DN article about stress
Today I read a Dagens Nyheter article about stress (in Swedish) that was interesting. To sum it up, stress is a natural reaction for your body: it stops doing things (e.g., rebuilding cells) in order to respond effectively against something that seems to be a threat. If you experience this for too long periods, your body has a hard time to cope with some of the essential processes running at a too low priority level. In other words, you need to rest.
Another thing that the article says, is that studies of baboons show that things like social and physical contact with others positively affect the stress levels. And that nowadays we know that much social and physical contact in childhood makes you better suited to handle stressful situations.
About a year ago, I started working full time after having worked part time (50%) for half a year. The reason I worked part time was that I experienced stress 24 hours a day. I was stuck in it. Although I tried to relax, it didn’t help much. Everything felt stressful and things from the past I hadn’t dealt with began popping up (which is why I am of the opinion that you should try to understand things in your past). Nowadays, I’m more careful to relax.
And, as for social contacts, what’s troublesome when you get stuck in stress, is that you (or at least I did) shy away from people. But I’m not too sure that it would have been a good thing for me if my friends had been more persistent when I turned them down when they wanted to see me. I think it might have just added to the stress. There seems to be a Catch-22 like thing here: you benefit from engaging in social contacts, but you must want to do it.
At least in Sweden there has been a lot of talk about “burnout”, and often you can detect in what people say that they see their work as the only cause for their condition. It is important to realize that things in your past, besides your work, play a part in the situation you’ve ended up in. If you deny that, you’ll have a hard time trying to recover.
The fact that stress causes processes in you to, if not grind to a halt, so at least slow down, can make you feel tired, irritable, sad – or even depressed (which is a completely different thing from being sad, although people use the word “depressed” when they mean “sad”). Your memory also gets bad. I feel that my memory is recovering, thankfully. There have been a lot of things that I have forgotten during the past few years – that can be tough on you and the ones close to you.
So, in short: if you experience stress a lot – be sure to relax often (take walks, sleep, meditate, watch movies, read books, and so on). And although you might find it difficult to socialize, at least realize that it would be good for you – and think about under what forms you would be able to easier hang out with your friends and loved ones. And foremost: be kind and gentle to yourself. This is one of the situations where you have to think about yourself to be able to think about other things.