What enters your mind and how does your body feel when 'Stress' is mentioned?

**Lionelgee** · 14th June 2023, 09:10 PM

Hello All,

I could write chapters about what stress is and how it may be both negative and positive. How stress that remains unabated can lead to the condition known as ‘anxiety’. Where anxiety is an overarching condition that does not go away after a stress event such as taking an examination is completed. What is important to know about stress and anxiety is that both conditions wear many faces and affect people differently. For example, what may be an easily achievable activity that one person can do without much thought could leave another person catatonic with stress and anxiety. Fill a room with one hundred people who experience stress or anxiety, and you can have at least one hundred different manifestations or descriptions of stress/anxiety.

The masquerade of stress and anxiety
Another interesting thing about stress or anxiety is that they can put on disguises that an individual might not be able to recognise even within their own selves. You might have learnt the best stress control technique that is currently available. However, if you cannot recognise that you are increasingly feeling stressed or anxious, that top-shelf stress/anxiety control technique will never be enacted. Or by the time you recognise that you are feeling stressed or anxious its levels have climbed so high that it is simply too late to deploy the stress/anxiety control technique. The consequence is referred to as experiencing a meltdown that can then flow on to things like burnout. The sooner increased levels of stress/anxiety are recognised the more rapidly stress/anxiety controls can be enacted. So, if stress/anxiety can masquerade until it reveals itself when it is too late to enact control techniques what can we do to remove its disguise?

Removing the disguise
The best way to see through stress/anxiety’s masquerade is to follow an ancient Chinese philosopher who studied war – Sun Tzu’s (1) piece of advice - Number 1. know yourself! Learn about how you can tell that you are becoming increasingly stressed or anxious. If you consistently fail to accurately identify the symptoms of stress and anxiety within your own body, ask someone who has known you for years. They may be able to tell from things like your mood, your actions, your tone of voice or even your facial expressions that you are getting increasingly stressed or anxious. Just like while playing a card game such as poker you can have 'physical tells' which are accidental give-aways to other people playing the game that you are bluffing about the how bad the hand is that you are holding. Or that you are playing down just how good that hand of cards is, so other people start to raise the stakes and you might increase your profits. These ‘physical tells’ can be learnt from other people, and you can gain from their insight to learn that your stress and anxiety levels are actually increasing.

Using your vision to see through the masquerade
Another thing you can do is to ask someone you trust to take some photographs of your body posture and your face when they can tell from your physical tells that your stress/anxiety is increasing. Get a copy of these photographs and blow them up so they can be easily examined and place them next to a mirror. By looking at your stress/anxiety photographs you can compare them to your current face, or your physical tells. Attempt to feel the arrangement of muscles in your face during the physical tells that inform you that you are stressed or anxious. Become familiar with how these facial or perhaps neck muscles feel during the time of your stressed/anxious physical tells. After some practice you might be able to recognise that the muscles in your face or neck are starting to tense and begin to form the physical tells that other people can use to identify that your stress/anxiety is increasing.

As you become increasingly familiar with these physiological changes in your muscles the sooner your stress control techniques can be enacted. Initially using photographs of our individual ‘physical tells’ of stress and anxiety to compare against your expression in a mirror might seem very naïve. However, research into the brain estimates that eighty to eighty-five percent of our perception, learning, cognition, and activities are triggered through vision (2). Therefore, using photographs as an aid to learning is most likely the quickest and most direct route into your brain. The quicker an individual can recognise that they are stressed or anxious the sooner control techniques can be enacted and the more effective they will be.

Stress and Anxiety are Emotions
The other thing about stress and anxiety is that they are both emotions. Not only can these emotions disguise themselves they can also block other emotions. In some cases, prolonged exposure to stress or anxiety can block the influence of other more desirable emotions. Within this subsequent void the less than desirable emotions dominate your life. A research team led by Shaver (3) found that there are five groups of ‘basic’ emotions. These are: Love, Joy, Anger, Fear and Sadness. Among the 17 emotions found within the Basic Emotion of Fear is 'Anxiety'. You may be familiar with one common association with Fear as an emotion and that is the fight/flight response. Once this response is triggered one of either Fear (Flight) or Anger (Fight) becomes the dominant emotion. During this time Love, Joy and Sadness can be excluded from an individual’s emotional repertoire. This exclusion of these three other emotions comes at a great cost to an individual’s wellbeing. More about fight/flight (4) response will be discussed in the next Wellbeing segment.

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S. Tzu, The Art of War. America: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018
T. Politzer. "Vision Is Our Dominant Sense." WETA Public Television. Vision Is Our Dominant Sense | BrainLine (accessed 2023).
P. Shaver, J. Schwartz, D. Kirson, and C. O'Connor, "Emotion knowledge: Further exploration of a prototype approach," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 52, no. 6, pp. 1061-1086, 1987, doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.52.6.1061.
Seng and C. Group, "From Fight or Flight, Freeze or Faint, to "Flow": Identifying a Concept to Express a Positive Embodied Outcome of Trauma Recovery," (in eng), J Am Psychiatr Nurses Assoc, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 200-207, May/Jun 2019, doi: 10.1177/1078390318778890.

Copyright Dr. Lionel G. Evans June 2023

Kind regards
Dr. Lionel G. Evans

**Lionelgee** · 14th June 2023, 09:34 PM

Hello All,

Just in case you are wondering why I have started a post about stress and anxiety - here is a bit of an explanation. My PhD was about wellbeing and stress/anxiety. If I release the content of my first post within my work environment then my employer can claim that the work was generated on company time - which it was not - and they can attempt to claim the intellectual property as belonging to the company - and they can hold it in perpetuity and profit directly from my research.

Now, if I can prove that I have written the content in my own time and using my own knowledge; plus that it has been published earlier and elsewhere - then they can have absolutely no claim on my intellectual property - they can effectively be told to sod off!

Now being a member of this forum has kept me sane and most of the time fairly functional. Especially while I was doing the PhD itself. So I owe a hell of a lot to my fellow members. Hopefully the content of my wellbeing research can assist some readers on this forum. Think of it as my paying you all back so you can pay it forward.

Oh and you can tell me to sod off with this stuff too. With that being all said - thank you one an all. Please feel free to post some constructive feedback too. Yes - please notice the word 'constructive' in the last sentence. If your feedback is less than constructive please refer to what Thumper was directed to recall about what his father said ... you can look that one up yourselves! It goes something like... 'if you can't say something nice ....'

Kind regards
Lionel

**BradC** · 14th June 2023, 10:28 PM

Thanks for posting this Lionel. While I can't see it, my wife can, and she's excellent at pushing me in the direction I need to go. With what has happened, and is happening in my life, I'm currently being "medicated" for stress related anxiety and she's my greatest "tell". My landrover is "a minor contributing factor", but I'll put up with that. The nutbags on this forum have been a haven of "sanity" when needed. So I join you in emphasizing that.

**Tins** · 14th June 2023, 10:59 PM

Like Brad, I thank you for these posts, Lionel.

In another of the interesting threads you have started you asked about advice that has moulded lives. In my clumsy reply I was quite possibly attempting to convey what Sun Tzu advised. Of course, knowing oneself is easier said than done, and in my case it was only through the furnace of grief and subsequent alcoholic anesthaesia combined with psychological counselling that I realised that there was a "me" to know.

I am a very different man now, and am reasonably proficient in identifying the onset of stress in myself. I am 69 years old, but hey, better late......

Lionel, I have a request. I have entered into a relationship with a woman a fair bit younger than me. She struggles with stress most days, often to the levels you describe in the para "The masquerade of stress and anxiety" .
She takes quite a bit of comfort from my relative calmness, and the insights I have gained from counselling. I would very much like to share with her your writings. Would that be ok?

**3toes** · 15th June 2023, 06:54 AM

This kind of thing can sneak up on you and come from perhaps unexpected directions. I noticed have not been as productive as should be. Was taking days to do tasks that were taking less than a day on a couple of months ago.

Sometimes just sitting there doing nothing when should be working. Unable to focus but knowing had to do work which was further ramping up stress. Have some work for another client that should have been finished Tuesday but will be Friday now. I set myself deadlines and do not like to miss them. Another stress point as the deadline should not have been a stretch to achieve. Realisation was that this was related to the impact this one client was having on me and the multiplier effect of the stress they were inducing which can so easily if not caught can move to and in my case was moving into depression

Have been able to let people and their attitudes flow past me as can see why they are like that and accommodate. This has worked well for me as have developed good relationships with some clients others cannot work with

Thinking about it was one new customer who has taken on work that they have not thought through and then what they are producing is sub standard. They do not care about the quality of their work and have no intention of fixing it. They are being paid and that is all that matters

