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.