Stress is one of the topics that concerns us most lately. Both our clients and the caregivers we serve, volunteers from our team and ourselves live in a constant state of alert or concern that affects our health and well-being at different times and to different degrees. It seems to be an evil from which very few escape. What to do about it? Although it sounds paradoxical, the best way to combat stress is with more stress.
Hans Seyle was the first person to coin the term stress to refer to the common symptoms of patients with different diseases. For Seyle, stress manifested itself in two ways, one positive (eustrés) and one negative (distress).
fighting-stress-with-stress-expressive-arts“Stress is the body's nonspecific response to any demand, whether caused by pleasant or unpleasant conditions. During both eustrés ("good stress") and distress ("bad stress") the body experiences in practice the same unspecific responses to the various positive or negative stimuli acting on it. However, the fact that eustrés does much less harm than distress demonstrates graphically that it is "how you take it" that ultimately determines whether one can adapt to change successfully. " (Direct translation by Selye, H. (1978), original publication in 1956).
From now on, most scholars have left the eustrés aside and have only researched and written about the distress because it is a potentially damaging element that requires more urgent attention, and has given this part the general name of stress. In this way, as JM Gutierrez mentions in his article "The Promotion of Eustrés", stress has been pathologized, attributing to the whole the characteristics of only one of its parts. It is clear that the investigations have been carried out with a problem-oriented attitude, not with an intention to hide the benefits of positive stress, but with a need to clarify the distress and its effects, in order to alleviate them.
What is distress?
Lazarus defines psychological stress, referring to distress, as "a particular relationship between the individual and the environment that is evaluated by him as threatening or overflowing with his resources and that endangers his well-being". For this, he mentions, the individual performs two evaluations: the first to judge whether the situation is threatening to his physical or mental survival and the second to evaluate the physical, social, psychological or material resources that he has. Stress occurs when there is a discrepancy between the perceived demand and the resources to cope with it.
Types of distress
The APA (American Psychological Association) distinguishes three types of distress, although it also calls them wrongly or by stress convention:
Acute Stress
It arises from the demands and pressures of the recent past and the anticipated demands and pressures of the near future. Because it is short term, acute stress does not have enough time to cause the major damage associated with long term stress. Acute stress can occur in anyone's life, and it is very treatable and manageable.
This stress is the most common and it happens to all of us at different times.
Episodic acute stress
On the other hand, there are those people who are frequently acutely stressed, whose lives are so disordered that they are studies of chaos and crisis. They are always in a hurry, but they are always late. If something can go wrong, it goes wrong. They take on too many responsibilities, have too much on their hands, and cannot organize the amount of self-imposed demands or pressures that demand their attention. They seem to be perpetually in the grip of acute stress. Always in a hurry, they tend to be sharp and sometimes their irritability is transmitted as hostility
Another form of episodic acute stress arises from unremitting worry. The "doña o don angustias" see disaster around the corner and pessimically foresee a catastrophe in every situation.
Often lifestyle and personality traits are so ingrained and common in these people that they see nothing wrong with the way they lead their lives. They blame other people and external events for their ills. They often see their lifestyle, their patterns of interaction with others, and their ways of perceiving the world as an integral part of who they are and what they do.
In general, episodic acute stress is more related to anxiety.
Chronic stress
This is the exhausting stress that wears people out day after day, year after year. It wreaks havoc through long-term wear. It is the stress of poverty, dysfunctional families, a long illness, the unprocessed grief of a loved one, being trapped in an unhappy marriage or in a job or career that is hated, as some examples to mention.
Chronic stress arises when a person never sees a way out of a depressing situation. It is the stress of unrelenting demands and pressures for seemingly endless periods. Hopelessly, the person abandons the search for solutions.
Some types of chronic stress come from traumatic childhood experiences that are internalized and constantly painful and present. Some experiences profoundly affect personality. A world view, or a belief system, is generated that causes endless stress for the person (for example, the world is a threatening place, people will discover that they pretend what is not, it must be perfect all the time). When deep-seated personality or convictions and beliefs need to be reformulated, recovery requires active self-examination, often with the help of a professional.
The worst aspect of chronic stress is that people get used to it, forget that it is there. People are immediately aware of acute stress because it is new; They ignore chronic stress because it is old, familiar, and sometimes even almost comfortable.
Chronic stress kills through suicide, violence, heart attack, stroke, and even cancer. People wear out until they reach a final and fatal nervous breakdown. Because physical and mental resources are consumed by long-term wear and tear, chronic stress symptoms are difficult to treat and may require medical and behavioral treatment and stress management.
Chronic stress is generally related to depression.
How do we deal with stressful situations?
A stressful situation is that situation that can be perceived as a threat to our integrity and / or physical or emotional stability.
This situation is caused by a stressor; that is, an internal or external stimulus of a physical, chemical or social nature. They can be stressors: work, family, illness, death and grief, the weather, relationships, alcohol, frustrations, expectations, patterns or social patterns, the past.
