298 - Eustress, or Are You a Good Stress or a Bad Stress?
Distress and eustress
By Merriam-Webster definition, stress is “a physical, chemical, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation.”
Specifically, however, there’s a distinction between negative and positive stress, first made by endocrinologist Hans Selye:
Distress is what we normally think of when we think of stress. Distress is/characterized by:
An inability to completely adapt to the stressor.
Decrease in focus and performance.
Showing maladaptive behaviors such as aggression, passivity, or withdrawal.
Can come from a variety of influences, like work/school, peers, family, relationships, life changes, and more.
Constant stress is linked to the top six causes of death, disease, accidents, cancer, liver ailments, lung ailments, and suicide.
Eustress, on the other hand, is stress that makes you healthier, and is characterized by:
Our ability to adapt is challenged but not overwhelmed.
Excitement.
Not too far out of reach but still slightly more than we can handle.
Only lasts in the short term.
Associated with hope and active engagement.
Has shown a positive correlation between life satisfaction and hope, as well as physical recovery and immunity.
Stress effects
Even distress can temporarily boost the immune system, and when the distress goes away in a reasonable amount, the body returns to normal. However, if the distress is chronic, the immune system burns out and ends up functioning at a lower level. Additionally, short-term stress can enhance memory, while long-term stress decreases it. Stress produces oxytocin as well as adrenaline, meaning our bodies want us to reach out and be social and ask for support during times of distress, and also helps our bodies heal from the damage inflicted on it by the distress. The key is a proper balance:
More eustress, less distress
While keeping in mind that there are some hereditary predispositions or societal expectations that make some of us more prone to stress, here are some things that may help lower distress and increase eustress:
Enjoying new things: If someone enjoys new things and believes they have importance in the world, then they’re more likely to experience flow.
Perception of control: Those with internal loci of control have an increased flow chance because they feel as though they can increase their skill level to match the challenge. Additionally, many studies have shown that employees with more decision-making power are more likely to be committed to their job and therefore experience more subsequent satisfaction. Predictable stress is also less harmful than unpredictable stress.
Support network: Social networks and real-life touch helps decrease the steroid-like hormones glucocorticoids, which can can cause bodily distress and health problems if prolonged in the body by stress.
Motivation, persistence, and perfectionism: While persistence is associated positively with flow and related to intrinsic motivation, perfectionism is associated negatively with flow, because a person downplays their skill levels and perceives the challenge to be too large to experience flow.
Helping others: In 2013, there was a study that showed that those caring for others during times of stress, even big stress like family crisis, experience no increase in mortality, as opposed to a 30% increase for those who did not care for others.
Mindset: Optimistic people tend to experience higher eustress, and the presence of a positive mindset increases the chance of eustress. Rethinking your stress responses and reframing them as positive instead of negative may help you change your mindset if it’s pessimistic.
Stress exercise
First, think of some stressful experiences you’ve had, whether in the last week, month, or year, as long as it’s fairly recent. Think of at least one where you were overwhelmed and let down or panicked and at least one where you felt the odds were against you but you managed to succeed.
Categorize each one as eustress or distress.
Write down for each the physical and mental symptoms you experienced during it.
Try to determine, from the distress experiences, any common patterns in what you feel or what causes them.
Compare to the list of eustress experiences and look for more patterns.
Now, for each stressor, you can do one of two things: figure out how to eliminate as many of them from your life as possible, or figure out how to turn them into eustress, by viewing them as a challenge rather than an opposition, for example.
Transcript
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Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about the concept of eustress, the idea that not all stress is bad, and in fact, stress is actually necessary for your quality of life. In this episode, we're exploring the difference between healthy and unhealthy stress, looking at some of the effects of stress, and then exploring what the research tells us about ways we can decrease our bad stress and increase our good stress so that we can lead more happy, healthy, and fulfilling lives.
Dedeker: Now, I have a question for you. Are you a good stress or are you a bad stress?
Emily: Depends on the day.
Jase: Oh, that's great.
Dedeker: If a house was dropped on your sister, are you going to feel good stress or bad stress?
Emily: Depends what I think of her.
Dedeker: Now, this is an interesting chemistry between me, Glinda, and Emily, the very Wednesday Addams version of Dorothy.
Emily: Hey, if I get to be Christina Ricci, sure?
Dedeker: Christina Ricci playing Judy Garland playing Dorothy.
Emily: Sure.
Jase: Yes, that's good. I like that.
Dedeker: This is Jason in the middle of this, he's all the munchkins.
