridget has joined the IVOH (Images and Voices Of Hope) Facebook group and found other self-help websites with tips for helping her friend. She listens now for evidence of June’s resilience, and points out examples of qualities that have made June such a gifted parent. The new tone of the conversation helps them both feel stronger, with June often returning the favour.

Directing her attention toward realistic, positive thoughts has become an uplifting practice, with connection to nature as the way to get there. She takes brisk walks in the park, breathing deeply and observing nature, experiencing each time a positive change in her mood and perspective. She almost feels like thanking her stress for the motivation to get outside.

Stress hasn’t ended for Bridget, but thanks to a shift in her mindset, stress has shifted its meaning. Would she prefer the stress and the pandemic to end? Of course, she would. In the meantime, by changing her relationship to stress she has come to feel less helpless, less lonely, more enthusiastic and empowered.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mike MacConnell, founder of Reflective Mediation, is an accredited family mediator, conflict coach, educator and author. He is the highest-ranked mediator on Google in the greater Toronto area, with over 180 5-star reviews. To book your free consultation click here.

The Upside of Stress

March 31, 2021 Aleksandra Ania

I published “The Yoga of Divorce” in 2016 to describe how I used yoga to manage the stress that was hijacking my life during my divorce and to forge a win-win amicable parting. I was responding to my fear of stress, based on the widely-accepted view that it could damage my physical and mental well-being. Although the stress reduction practices I outlined there are valid, that viewpoint turns out to be only half of the truth.

Recent research presents compelling evidence that stress can in fact be good for us if we change our attitude to it. In her famous TED talk How To Make Stress Your Friend and in her bestselling book The Upside of Stress, Kelly McGonigal, a researcher from Stanford University, argues that how we think of stress can determine whether we have a full-throttle fight-and-flight style threat response, or whether those same stressors result in increased energy and higher performance.

The evidence comes, in part, from “mindset intervention” experiments developed by David Yeager, a mindset researcher at the University of Texas, in which students listened to a brief talk on the energetic benefits of stress immediately prior to a stressful examination. Students who heard evidence of the upside of stress had improved recall and focus because they viewed stress as an ally rather than an enemy. Those who received the “intervention” not only scored better than those who didn’t, but their grades remained significantly higher throughout the academic year.

McGonigal isn’t denying the debilitating impact of stress. It can undermine your ability to cope and harm mental and physical health, nor does she discount the evidence-based benefits of mindfulness as a tool to manage stress. Her point is that for most of us, most of the time, viewing stress as harmful increases the risk of feeling overwhelmed and hopeless when facing stressful situations. Our fear of stress is the source of its power to harm our health. Her advice is that rather than seeking to avoid or control stress, we can choose to change our relationship to it. She argues that welcoming anxiety and stress, seeing it as a natural source of energy and alertness, can boost confidence and improve resilience.

She reports on a Gallop World Poll spanning 121 countries which showed that the happiest people were not those who report less stress, but those who manage high stress without becoming depressed. The “stress paradox” is her term for the discovery that high stress correspond with distress, and also with a sense of meaning and accomplishment.

When you take this view, life doesn’t become less stressful, but it can become more meaningful. Our culture often celebrates a risk-free life of ease and comfort. McGonigal suggests that we find greater satisfaction from challenging ourselves to meet uncertain goals. Quoting from Antonella Della Fave, she concludes that “the more directly one aims to maximize pleasure and avoid pain, the more likely one is to produce instead a life bereft of depth, meaning and community”.

In this month’s blogpost I’ve introduced this radical shift in thinking about stress; next month I’ll describe McGonigal’s recommendations for HOW we can build a richer, more authentic life by speaking out about our stress and reaching out to serve others.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Learning to Look On The Bright Side

February 24, 2021 Mike MacConnell

Last month’s blog looked at “learned helplessness”, a kind of paralysis which can take over a person’s life in response to overwhelming stress. Martin Seligman, the researcher who first named the condition noted its association with pessimism along with a high risk for PTSD and depression.

He used 3 Ps to explain why people give up after being knocked about by life. They come to believe:

1. Adversity will always occur (is Permanent);

2. It will occur in all areas of life (is Pervasive) and

3. They are powerless to change it (is Personal).

This month, the good news. Martin Seligman, who coined the term “learned helplessness” also came up with the concept of “learned optimism”.

Really? Can optimism be learned?

Most mothers will tell you their children were born with either a cheery or fragile disposition. To some extent those traits are hardwired. Yet despite inborn temperament, the evidence is conclusive. Humans have the capacity, with effort, to adjust their disposition and enhance their own well-being. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism

Seligman’s model presents a 5-step ABCDE sequence. Here’s how it might work in the case of Bridget, who I introduced last month. A single parent, she was overwhelmed with having to work, manage the house and monitor her children’s schooling in a pandemic

1. Adversity: she’s feeling stuck and overwhelmed, yet hasn’t reached out to her mother or best friend.

2. Belief: she predicts her mother and best friend will give unwanted advice and react impatiently to her complaints. She fears they don’t really care about her.

