Reprinted from: MidValley Life 1(1):21-27, 1984.
by . Stephen I. Sideroff, Ph. D.

What is your reaction when you hear the word "stress?" Most people that I speak to try and avoid it. You know it's there and is probably affecting you, but if you can ignore it, then maybe it doesn't exist. There are many misconceptions about stress. With all the publicity on the subject, one can easily get the message that stress is bad and should be eliminated. At the same time, we seem to look for, and even desire, stress. How is it possible to reconcile these two positions? It is almost impossible to achieve success without encountering and engendering a certain amount of stress. It is a necessary part of life. The problem occurs when we lose control of our stress and when we place too much stress on ourselves.

What is stress? To begin with, let me give a brief definition of stress so you can see why it has become such a prevalent word in our language. Stress results from any demand on us to adapt ... to change either physically or emotionally. Stress is our body's reaction to these demands. Stress can be your reaction to an automobile cutting in front of you, a deadline at work, conflict in a relationship, or a death in the family. Stress is also caused by getting a promotion, taking on a challenging or exciting project, getting married and having a baby, Stress is not only caused by something happening to you directly.

If you believe you are in danger, even if the threat is not real, this causes stress. When under stress, our body gears up for an emergency. Our heart rate, blood pressure and breathing increase. Hormones and sugar are released into the blood, muscles tense and pupils dilate. We go on alert.

Is stress good or bad? The answer is yes. Stress is good and stress is bad. The question really should be: "What is good stress and what is bad stress?" All people who are successful experience stress, since success always involves taking risks. To live life to the fullest you cannot avoid all stressful situations. In fact, studies have found that people achieve peak performance when they are under a certain amount of stress. So, you can see that we need stress in our lives and that stress actually enhances our lives.

The problem occurs when we lose sight of our optimal level of stress. While stress is good, too much stress is definitely bad. Again, studies have found that beyond a moderate level, stress begins to impair performance. It makes us less capable of thinking creatively, of problem solving. Our thinking becomes more stereotyped, making it difficult to explore new directions.
Too much stress, furthermore, makes one more susceptible to disease. Hans Selye, the father of stress, has defined stress as the 'wear and tear on the body'. He has also described aging as the sum total of all the stress we place on our bodies. Some medical experts estimate that between 50 percent and 90 percent of medical problems have a stress component. How can this be?
Every time you undergo stress your body goes through changes and reaches into its reserves to go all out, just as a car engine will rev when you step on the gas to pass another vehicle. In fact, our bodies are designed to be able to react in this way to handle emergencies. The problem occurs when we make this kind of demand on a regular, non-stop basis, and when we don't take the time to relax our own 'personal' engine. When we make too many situations 'emergencies', we wear out the resources of our body. The resources needed to fight off disease, for example. It is like taking a rubber band and stretching it. And then, without letting it go back to its normal state, stretching it again. You know what will happen... it breaks' This is also true of your body . Placing too many demands on it without allowing it to relax, results, after a while, in your inability to continue responding.

Think about your typical day. In my workshops, I ask participants to imagine sitting and watching a movie of their day, played before them. Notice how much of the day you spend under pressure. This can be time pressure, decision pressure, or personal interaction discomfort. It can be financial pressure and it can be concern over personal health. Many of the people that I work with notice that they are jumping from one stressful situation to another in the course of the day. They also discover that they rarely give themselves time to unwind or relax. It is hard for them to take a five minute break.

Resistance to getting stress under control. For many of us, we believe we can go on at our fast pace forever, Or at least, we say, until we become more financially stable. Or we have some other way of fooling ourselves. The truth is that we are afraid to slow down. We feel that we will be shirking our responsibilities or considered lazy. As part of each person's program to reduce stress is the exploration of what keeps the individual going at a fast pace.

This is important because your reason for staying on a treadmill acts as a strong resistance to any stress management program. To facilitate one's awareness of this resistance. I like to use a gestalt therapeutic technique in which the person has a dialogue with their own "resister".

That is, playing both sides of the issue: The side that wants to get stress under control and the side that feel's threatened by what it perceives as any lowering of drive.

Why is stress control so important? I have already alluded to the negative consequences of too much stress: Decreased creativity and increased probability of illness. Let's explore this in a little more detail so you, the reader, can check for your own signs and symptoms of stress. Stress basically shifts our body functions out of balance, leaving us less capable of responding to situations, physically, emotionally and mentally. A major source of stress is also what I call "unfinished business". where we walk around with much on our mind. And even go to sleep at night trying to solve or juggle a half dozen things.

The following is a partial list of signs and symptoms of stress that is out of control: Stomach aches. ulcers. colitis, headaches, high blood pressure. asthma and other respiratory problems. stiffness in the neck, shoulders and back. trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, muscle twitches and aches, arthritis, proneness to anger and yelling, forgetfulness, depression, impatience, inflexibility, quick temper, fatigue, compulsive eating or smoking, overuse of drugs and alcohol (don't fool yourself here), teeth grinding, working harder but accomplishing less, difficulty concentrating, wanting to run away from your responsibilities.

As you can see, it is difficult to avoid the influence of stress in our lives. As I tell my workshop participants, getting stress under your control will make the difference in your quality of life. It can also help to make you more successful. Think of any of the above symptoms you may be experiencing. How much better could you perform if they were reduced, or if you didn't need to control them with drugs?

