The Tribune

By Diane Phillips

Six seconds. That’s all it takes for stress to leap from being an emotional response to something you feel you cannot manage or control to becoming an enemy of your body. Six seconds – less time than it took you to read that sentence. In those fleeting seconds, the stress factor has silently taken over your cells, subsumed you in ways that, if you stopped to think about it, would only stress you more. It has evolved from a build-up of tension or a feeling of being overcome, overwhelmed, over-anythinged except what you want to be to being a slow, creeping, marauding predator and you are its innocent prey.

Mind you, not all stress is bad. There are volumes of material about how good stress can prompt you to act quickly, react to a trigger, make a flight-or-fight decision, move at a speed you did not know you could, utter words of wisdom you did not know you possessed.

But long-term, chronic stress is a killer. Those same powerful fight-or-flight reactions push you into overdrive, clenched fists at the ready, teeth at the ready to grind. Chronic stress dresses you in a hard shell, as if you were wrapped in metal, your body stiffened and ready for a fight, your mind on high alert.

With chronic stress, instead of an occasional dose of hormones like cortisol, you are producing constant shots of it, pumping and interfering with the functioning of your hippocampus, the area of your brain where memories are stored and retrieved. And you need those memories. You use them without realizing their importance every time you make a decision. Stress impacts not just the gray matter we think is important but the white matter that fills up the rest of the space.

Friend or foe

Friend or foe, stress is part of our lives. We live in a world where we are forced to make decisions every minute. Will we get it right or wrong? Will we meet our financial obligations that never seem to be satisfied or our children’s demands and needs that deserve our attention? Will we complete our work on time, keep up the housework, make a healthy or tasty dinner? The smallest mistake while we are preparing, five minutes too long in the oven on too high a heat, and the chicken is overcooked and dry. It is so hard to get it right all the time, yet we never stop worrying that we are getting it wrong.

It’s no wonder we are stressed. No wonder our bodies are telling us in a hundred ways to stop it. No wonder our bodies react with all the symptoms they can throw at us – headaches, high blood pressure, depression, systemic inflammation, irritable bowel syndrome, shortness of breath or rapid breathing. No wonder our central nervous and endocrinal systems punish us. We’ve been punishing them for too long, shoving all this stress at our bodies, our cells, our physical being when we assumed all along that it was a mental thing, something we were doing to our head and minds.

Or at least I never really stopped to think about what stress was doing to the part of me that doesn’t show up in a mirror, the inside, until I read the six second comment in a book by Mel Robbins. The book is called The Let Them Theory and it was a gift from my older daughter who was trying very hard to tell me something, bless her heart.

If you don’t know who Mel Robbins is, you might want to meet her. She’s pretty amazing and very accessible. Her podcasts in 194 countries educate, inform and tickle your laugh button all at once. She’s a best-selling author, an in-high-demand speaker and yet a woman in many ways who every woman can identify with, the Erma Bombeck of relatable people for the 21st Century. Brilliant, down-to-earth, imperfect, a woman who threatened to bar her mother from her wedding because she did not approve of her choice of husband. They’ve been married for decades now and Mom is his greatest fan.

She’s a mother who confesses to juggling between spoiling her children because it was easier than reasoning with them and screaming at them (before she started listening to her own advice). In other words, she’s just like us, putting the part about a huge success story aside for a moment. Flawed and stressed. But unlike most of us, she decided to learn about it and how to handle it without using the same old prescription that everyone else says in endless best-selling epochs of guidebooks on how to beat stress. From massage to meditation, essential oils to cool cloths and hot yoga, experts tells us a hundred ways we can beat stress. Every time I hear or read those words, I revolt and my stress level increases. What do you mean, beat stress? Find a broom and slap stress around until it whimpers and wanes, and you win. It fades. You move on.

Stress changes your cells

Only you don’t move on. Stress is not something that happens and goes away. It clings. It changes your cells, making them age faster. It adds to the wrinkles (the really bad news for us women over 40 already stressing about how many wrinkles we saw staring back at us as we brushed our teeth this morning and glanced at the glass thing above the sink that we once thought was a good idea to place there).

It’s hard to say how much of our stress is related to work as opposed to what happens in those hours when we are not on the job. But studies have shown that more than half of all workers worldwide are looking for another job or actively watching for job openings and opportunities. That gives us some sort of idea. Nor do we know how much our dash to be the best and get to the front of the line even in a job we enjoy does to our stress level. The smile on our face in meetings can belie the turmoil in our minds. We just never think about how something that feels so mental manages to work its way into our cells, causing them to age prematurely.

Given that Robbins traipses across the globe never failing to win over a crowd while maintaining a solid marriage, motherhood, community engagement, answering to a demanding business and business partner and writes books and podcasts in the 25th hour of every day, she knows a thing or two about stress.

Actually, she probably knows as much about stress as anyone ever needs to know so when she says six seconds from mind to changes in the cellular structure of your body, I sit up and listen. I am not trying to beat stress with a broom. I am going to follow her advice and let it roll off my shoulders little by little by letting go, little by little by little by little. If my husband, who is semi-retired, wants to stay in bed for an extra hour when I leave for work, I will be okay with that. I am only responsible for where I am going in that hour, not what he is doing. If someone neglects to invite me to an event or the launch of a new product, I will not take it personally. They have a life and I probably would not have gone anyway. I do not need to worry about everything around me, just what I can manage at that time and the time I wish to account for.

This is not a matter of ducking responsibility, but accepting responsibility for yourself instead of yourself and the world around you. You can’t tell a child to calm down and expect that they will because you said so. But you can stoop down to their level and explain carefully to them why they cannot have that Lego set they wanted you to buy before they threw a tantrum and threw themselves on the floor of the store and you almost bought the Lego to save the embarrassment of a spoiled child acting out. Let them scream. Let you do what you need to do, which is to handle the situation like the adult and parent you are and if they fail to listen to your reasoning about why they cannot have the Lego set, so be it. You have tried. Chances are, they will calm down without your having to use those words and a situation that could have been immensely stressful, aging those cells once again, is ameliorated.

You cannot beat the stress out of life. Stressors will always be there. But you can decide to shed it by “letting them”. Thank you, Mel Robbins. I’ll give it a try.