Emily: Yes, that sounds about right.
Jase: Yes, I think so.
Emily: What are you Dedeker? Are you a good stressor or a bad stress?
Dedeker: Obviously, I'm a good stress because I'm sitting here in my big fluffy pink dress and waving a magic wand around so, you know I'm a good stress.
Emily: Well, that's good. This has been a year of stress in my opinion. Maybe not just for me and for the two of you, but for all of you listeners out there as well, there have been-
Dedeker: Oh, most likely.
Emily: -many stresses that this year has given us. What is stress? Let's look at that. Well, when we look up the definition of stress, it's either a technical term or a negative physiological or psychological response that causes harm. Yikes, and dictionary.com says that, "It is a specific response by the body to a stimulus as fear or pain that disturbs or interferes with the normal physiological equilibrium of an organism." Wow, not just like humans, anyone, anything, any being, any organism.
Jase: Right, a lot of research on stress is done on rats or things like that too or mice or whatever.
Emily: It's really terrible. Merriam-Webster said that, "It's a physical-chemical or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and maybe a factor in disease causation." Absolutely.
Dedeker: Yes, I think pretty clearly were used to stress being a concept that we are all plagued by constantly all the time too much. Also, it's a bad thing that we need to distress or detox or recharge. I think so much of our economy of mental and emotional wellbeing right now is based on how do we deal with stress? How do we get rid of it? How do we reduce it?
Jase: Right, and it's very demonized.
Dedeker: How do we escape?
Jase: It's like stress kills you. It's like stress causes you to have heart attacks or stress causes depression or all sorts of things. It's very much like stress, stress, stress.
Dedeker: Which is not wrong, definitely scientifically-based, but let's get a little bit more specific. In 1974, the Hungarian Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye made this distinction between negative stress and positive stress and that's what we're referring to by distress versus eustress, or are you a good witch? Are you a bad witch?
Jase:
Dedeker: Distress is what we might normally associate just with the term stress. As in we're unable to completely adapt to whatever it is that is stressing us. It decreases our focus and our performance. We can show maladaptive behaviors like aggression or passivity or withdrawal or any the classic fight-flight-freeze-fawn reactions.
Emily: Fawn?
Dedeker: Yes, fawning.
Emily: Have never read that one before?
Dedeker: Yes, I don't want to go on too much of a tangent there, but yes, fawning in reaction to a threat being like submission or subservience sometimes.
Emily: Oh, God. I have done that for sure.
Dedeker: Oh yes, we all have and of course, something that I think is fairly obvious to most of us is that stress or distress can come from many different directions, many different influences. Can come from work, school, your peers, your family, your relationships, major life changes, the world in general, et cetera, et cetera.
Emily: A pandemic, and as Dedeker said before constant distress has been clearly linked to the six leading causes of death, disease, accidents, cancer, liver disease, lung ailments, and suicide. Occupational stress is estimated to cause the US economy between $200 and $300 billion a year. We can be putting that money is somewhere else.
Jase: What if we put that money somewhere good instead of just stressing out our workforce more? That's distress. Then, by contrast, we have eustress, and eustress is spelled E-U-stress and it's from the, I always forget, which is which if it's Latin or Greek, but the prefix for good. Eustress by contrast.
Emily: Eu.
Dedeker: Like a euphonium or like a euphoria.
Emily: Yes, euphoria.
Jase: That's a good one. This is defined by our ability to adapt to this stress is challenged, but not completely overwhelmed like it is with distress and so our reaction to it can be to be excited by it. Basically, the goal is not too far out of reach, but is still slightly more than we can handle. It's not just like, oh yes, that's a little bit whatever. It's like, no, it is a little bit out of our reach, but not too far. It's short-term, you don't have chronic eustress. Each eustress instance is on its own. It's associated with hope and active engagement and it has been shown to have a positive correlation with life satisfaction and hope as well as physical recovery and immunity.
It's also associated with being in a flow state, which is something like bloggers love to write about.
Emily: Oh, what do you mean by a flow state like how an athlete is in the zone, that kind of thing?
Jase: Yes, it's when you're in the zone.
Dedeker: That's like data waves, is related to that?
Emily: I'm not a brain scientist.
Jase: It's like when you're a writer and you're just in the zone, it is just like coming out of you, you write the music speaking through you or you're an athlete and you're just so focused on what you're doing. Or you're playing a video game and you're just so engaged in it. It's like your mind is like water flowing through the game. It's like that type of experience is associated with eustress and is by some people seen as the ultimate manifestation of this kind of good stress, this eustress. That leads to life satisfaction and health improvements and stuff, which is pretty wild.