I have become their quality control rather than the checker. What was contacted as 3 days work a month is taking 3 weeks of my time. They are taking advantage of my desire to do things properly. No recognition from them of their constant failures just plenty of abuse and attributing issues with delays when they are speaking to others to me. I do not need the repetitional damage that their work quality could do to me if it finally blows up

So the impact of this one customer whose corporate values do not match with mine were impacting on my bigger business picture and me personally. Took months for me to figure this out. Am still extracting myself from it. My stress levels through the roof 24 /7. Light can be seen at the end if the tunnel

**p38arover** · 15th June 2023, 08:15 AM

To be honest, I looked at your post, saw how long it was, and didn’t read past the first sentence.

Not really your fault, I simply can’t be bothered with things like that. Ditto with feel good programmes on TV, e.g., Australian Story, that my wife watches. I’m not an empathetic person.

**Lionelgee** · 15th June 2023, 08:27 AM

Hello Brad, Tins and 3Toes,

Thank you for all your replies and for the insight you have provided. Tins feel free to send me a PM. Just some caveats... 1) I am not a psychologist, psychiatrist or a counsellor. My background is in Wellbeing with a focus on Autism and disability - this is principally because I had to specialise in one area of Wellbeing to remain within the limits of a PhD thesis. I found the main common element that undermined wellbeing was stress and anxiety. I also found links in the language used by the research participants matched exactly the clinical symptoms of war veterans experiencing PTSD. When you look at the areas of the brain affected by PTSD and the physiological 'wiring's of the brain shown in MRIs in Autism this finding was not unsurprising.

The techniques that I have developed to unmask anxiety and stress should be incorporated into the practice of mental health professionals that you may be seeing. If you are not seeing any mental health professionals please make good access of your support networks - friends and family. Stress and anxiety may have closed some doors on things that have been hidden away by your mind - for your own benefit. Opening some doors and having some very heavy things jump on top of you can be very threatening - seek assistance and talk through this with people you trust. There is also the ability to take samples or small instalments of only opening the doors slightly so amounts you can cope with can be released. Do not just fling the doors open wide and stand immobile because the door could really be a floodgate. There are services like Life Line and Beyond Blue that are available 24 hours a day all year round. Do things at your own pace.

However, the process about removing the caustic nature of stress and anxiety from eroding your wellbeing does involve revisiting Sun Tzu....

The Art of War, By Sun Tzu Translated by Lionel Giles
17. Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory: (1) He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. (2) He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces. (3) He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks. (4) He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared. (5) He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.

18. Hence the saying: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
accessed 15th of June 2023 from, The Internet Classics Archive | The Art of War by Sun Tzu

In this case my techniques borrow heavily from Point 18 where the enemy is stress and anxiety. Where you need to know how it masquerades and Knowing yourself is to identify how the enemy has found itself inside you - then developing Strategies to counteract stress and anxiety. Plus, knowing the Consequences of what will happen if you do not enact counter measures. Somewhere within Sun Tzu is a lot of thoughts about having allies. It has been a while since I read the book. Having allies and circles of support to assist you through your campaign against stress and anxiety is thoroughly recommended.

Well - work is calling so I had better make tracks. Have a good day everyone!

Kind regards
Lionel

**Tombie** · 15th June 2023, 08:53 AM

I often think of this:

Stress and High pressure is a daily part of my employment.

**Tins** · 15th June 2023, 10:08 AM

Originally Posted by Lionelgee

Hello Brad, Tins and 3Toes,

Thank you for all your replies and for the insight you have provided. Tins feel free to send me a PM. Just some caveats... 1) I am not a psychologist, psychiatrist or a counsellor. l

Totally aware of that. I had a grief counsellor for 13 months, and have seen a psychologist for over 5 years now. I think that journey is near its end. I want to show my friend your post simply because it expresses what I tell her in different terms, and may give her different insights. She has a psychiatrist, but that role seems more interventionist than therapist in her case.

Once again I thank you for this thread.

**Lionelgee** · 15th June 2023, 11:57 AM

Originally Posted by p38arover

To be honest, I looked at your post, saw how long it was, and didn’t read past the first sentence.

Not really your fault, I simply can’t be bothered with things like that. Ditto with feel good programmes on TV, e.g., Australian Story, that my wife watches. I’m not an empathetic person.

Hello Ron,

No worries at all Ron. Thank you for taking the time to reply.

Kind regards
Lionel

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