The issue of stress remains in the news. Last week there was a morning series on the ABC "Good Morning America" program. People continue to report high levels of stress. Poorly managed stress contributes to upset in various ways. One is emotional distress, probably the best known effect. Yet emotions are a normal part of life. So what are we to do, give up our emotional life? Hardly. In our recently published book (I Can't Take It Anymore: How to Manage Stress so It Doesn't Manage You; Paul G. Longobardi, Ph.D., and Janice B. Longobardi, R.N., P.H.N.) we discussed this issue in an early chapter. We will reprint an excerpt here. The entire book is available from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1542458056. For additional information about the book and the authors, you can go to the book website at http://www.manageyourhealthandstress.com/
Here is the excerpt:
Emotions are a vital part of human existence. They give some of the meaning to your life. While some emotional experiences are pleasant, others are unpleasant. You then may try to avoid feelings such as irritation, anger, apprehension, fear, sadness, grief, guilt, etc. It is easy to forget that they are necessary elements of a well-rounded emotional life. Everyone experiences them at one time or another.
Avoiding unpleasant feelings doesn't make them go away. You only become more vulnerable to them and give them time to fester and grow. Dealing directly with unpleasant feelings, while painful, makes you stronger and rids you of them.
When your level of physiological arousal remains high, or you have frequent episodes of stress, you're more likely to experience anger, anxiety, and/or depression as symptoms. People who see stress as solely an emotional phenomenon often confuse it with anxiety. As we have shown so far, stress involves both mind and the body. Anxiety is just one of many possible symptoms of stress. There are usually three emotional symptoms of stress: anxiety, anger, and depression. These stress emotions are sometimes difficult to separate. They become so intertwined that you don't know what you're feeling, except that you're stressed.
Your emotions can increase and become so powerful that you feel overwhelmed. Some people fear losing control. One way to get control over your emotions is to sort them out by labeling them, but it's not easy. Frequently, when we ask our patients to describe their emotion, they may say, “I’m just upset.” This is because we experience emotions as a child before we use language to describe them. Think of the infant who just cries. It does little good to ask them what they are feeling.
It takes effort to be able to describe your emotions—the first step toward calming your stress reactions. Many people have grown up in homes where it was not acceptable to label and discuss your feelings and emotions. This is certainly more common for men than for women. Some families, or parents, focus only on one or two feelings. I (PGL) worked with a patient who could only discuss and recognize anger, as it was the only emotion expressed and discussed in the home.
The good news is that you have more control over your emotional state than you probably realize. We have worked with many patients who have lamented, “I can’t change what I feel.” Actually, it is possible to agree with them to some extent because what and how you think determines, in large part, what and how you feel. We will discuss this in detail in a later chapter, when you will see how your thinking largely determines the degree of your emotions. For you, getting better control of your thoughts will change the way you feel. Perhaps, amazingly, getting control of your feelings also changes the way you think.
As mentioned in the excerpt, part of the change issue is how to modify your thinking about the way events impact you. That will be discussed in another post. For now, take hope in knowing that your ways of responding to stressful events are not immutable. We are all capable of more change than that for which we give ourselves credit.
Best wishes on your journey.
Dr. Paul Longobardi
For information on these and related matters, please see my website at www.successandmindset.com