How to handle stress. Keeping your body in good condition is a first step in managing stress. When you take care of yourself through good nutrition and the proper exercise you are making yourself more tolerant to the negative effects of stress. But this not enough. Recently I was referred a patient who had a severe heart attack. This occurred in spite of the fact that this person ran two miles each day, was conscientious about diet and nutrition and was at an ideal weight. The missing piece was a very stressful life.
I am finding more and more people these days are turning to drugs and alcohol to counter the effects of stress. How many people whom you know routinely use some form of drug in the evening to bring them down ... or up, and to help them fall asleep or get their work done ... is this true for you? The use of drugs in this context is very dangerous since it simply masks the imbalance in your body. Your body, through aches, pains and other symptoms, is giving you a message and it is ignored. This is like driving down the freeway in your automobile and seeing the red oil light go on. In this situation, do you think you would take a hammer and smash the red light? Certainly not - you would immediately have it taken care of. Yet we regularly ignore the red signals our body sends out.

One of the main reasons we turn to the use of drugs and alcohol to feel better is that many of us don't know the alternatives or other ways of getting control of our lives. The goal of my program, whether it is for an individual, group or corporation, is to learn new ways of getting control of stress. In future articles, I will discuss cognitive techniques that will help you avoid unnecessary stress in the first place. This has to do with situations in which your interpretation of another person's motives or feelings (she must not like me, etc.) creates stress; situations in which your lack of assertiveness results in more stress.

I will also look at time management and other techniques as ways to avoid unnecessary stress. For the remainder of this article I shall focus on a relatively new procedure called biofeedback.
Bioleedback: the natural way to relax and control stress. Just as our body has a mechanism to deal with emergency situations. as described earlier, we also have an opposite system that allows us to recuperate and build up new body resources- The problem is that most of us lost the ability to use this system after becoming adults. Even when we have the time to relax. we manage to find something to do to keep busy. For many of us it just does not seem right to take time off and do nothing. How many of you wake up in the morning feeling like a truck just ran over you? For many of us, sleep itself is not totally relaxing since we have difficulty shutting off our minds from all of our unfinished business and we fall asleep with our muscles remaining tense.
Biofeedback is a technique I have been using to help people relearn how to relax and to help people turn on their own recuperative powers and be able to relax and regenerate. Biofeedback uses a sensitive machine to monitor some biological system, such as muscle tension, heart rate or skin temperature. This information is then fed back to the person in the form of a signal that can be seen or heard. For example, you know that when you feel tense or nervous your palms begin to sweat and get clammy, The technical term for this is galvanic skin response or GSR. The more relaxed you get, the less moisture is present on your skin. GSR biofeedback monitors this moisture and feeds back a signal which lets you know whether you are getting more tense or more relaxed. During the biofeedback portion of my program, I give participants strategies or suggestions on relaxation. The feedback from the machine lets them know of minute changes in their body - such as a successful lowering of tension - that they would not otherwise be aware of. This immediate reinforcement, a change in tone or other signal, makes it more likely that the participant will repeat the relaxing behavior.

Through continued practice, one is soon able to reduce the tension without the machine. The ultimate goal is to be able to independently detect when tension begins out in the real world, and to use the learned techniques to lower the tension and thus keep stress under control.

In addition to helping people to relax, biofeedback has been important tool in my treatment of headaches, high blood pressure, colitis, insomnia and anxiety. Perhaps most important about biofeedback is the new level of awareness my clients acquire from the training. One of our defenses against stress as mentioned above, is to numb ourselves to the fact that we are feeling tense or feeling any other symptom. Biofeedback gives us a new window into ourselves. My clients develop an exquisite sense of when their body starts to get out of balance and then they have the ability to correct the imbalance before problems are created.

It is possible for you to experience a simple form of biofeedback without any special equipment. When we are tense and under stress, peripheral blood vessels constrict, causing blood to flow away from hands and feet and toward our vital organs. When this happens, the temperature of our hands goes down. Skin temperature feedback can be
accomplished by using a thermometer taped to a finger. The goal is to increase the temperature reading of the thermometer - indicating more blood flow to the hands, resulting from successful relaxation.

If you try this, I suggest making yourself comfortable and eliminating any distractions. After you tape the thermometer to your finger and note the temperature, take some deep breaths. Make a 'sighing' sound as you exhale. For about 15 minutes imagine your hands getting warmer. You might think of the sun shining brightly, or placing your hands around a warm cup or candle. After 15 minutes, note the temperature again and notice how you feel. Do you feel more relaxed? An increase in temperature indicates that your body is in a greater state of relaxation.

For my training, I use home - training biofeedback units called GSR2 . They allow me to monitor GSR and also have attachments for skin temperature and muscle tension feedback.
Comments.

There are two general ways in which we can handle stress:
1) Encountering fewer stressful situations during the day - in other words, spacing stressful events further apart, and
2) Learning to relax when we are not under stress. Most of us have developed habits that result in constant stress with no time to relax.

Stress management involves setting goals and organizing your life in the best possible manner. This article describes one method -biofeedback, that can help you keep your stress under control and thus be more successful.

Dr. Sideroff is a clinical psychologist and is on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, UCLA, and at the VA Medical Center, Brentwood, as well as in private practice. He has published numerous articles in the area of psychology, behavioral medicine and cardiovascular control. He has taught and served as a consultant for professionals and corporations in the United States, Canada and Europe. Dr. Sideroff is an expert in the area of stress management and psychosomatic medicine. His clinical practice is oriented toward helping people achieve their full potential.