It is a well known fact stress is one of the key negative aging factors. Yet it isn’t the stress per se that’s the problem. In fact, we need stress. We need stress to be alive and to function well. Hans Selye made this point decades ago when he relabelled some stress as eu-stress (literally good stress). This is the stress that you and I experience as excitement, as “passion,” as “enthusiasm,” or even as “love.” This is the stress that optimally keeps you functioning well.
We all know and experience this kind of stress in any kind of sport. The effort you expend as you rally your speed or strength or endurance to do something that you find exciting expresses a healthy effort. It enables your muscles to grow, your lungs and heart to develop, it enables you to tap into your physical potentials. It’s good for you! This is the kind of stress when going to something like the gym, the exercises we engage in push us to exert a level of effort that uses a certain set of muscles and in the process, enables the muscles to grow and to become stronger or more flexible.
Imagine a stress scale from 0 to 10. When you are at zero on that scale—you are dead. There is nothing going on, nothing is alive, nothing is moving, nothing is striving. And at the low numbers (1 to 3) there is very little stress. You are resting, relaxing, or sleeping (if it’s healthy); or if you are depressed or lacking vitality (its unhealthy).
Then there is the range of eu-stress (4 to 6). This is the healthy range—the range of stress that you need to be alive and growing. And this applies to the mind and spirit as well as the body. Beyond the eu-stress range is the dangerous range (7 to 10). Here there is too much stress and except for an emergency, this is not a range to live in.
What is “stress?” Stress refers to anything that activates the mind-body-emotion system requesting or demanding that we respond in order to deal with whatever is challenging. If the challenge or threat is in the eu-stress zone, things are fine. You have the resources for handling it and you probably love handing it. You find it exciting and enlivening. Though above that, the challenge is a threat or an over-load. These are the two messages that kick in the general arousal syndrome when the brain gets them. Then, adrenaline and cortisol is released into your blood stream. Then the heart and lungs start pumping away as blood is withdrawn from brain and stomach and sent to the larger muscle units. Then to handle the extreme danger (the threat or over-load) you are ready to fight or flee, or freeze.
If this happens on a temporary basis, it is acute stress and designed to help you deal with the emergency and then get back to normal. But if this happens regularly or, worse still, consistently, then you are in chronic stress. This will exasperate any illness or disease and/or create different diseases. It lies at the heart of cardio-vascular diseases.
Now as a fact of life, stress is not the problem per se. The problem lies in how a person manages it or more accurately, how a person does not manage it. And again, the key goes to how you think about stress, about over-load, about adding more and more demands to everyday life, about how you interpret things as threat which are actually psychological issues and not physical threats,
The bottom line is that despite the idea that “stress makes you old,” it is actually not stress that does that. It is rather the perception of stress that ages you. It is fearing stress, hating stress, living in stress—these are the things that age a person. It is the inability to manage stress well and the lack of resources for handling stress effectively—these are the things that will age you before your time.
Actually, living in and with eustress keeps you young in body and in heart. Living above the eustress level (from 7 to 10 on the stress scale), that is what will wear you out and makes you old.
To manage stress— change your frames about things that are not true threats or dangers, but psychological fears. Build up your resources for handling everyday challenges. Develop a dozen de-stressing processes so that you can quickly get stress out of your body. Then you don’t have to live with it. Slow down and do one thing at a time. Be fully present in everything you do. These are the things that you can choose to do that will enable you to manage stress and prevent it from undermining healthy aging.
This report is from Michael Hall, Master NLP Practitioner and Trainer, who has taught countless students of NLP to help their clients work through and manage the unwanted stress, so they can lead happy and healthy lives. If you would like to know more or experience a session with an NLP Practitioner, contact Beverley on 0412777111, located just 15 minutes south of Perth and learn some strategies to best manage stress.
