“Stress is a signal something needs to change… suffering is when we don’t make the change.”

~ Bill Crawford

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What Stresses Me Out?

This is a quote I have used before, and one that always plays a significant role in my books and presentations, because it introduces a new way of looking at stress that I believe is essential in dealing with life. I’m revisiting it here because it goes very nicely with this week’s topic, i.e. my response to the question “What stresses you out?” This is a question I get a lot, and I’m guessing that people are wanting to be reassured that I am a “normal human being” (someone like them who gets stressed), and that I have found new ways to deal with it.

The good news is both are true. Like anyone, I experience stress, however, unlike most people, I have knowledge that allows me to deal with it before it deals with me. For example, most people see stress as something that is done to them by difficult situations (traffic stresses me out, difficult people stress me out, etc.). While this perspective is understandable, holding on to this interpretation is almost guaranteed to trigger more stress, because we see our discomfort as something caused by an external stimuli that is beyond our control.

What I have discovered is that stress is actually a chemical change in our body that is triggered by the lower 20% of our brain. However, the truth is that few, if any of the situations we encounter today actually call for a fight-or-flight reaction, and therefore, most people are experiencing a lot more stress than is necessary or healthy.

What I have learned to do (and what I teach to others) is how to recognize this chemical reaction when it first becomes triggered, and shift from the lower brain (the brainstem) to the upper brain (the neocortex) and change the chemical makeup of our brain and body. I believe that I should be pretty good at this, or I shouldn’t be out there teaching it to others, and I can say with some degree of pride that, as a result of practicing what I preach, over the last four years, I have only been really upset twice.

Like most people, however, I do experience stress from time to time, especially since I travel about 200 days out of the year. In fact, the last time I experienced the signal of stress was on a trip to Canada where I first missed my connection from Vancouver to Victoria, and arrived at my destination only 30 minutes before I was to present. Plus, when returning home, I discovered that the airline on which I was supposed to be booked had no reservation in my name. Not good.

However, what I was able to do in these situations that kept me from becoming “stressed out” was to catch this signal, or this chemical change early, and shift to the part of the brain that triggers the production of serotonin and endorphins versus adrenaline and cortisol.
The key to pulling this off is to see stress as a reaction to an interpretation versus what is being “done to us” by a person or situation. In other words, our limbic system (the middle part of our brain) is interpreting some situation as “stressful,” and the anxiety, frustration, anger, etc. that we feel is the result of this perspective. If we look at our reactions in this way, we can catch them early in the process and decide how we would like to respond, and/or, how we would teach someone we love to respond to a similar situation if we were wanting to help them be as influential in their experience of life as possible.

Therefore, if this type of influence is important to you, I suggest you begin to practice this “Catch and Shift” technique the next time you become stressed. See your reaction not as what is being done to you, but as a chemical change traveling from your middle brain down your brainstem, and see if you can catch it early and shift up to the neocortex. You might ask yourself, “How would I rather be feeling here?” or, “What reaction would I recommend and/or teach to someone I loved?”

The truth is that we will become skilled at anything we practice… and that we are always practicing something. Therefore, if you feel you no longer need to practice getting stressed (you are already really good at it!) and instead would like to become skilled at accessing the clear, confident, and creative part of your brain, especially in “difficult” situations, I suggest you begin to see stress as a signal that something needs to change. Then, rather than looking to change some situation and/or person (and experiencing suffering when this isn’t possible), I suggest you start where you have the most influence, i.e. the chemical nature of your brain and body. Catch this signal early, and shift to a way of being that you would recommend to someone you love and suffering never even comes into the picture.

Take care and God bless, Dr. Bill