Stress management - Post 3

Hello, The previous post is Here, and if would like to start from the beginning it is Here

It is true that stress hormones can turn a human being into a rocket or a superman, but it has a price. But what happens when we have stress and what is the difference between the winner and loser in this situation?

Imagine two lions meeting each other at the start point. They are stressed, so they are very powerful and aggressive. They fight, and one of them wins another loses. A similar amount of energy expended. The winner gets dopamine and endorphins mixture into his blood. It relaxes the muscles and takes away the pain. The winner recovers fast with new energy and optimism, while the loser stays exhausted and disappointed.

The green line shows the time of winner’s recovery, while the loser’s line is red. As you can see, the loser does not recover fully and additionally got the bad experience in the memory storage.

We all collect good and bad memories of our lifetime stress experiences. The bad memories are stronger because they are more important for survival. As the years pass, bad memories outweigh our good experience memories and can make us coward, too cautious, gutless, and always pre-set to lose.

This kind of life-or-death situations is rare nowadays. However, the so-called permanent stress became a reality in the second part of the 20th century. Not so noticeable in a short run, it has enormous and destructive long-time effects.

The dynamics of permanent stress can have few scenarios possible:

In Scenario 1, we have a conflict with someone stronger, more powerful or above us by subordination. You have your fight or flight reaction in your body, but you cannot show it, and you stay a loser in this situation full of stress hormones and no happiness and reward..., with the longer time needed for your recovery and some bad experiences coming your way. If you have such a conflict for a second, third time and so on, you do not react that strong, because your body cannot afford such a massive waste of energy. The suppressed reaction causes physical blocking in your body, known as spasms or cramps and can lead to illnesses both physical or mental

In Scenario 2, we are influenced by memories of such conflicts and even having no repeated conflict we experiencing a stress reaction just seeing the person we had a conflict with... In this case, we deal with the mental, or psychological trigger (the non-existent one, discussed earlier).

In both cases, we face the loser stress, causing the loser feeling and loser thinking in us.

So how to deal with the stress?

There are three stress management directions: