Stress isn’t actually a thing. Wait! What? Everyone says “Stress – It’s a thing!” Dr. Sara, you’ve been telling us for years that stress is a thing and it’s a bad thing. Yes. I know.
I was wrong.
Stress is something called a nominalization. It’s a non-tangible process that we shorthand into a “thing” to talk about it more easily. But it’s not a “thing”. You can’t put stress into a wheelbarrow. That’s a handy test for “Is it a thing?”. If you can put it in a wheelbarrow then it’s a thing. If not, then it’s a process our minds are creating. And good news, if you can’t put it in a wheelbarrow then it’s up for grabs to change or shift as it wasn’t “real” to start with anyway.
Ok but I still feel really tired and anxious, and you told me my low back pain had a lot to do with stress. You told me, Dr. Sara!
So what now?
Understanding how your brain creates stress can help us do something different. In chiropractic, we talk about 3 main stressors or sources of stress. These are physical, chemical and mental-emotional. The first two tend to be well understood by most people and the last one is rarely understood or even looked at.
Physical stress is things like a car accident, a broken arm or even soreness from exercising. The effect of the stress can be negative (e.g. car accident), creating a breakdown or positive (exercise soreness) creating growth.
Chemical stress is things like eating McDonald’s every day, alcohol, or an industrial chemical burn. Being exposed to these things requires your body to use more energy to clear them from your system just as physical stress requires more energy from your body to heal. This requiring energy is an extra load on your body or “stress”. Again, this can create growth or breakdown.
Mental-Emotional stress is the things we tell ourselves. It can be habitual thought patterns or just random thoughts. Our thought patterns are powerful as they dictate our posture, our energy levels, and the possibilities we allow ourselves in life. Like the previous two types of stressors, Mental-Emotional stress can be a trigger for growth or breakdown. We can tell ourselves wonderful joyful thoughts or terrible scary thoughts.
The awesome thing is that our bodies and minds are designed to return to a calm expansive, relaxed state once the stress is done. Once the broken arm is set and healing, once the chemical is cleared from our system, and once we allow the scary thoughts to settle we can return to factory settings ready for anything.
Mental-Emotional thought patterns are the day-to-day main reason why we don’t return to “factory settings”. They are so habitual and run beneath the surface of our awareness creating tension and tightness throughout your body and spine. Our brains can’t tell the difference between a thought in our head and a tiger on our doorstep. We create states of worry, fatigue and anxiety by replaying all the scary thoughts over and over.
The first step to changing this situation is to just notice that we are doing it. Notice that your thoughts are having an effect on your body. It could be a good effect or a bad effect. Decide if you like the way you are feeling. If yes, carry on. If no, then notice “Oh look! I thought about a tiger (or scary thing) and I contracted in, my breathing got shallow, I tightened up my jaw.” Noticing allows your brain to become aware and do something different.
The second step to changing is to become aware that we can choose our thoughts internally separate from external events. An outside circumstance happens and we are the ones who put meaning on it and create a thought with that meaning. Our body then reacts to that thought/meaning as “real”. Noticing that we have a choice is huge in itself. It opens up a path to freedom.
Noticing that you are the wizard behind the curtain is the most important part of opening up to more possibilities and eventually resting in a deeper space of aliveness for longer and longer.
With love,
Dr. Sara