In this context, Lazarus proposes two coping models to deal with stressful situations: the problem-based strategy that tries to change or control some aspect of the person suffering from stress, or some aspect of the environment and the strategy based on emotions, sometimes A priority is to manage or regulate the negative emotions associated with the stressor. (Lazarus and Folkman, 1986)
In many of the contexts in which we work, modifying the stressor is impossible for us. For example, in the case of Bubulina professionals, working in the hospital with terminally ill patients, we have very little control over the external circumstances of our work: the little privacy afforded by caring for a patient in a room shared with others, the level of noise, the distraction of nurses and doctors approaching to take measurements, the physical and mental condition of the patient, etc. However, it is possible to regulate the negative emotions that these can produce. How? Rethinking our way of assuming the stimulus, for this it is necessary to talk more deeply about eustrés.
What is eustrés?
Eustrés or positive stress is one in which the perceived demands do not exceed the individual's resources.
In an eustrés environment, the body is able to face challenging and difficult situations and even obtain pleasant sensations with it, experiencing the world in a different way.
We instinctively look for eustrés situations such as: playing sports, going to the gym, dancing, having hobbies, learning new things. In general these activities carry a challenge that we enjoy going through.
JM Gutierrez values eustrés as a highly effective element to combat distress. Both eustrés and distress are psychophysical responses to demanding situations in the environment, the difference is that while in distress the individual feels that the demand far exceeds his capacity and this generates a negative response, in eustrés the individual assumes this As a challenge, he dares to get out of his comfort zone and take risks that will help him find new resources.
It sounds simple enough to say that our stress response can be controlled, that one can face external stimuli in a positive (eustrés) or negative (distress) way, but maintaining the right attitude to stressful situations requires effort and conscious attention to how we react. to stimuli, as well as an understanding of the number of stressors that we are able to handle in a healthy way. An attitude that tends towards eustrés and adequate coping strategies can be developed, if exercised.
“Look for satisfactory stress situations practiced in an empathic, non-competitive way; they allow us a feeling of well-being and adaptation, strengthening our self-esteem and reinforcing coping strategies. ” JM Gutierrez.
A resource-oriented attitude
As P.Knill, E.Levine, S.Levine (2005) point out, an experience of grief or distress is marked by situational restriction and / or individual disability.
In working with the imagination through the expressive arts, however, there is an effective experience of empowerment and achievement within a frame of limited resources. Consequently, the experience of a decentralization through art can be seen as an experience of coping or as an "access road" to resilience in a restrictive situation.
How the expressive arts can generate eustrés?
At Bubulina we believe in the power of art and play as generators of eustrés. In both, situations are offered that involve taking a risk, getting out of our comfort zone and risking trying different ways to solve tasks that apparently are above the resources we believe we have.
As P.Knill, E.Levine, Levine (2005) point out, achievement in making art has the merit of offering a beauty that can evoke responses that move or touch us.
This coping process can also be seen as training or exercise to deal with situational restrictions and individual disability in the life of the person seeking help. The experience of coping in the artistic process challenges beliefs such as: "I am not capable of achieving anything", "I have no talent" or "I have so few resources", etc. Additionally, expressive arts therapy includes more levels than just cognitive argumentation, including:
- They are valuable exercises with repetitive experiences of achievement. They are concrete psycho-physical experiences that make emotional and cognitive reasoning possible. Beauty, as it touches us, can be motivating and convincing, and overcomes the barriers raised by cognitive reasoning and the logic of resistance and fear. With the repetitive coping experience, beliefs about one's lack of competence and ability are challenged. Furthermore, the act of having created a work that gives satisfaction and pleasure to the eyes of the observer is a complete confrontation with these convictions. There is also an experiential field of discovery that mobilizes curiosity.
This type of discovery is one of the fundamental experiences of sensory-motor and cognitive learning.
In the expressive arts, we generate eustrés in a safe environment in which we can explore through imagination, discover in experience new and old resources, whether internal or external, and reflect on what has happened.
This allows us, not only to increase vitality, health and energy at that time, but also to recognize resources with which to face other challenges in our day to day, facilitating decision-making and increasing the level of awareness and perception of stressors in our life.
Over time the levels of distress decrease; Although the demands remain uncertain, our confidence in the resources we have to face them increases.
References:
- Gutiérrez García, JM (1998). The promotion of eustrés. Psicologia.COM, 2 (1), 38 paragraphs. Available at: https://psiquiatria.com/estres-62/la-promocion-del-eustres/ American Psychological Association (2016) Los Distintos Types of stress http://www.apa.org/centrodeapoyo/tipos.aspx. Adapted from "The Stress Solution" by Lyle H. Miller, PhD, and Alma Dell Smith, PhD.Lazarus and Folkman (1986): LAZARUS, Richard and FOLKMAN, Susan. Stress and cognitive processes: The concept of coping. (1984 - 1986) Barcelona, Spain. Martínez Roca editions. 1986 p. 141P.Knill, E.Levine, S.Levine (2005): Paolo J. Knill, Ellen G. Levine and Stephen K. Levine - Principles and practice of expressive arts therapy (2005) Digital Print Version 2010 pg. 90-92; pg. 157