3. Consequence: the result of these negative beliefs is that she remains isolated, unheard and lonely and feels powerless to help herself.

Steps A, B & C present the dilemma. Points D & E outline what Bridget can do to overcome her feeling of helplessness.

4. Dispute: She challenges her assumptions, asking herself how certain she can be that they’ll respond the way she fears. She brings to times her mother and friend were attentive and helpful. She realizes she can’t really know how they will respond if she calls.

5. Energization: she begins to feel hopeful, that it may be worth reaching out. She notices that she’s still nervous. She’s vulnerable. It will take courage to phone – to share her pain and uncertainty. Only one way to find out - she picks up the phone.

The goal isn’t a quick fix, but to help empower Bridget to think about the situation differently. She can more energetically assess her options and thereby act to improve her mental health.

In his bestselling book Learned Optimism, Seligman suggests that people suffering from learned helplessness pay attention to the underlying thoughts that influence their emotions and behaviours and actively challenge their own hasty conclusions. His technique is a variation of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

Seligman is NOT claiming we should always be optimistic. He recommends Balanced optimism, deciding NOT to choose an optimistic prediction if the risk of being wrong would be catastrophic. For example, Bridget might consider quitting her job on the optimistic prediction of winning the lottery. If the prediction is wrong, she could end up homeless, so optimism wouldn’t be wise. With respect to calling her mother or friend, however, the risk of being wrong would be no greater than a difficult conversation. It therefore makes sense to make the call.

Next month’s blog looks at “The Upside of Stress” by Kelly McGonigal. Her research concludes that meaning and purpose are enhanced by changing your relationship to stress – by choosing to make discomfort meaningful rather than trying to avoid it – and provides tips on how doing so can empower you to be strengthened and enriched by stress.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

When Misfortune Leaves You Paralyzed: The Dilemma of “Learned Helplessness”

January 26, 2021 Aleksandra Ania

Bridget is a single mother, suffering in the midst of the pandemic. She feels overwhelmed by the weight of homeschooling her children while working from home at half her former wages. In addition to the necessities of shopping, cooking, cleaning and caregiving, she can’t stop thinking of how she dropped out of college, about the great job she lost, and how her marriage fell apart. After a sleepless night, her life seems to her like a litany of failures with no way out of the gloom. She worries she’s reached the breaking point, yet can’t muster the motivation to call her mother or best friend for support. She imagines they’re tired of her complaints and will just offer unwanted advice. She emails her ex to pick up the kids and crawls back under the covers, trapped and alone.

Many of us have felt something akin to Bridget’s emotional paralysis. You may have experienced a sense of futility that temporarily sapped your motivation. Often it resolves on its own. However, for some, “learned helplessness” becomes a permanent frame of mind, often associated with PTSD and clinical depression. People stuck in a situation, unable to change tracks.

The Oxford dictionary defines “learned helplessness” as “a condition in which a person suffers from a sense of powerlessness, arising from a traumatic event or persistent failure to succeed and becomes unable or unwilling to avoid subsequent encounters, even if they are escapable”. The term was coined by Martin Seligman in 1967 after observing the behavior of dogs who lacked the initiative to escape following repeated exposure to electrical shock, despite being offered the opportunity.

Some of my clients express feeling this way in their family or work life. These are intelligent, well-intentioned individuals who may have felt overwhelmed by divorce, health issues, job-loss or stress at work. They are unable to visualize steps to improve their situation. There is no issue of blame here. Given a world in which external forces impose relentless, unwanted pressures beyond their control, the temptation to believe their situation to be hopeless is entirely understandable. But the sense of hopelessness mires them deeper. It blinds them from seeing the one thing they can control, which is their response.

“Learned optimism” is the answer, and Seligman has emerged as a world expert in the field. Along with other positive psychologists such as Kelly McGonigal, (see her TED talk and book: The Upside of Stress) a powerful movement has emerged making a convincing case that learned helplessness can be overcome, and that an attitude of balanced, realistic optimism can, with effort, be acquired.

Bridget may not be able to transform the circumstances that gave rise to her distress, but she can energize and transform her response. By challenging her automatic thoughts, by expressing her needs in honest, vulnerable conversations and by connecting with others she can shift the lens through which she sees herself and her world.

In next month’s blog I’ll present a more detailed description of practical steps to overcome learned helplessness, and not only to survive, but to grow stronger in response to unwanted stress.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR