So I'm Beth Kurland.
I'm a clinical psychologist practicing outside of Boston,
And we're going to be talking today about stress management,
Trying to understand a little bit about what stress is,
How we can become more aware of it in our lives,
And then how we can work with it in a way that can help us face the challenges that we all face in our lives,
Some of the day-to-day stressors and challenges that we deal with.
And there's lots of different ways we could really talk about stress and I'll get into some of that.
But at its basic level,
There's a very physiological component of stress.
And this is the component of stress that evolved over millions of years to help us survive as a species.
And so we have wired into our brains this fight or flight response.
And what that means is basically that we are wired to,
When we perceive a threat,
To either fight back or to flee,
Or in some cases,
To freeze.
And this was really adaptive for our ancestors,
If you think back in the cave,
Cave person times,
Back in the savannas,
When people had very real external threats that they had to face on a daily basis,
The lions,
The tigers,
So forth.
And our bodies developed this way.
The people who survived developed this response where they could fight the predators or they could flee.
They could run the heck away.
And the people whose bodies were adept at doing this were the ones who were able to survive and pass on our genes to us.
We wouldn't be here today otherwise.
So we have this hardwired into our brains.
And that response involves a lot of things going on,
Sort of a whole mind-body response.
But in this very basic level,
We have things like the heart rate going up,
The blood pressure going up,
The blood getting pushed towards our fighting muscles.
Our pupils dilate,
Our digestion shuts down because it's probably not really all that adaptive to be digesting your lunch when you're trying to run from a tiger.
Our immune system functioning shuts down as well because we don't need to be fighting off illnesses when we're running from danger.
So we have this whole physiological response that's going on in our bodies.
And it's really adaptive for dealing with these kinds of life-threatening emergencies,
Again,
That helped us survive as a species.
The problem in modern day times is that most of the challenges that we face today are not this kind of life-threatening in nature.
So they're not external physical threats as much as they are more internal psychological threats.
We might have financial stress.
We might have self-esteem issues that we struggle with.
We might have relationship challenges we might have work stress pressures of too much to do and not enough time self-doubt,
All these kinds of things that we might commonly face more day to day in our lives for which neither fighting nor fleeing is a helpful or adaptive response.
And yet our bodies can very often go into that fight or flight response.
So we feel our heart rate going up.
We mobilize to deal with the stressor at hand.
And it's a little bit like i think of it as a false alarm so if you think of your smoke alarm in your home.
And this smoke alarm is there to detect a life threatening fire.
But I don't know if you're like me or not,
But I've certainly,
My smoke alarm's gone off burning a piece of toast.
And so this smoke alarm doesn't know the difference between a real fire and the smoke from the toaster.
But yet it goes off nonetheless.
And so that our bodies are similar in some way that we have this response to all these stress chemicals are getting released into our bloodstream.
They're mobilizing us to react to this situation.
And yet again,
The situation may be one for which neither fighting nor fleeing is particularly adaptive.
So.
.
.
How do we befriend stress?
How do we make stress our friend?
And so this idea that stress is not something we're going to get rid of,
But how can we work with it in a way that helps us to.
.
.
Live our lives,
Respond more adaptively,
To live with greater ease,
Even to make space for more joy in our lives.
And so being able to listen to this alarm going off,
Really being able to pay attention to this signal and using it as a helpful signal or a helpful cue that something needs our attention.
And it may not be that I need to run from this tiger.
I need to protect myself from a life-threatening event.
But something is going on that I can begin to pay attention to.
And if I can stop and pause and slow down,
And pay attention to that alarm to that signal,
I can really begin to use it as a helpful response to guide me and really listen to some of my own inner wisdom about what is most needed in the moment.
And so I like to think of this idea of helping people not be stress-free because that's.
.
.
I think quite unrealistic in our modern day age,
But more how to be stress smart.
How to be able to find ways to give people tools to become more resilient in the face of the stressors and challenges that we all face.
And I guess just to make a quick distinction between that we all have stressors and challenges in our lives.
You know,
Some of them might be these more day-to-day annoyances,
The traffic jam,
Such as the one I was in here trying to get here today,
The obstacles that we face on a daily basis,
And then we have these bigger challenges in our lives as well,
Some of the more serious stressors,
Whether they might be health issues or worries about a loved one or taking care of aging parents or,
You know,
Many numbers of stressors that that we may struggle with.
And we can't necessarily make those go away or make those disappear,
But we can learn how to grow the inner resources to be able to face those challenges with greater resilience and to be able to.
Handle them and respond rather than react from a more primitive place.
