Thoughtful Thursday: Stress

Understanding stress

• Stress is a normal response to stressors or challenges that we find difficult to cope with.

• As I had mentioned in an earlier article on trauma, stress can be categorized into positive, tolerable, and toxic stress.

  • Positive stress serves an adaptive function, it helps us survive and grow because it signals the body to use resources required for certain events. This does not overburden our body unlike other forms of stress.

  • Tolerable stress is a higher degree of stress as a result of more severe events but we are able to tolerate this because of protective factors such as supportive friends, a healthy environment, and so on.

  • Toxic stressors are the same severe events but we are unable to tolerate this because of the lack of sufficient protective factors. This is where trauma exists.

• Stress for prolonged periods drains a lot of our energy and can become a problem while for a shorter duration, it can merely help us adjust to events by making us more active, cautious, and so on (Cleveland Clinic, 2021).

• In cases of personality disorders, stress is sometimes a common experience if individuals experience significant dysfunction. When stressed, individuals with BPD may develop psychotic symptoms which involve a distortion of their perceptions (Harvard Health Publishing, 2019).

• For a person with BPD who tends to have turbulent relationships, the repetitive conflicts may become a pattern that contributes to severe stress. The stress then starts hampering the emotional regulation required to have stable relationships. Hence, it becomes a two-way process of sorts where the unstable relationships contribute to stress which contribute to unstable relationships.

Few things to keep in mind when you’re dealing with stress

• Keep in mind that stress is a natural response; it's a problem only when it is prolonged or hampering your life in any way. In such cases, you can do a few things to regulate stress.

  • Exercising and adequate sleep improves mood (Flueckiger et al., 2016).

  • A relaxation activity like meditating or deep breathing.

  • Expressing the stress in some way such as talking about it or journaling.

  • Finding other ways to deal with the stressor by looking online, asking someone, and so on.

• Stress may never stop. It will come again and again because in life we’re constantly striving to achieve various goals that require more resources than we have at the moment and there are other hurdles too. Severe stress, however, is bad for your body as well as mental health so it's good to take steps to improve it. If self-help does not work, it is advisable to seek out a mental health professional.

Questions

Q1. What are some major sources of stress in your life? How do you deal with them?

Q2. Any other thoughts about the topic?

References

Cleveland Clinic. (2021, January 28). What Is Stress? Symptoms, Signs & More | Cleveland Clinic. Cleveland Clinic. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/11874-stress

Flueckiger, L., Lieb, R., Meyer, A. H., Witthauer, C., & Mata, J. (2016). The importance of physical activity and sleep for affect on stressful days: Two intensive longitudinal studies. Emotion, 16(4), 488–497. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000143

Harvard Health Publishing. (2019, April 24). Borderline Personality Disorder. Harvard Health. https://www.health.harvard.edu/a_to_z/borderline-personality-disorder-a-to-z

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