Stress

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.  Matthew 6:34

I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.   Jennifer Yane

Fudōshin : Immovable mind

A spirit of unshakable calm and determination,
courage without recklessness,
rooted stability in both mental and physical realms.

Like a willow tree,
powerful roots deep in the ground
and a soft, yielding resistance against
the winds that blow through it.

I've managed to miss being in Christchurch for the two really big earthquakes - unlike my family, who were there for all of them. Post quake it's been impressive watching people cope with a situation which is out of their control – perhaps the scariest thing that a person can feel.

Stress can be a positive experience, but exposure to stressors beyond the persons ability to cope will lead to distress – an inability to cope adequately.

Stress comes in all shapes and sizes – it can be emotional, mental or physical. While it normally arises from a life changing event it doesn't actually need to be real to have an effect, we just have to believe it to be stressful. It's a complex phenomenon – an identical event will cause different levels of stress response on an individual basis, dependent on the persons resources and perceptions.

It's been suggested that as well as our perception of the event we also undertake an analysis of the situation, using both a problem solving process and a process of managing our negative emotions. It's also been suggested that we evaluate the resources we have available to deal with the issue. There are many ways of initiating this process; we can be entirely dependent on other people to direct us, we can use others help us work through the issue and what we should do, or we can deal with it entirely ourselves. Training, self understanding and intelligence all play a part in our ability to deal with stress.

How well we “rebound” from a situation is called our resilience; but this doesn't just describe our personal resources, but also how we interact with family and our other social and help networks. The interplay of the external and internal factors involved with resilience make it as complex as the original individual distress response which triggered it.

Rather than dealing with such a complex system I want to focus on our personal ability to cope – what is sometimes called our mental toughness.

Stress tends to cause one of three different reactions – aggression, passive withdrawal, or attempts to escape. There are a number of changes that take place within us – the way we think, how we feel, our behaviour, and our body processes. These changes take place as the mind and body go into “fight or flight” mode; there is the physiological impact on blood flow and energy, and mentally we start to suffer from distorted thinking and fear. Dealing with stress requires us to take control of these changes.

Emergency response staff, and high performance athletes deal well in their high pressure situations because they have a number of tools;

• structure to their response
• a set of skills to deal with the particular situation
• a particular mindset they develop – based around controlling their mental processes and their attention.

When developing the response structure – the “what would I do if” - the first thing to do is focus on the things you can control, rather than the things you can't. If you concentrate on what you can't control you immediately start to feel small and the situation feels too big. To feel that you can control things you need to trust yourself. If you don't, you will start to label yourself as a failure and blame yourself rather than rationally looking at the situation and learning from it.

Cognitively humans have developed wonderful skills at reviewing the past and anticipating and planning for the future – but there is a cost to this: it affects us emotionally. Recent research shows we spend on average 50% of our time thinking about either the future or the past, and it is our unhappiest time. At stressful times we need to control our attention by focusing on what is happening now rather than on our expectations or consequences which haven't happened yet. In a sense neither the past or the future are “real”; only what is happening at this moment is really “real”.

If you are thinking about your response to natural disasters, here's some links to help you prepare the things you can control;

Being prepared at home, at school, at work

and if you are in Auckland, here are the specific threats.

Christchurch earthquake - a personal story

From the moment I received the phone call from my wife in Christchurch, I knew from her tone that this earthquake was different from the first one.  For people resident in Christchurch since the big quake in September 2010, the continual stress of aftershocks has been fatiguing.  That makes the resilience displayed since last Tuesday all that more remarkable.

Unlike September, it was apparent I needed to come home as soon as possible - so kudos to our national airline, Air New Zealand for the cheap airfares and extra planes they put on to get people either in (like me) or out of the city.

My parent-in-laws house had been badly affected by the Boxing Day aftershock, and it's location in Heathcote Valley put it almost at the epicenter of this latest quake.  From the photos below you can see it - and many surrounding houses - are now uninhabitable.  For people now in their 70's, who helped build the house originally; and as the “family home” for them and their children, its loss is a huge blow.

 Fear of looters, concern for their missing cat, the needs of the few sheep they run on their property, as well as an attachment to the house, kept them on the property; sleeping in the back of their cars.  The entreaties of their children and offers of accommodation were refused.  Yes, stubbornness does run in the family!

When it became obvious they wouldn't move my wife devised an alternative plan, and rung one of her clients in Ashburton – around an hour and a half south of Christchurch and well outside the affected area - and appealed for their help.  They unhesitatingly agreed and spent a couple of hours looking for any sort of a accommodation they could find, and in the end offered – which was accepted immediately – the use, free of charge, for as long as needed, their new, unused, demonstration horse float.  Horse float? - you might ask: but this is a stunningly high tech device.  Solar powered lighting, refrigerator, water pump with sink and 80 liter tank, solar powered socket for recharging a laptop or other devices, seating and plenty of room at the other end for a double bed (and if you open the end even indoor/outdoor flow!) make this the perfect temporary accommodation for a place with no power or water services.

Even more amazingly, they drove up to Christchurch the same day to deliver it on site so that my wife's parents wouldn't spend another night sleeping in a car.

 Once the house is empty of anything valuable and salvageable, and with the cat now found, I'm sure they will move off-site eventually.  Until that happens, the huge generosity of Lysaght in donating their float needs to be acknowledged.  It's only when you are in real need that you find such wonderfully caring, generous people who will assist with no expectation of return.

It has to be noted that they are still waiting for EQC regarding the initial earthquake.  In the long term it's not just the needs of people such as my in-laws which need to be met, the really difficult job for authorities will be to manage peoples’ expectations as well.