When we reframe the stress response

The last few months have been objectively stressful. There were unexpected trips away from home to provide necessary care to grown children who were sick and needed someone “on the ground” with them — my husband and me together, and then tag-teaming it, trading off so that one of us was at home and one of us was away for more than a month.

To that, there are massive changes in his workplace, very public layoffs that are staged to happen in waves over the course of the spring. There is the bewilderment and the deep grief that comes from the loss of a corollary relationship that came with my dad’s death, and the sorrow that he still hasn’t been buried and there’s nothing I can do about it. And then there are the “things that used to be big things, but make us shrug and sigh and say ‘of course’ now”: The dryer is broken; there are conflicts on the calendar between events we need to attend in other states and events we need to attend at home; the car is making noises as I coax it along the 400-mile trip to Virginia again.

I am a certified health coach. I’m a Catholic mindset coach. I know stress when I see it, and I know the sage advice is that something has to change. Prolonged periods of intense stress are detrimental to one’s health. The familiar advice is that stress is bad and we need to stop being so stressed.

The reality is that stress is life. And the measure of stress in any one life at any one time is not entirely within our control. Ironically, to the stresses of each of our lives we add another stress: Studies show that stress takes years — even decades — off your life.

To some degree, I believe that. I have seen stress turn someone’s hair entirely gray in a matter of weeks. I’ve seen stress put 60 pounds on a person’s body almost overnight. I’ve witnessed what stress can do to blood sugar and blood pressure levels. We are wired to have physical responses to stress.

But what if stress isn’t the bug that causes a system malfunction, but a built-in feature that can be utilized to enhance performance and improve the way we live life? What we think about the stressor will determine how we feel about the stressor. How we feel about the stressor will determine what we do about the stressor, consciously and also — to some degree — unconsciously. When we feel our breath come heavier and our hearts beat faster in response to stressful stimuli, we can choose to react with more fear or we can recognize that our bodies are now providing more oxygen and more awareness. When we reframe the stress response and see it as a system feature that is helpful to enhance performance, we can be less anxious and more confident. Further, our bodies will respond the way our minds direct them to. When you think about stress differently, your body can read that stress response — butterflies in your stomach, increased heart rate, shaky breath — more like it does when you’re falling in love than it does when you’re falling apart.

We don’t need to eradicate stressors — which is good because life has a way of throwing them at us. We do need to learn to change the way we think about stressors and about our physiological response to stress.

What is necessary is simple: surrender. Recognize that undesirable events and emotions are part and parcel of life. Recognize that feeling this flood of “stress energy” in response to those events is part of being a human being. It’s normal and it’s how we were created to respond.

Ironically, research shows that people with more anxiety perform better than people with no anxiety. Anxiety is going to provide you with some energy to meet the challenge at hand. And that can drive you into a peak performance mode. Embrace it in the moment; see it as a gift hard-wired into your person by your Creator. When you see the physiological response that way, it helps you to also see the stressor differently.

God allows challenges in our lives. He allows hard things to happen. And what he desires from us relative to those hard things is also surrender. The reality is we have very little control over what happens in our personal lives or what is going on out there in the world. It’s the same powerlessness as we have over the surge of hormones when we are afraid. And we can invoke the same surrender response.

In that moment of overwhelming stress, we can recognize what is happening and recognize the power we do have and the power we don’t have. We can ask the Holy Spirit to help us to discern what matters most and to use the energy we feel to think the thoughts that drive the actions that are consistent with God’s will. Surrender means trusting God’s design, and then giving the full assent of our will to him so that he can work in us and through us to bring about his perfect plan. Fair warning here notes that his plan might look nothing like yours. And you have to be good with that.

The last three years have taught me that right on the heels of a basement flood that wipes out almost every family heirloom will come a totaled car and then there will be emergency eye surgery and then there will be a grief so deep and sorrowful it will never find its way onto these pages. Stress happens. I know that.

But when it’s urgent and incessant and unrelenting, what if I could see that God is calling me to himself urgently, incessantly, unrelentingly? That he is ready and willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with me, to show me how to harness the energy of my body’s response and to labor alongside me? And once we’ve navigated the hard things yet again, what if he is eager and willing and waiting to show me how sweet the moment of true rest is in his presence, knowing that he can and will work it all together for the good?