Emily: There are some good, or I guess, positive effects of stress. Let's talk about some of that. It's
Jase: What if we didn't even say they're positive. They're just effects, that too much can be bad, too little could be bad, it's all about balance.
Emily: Well, even distress, it can boost the immune system temporarily. I think about this when I have a cocktail at night, I'm like, I'm boosting my immune system temporarily because I'm putting stress on it. It's that kind of thing.
Dedeker: As in you're stressing it with alcohol or stressing it with the rest of your life.
Emily: I'm possibly both, but in that particular moment, I'm stressing it with the cocktail. Then I get a little immune boost, I don't know. I've heard that, I don't know if that's true, but I thought that I have heard things like that's why a glass of wine a day or something is fine-ish maybe.
Dedeker: I don't know if that sound, but we'll look at that.
Jase: This is not the talk we're going to be having
Emily: Whatever, it's fine. Listen, distress boosts the immune system temporarily and if the distress goes away in a reasonable amount of time, then the body will return back to normal, but if the stress is chronic, the immune system burns itself out and it ends up functioning at a way lower capacity.
Dedeker: Yes, which leads to all chronic health problems that we've talked about and other ailments.
Jase: It also lead to it staying elevated and having two boosted of an immune system is also bad. That's where we get into things like lupus where your immune system is out of control or arthritis or something like that. Not that stress necessarily causes those, but I just want to keep emphasizing that we want balance that we don't want just immune system off the rails all the time and we also don't want it suppressed, we want to find that balance.
Dedeker: Right, stress can also influence our memory. Our memory is actually enhanced by short-term stress, but long-term chronic stress will decrease. Again, stress doesn't make us, for instance, lose memories. Something like Alzheimer's might, it just makes the neural pathways in our brain atrophy, so that it's harder to retrieve those memories when we're having chronic stress. Also, even though we normally associate stress with adrenaline, it also causes us to produce oxytocin and we talked about this a little bit with Dr. Rhonda Freeman a few episodes ago.
In other words, our body chemistry by releasing oxytocin, when we're stressed, it's encouraging us to get social to connect to reach out to others for support. It's actually quite adaptive. Not only that, our stress response actually helps our bodies heal from the damage that we may receive from stress so that oxytocin comes in to not only encourage us to socialize and connect to others but also to heal whatever damage that stress may have been causing to us.
Jase: That impulse to reach out is important, but also in doing that, you'll help boost your oxytocin even further by establishing social connections with people and that will also help you to repair from damage the stress does. That's so cool. I was going to say, it's the last time I'm going to say this, but it's probably not.
Dedeker: Oh, it's definitely not.
Jase: It's all about balance. This whole episode is about balance and I think that the key with eustress and distress is that it's not that they're two totally different things. They're not caused by different things. The same thing could be either distress or eustress to you or to someone else and even for yourself, the same stressor could go from being distress to eustress or the other way. With all of this, it's more about this balance. Like we said, of it's pushing you a little bit outside your comfort zone, but not so far out that there's that panic give up helpless feeling.
This balance can be different for different people based on personality, life experiences, economic situation, health situation, so many different things. With all of this, I don't want us to get into this specific type of thing is eustress and this specific one is distress. Instead, this is about how you can take as many things as possible and turn them toward eustress from distress or how to decrease the amount of bad stress in your life and perhaps increase the amount of good stress, because if you don't have any stress, that's actually not good for you either that leads to apathy and boredom and impaired attention and confusion. That's not good either.
This also reminds me of something that came up, I think in our bonus episode with Dr. Rhonda Freeman last week, where she was talking about games to help you get back your prefrontal cortex functioning need to have a timed component or have a little bit of stress that keeps you focused. There need to be some consequences. It can't just be, oh, I'm playing with the Koi Pond app or I'm just waving my finger around and the water splashes. It's like there have to be some stakes to get you engaged. That reminded me a lot of this, that idea of you want there to be something that's just stressful enough to get you engaged, but not so stressful that it leads to panic.
Emily: All right, with all that, said, how do we have more good stress and less bad stress.
Dedeker: More good witches, fewer bad witches that's my platform.
Emily: There you go. There is something to keep in mind with all of those that we, as humans are not all starting on an even playing field. As Jase said based on socioeconomic status, just where you were born, how you grew up, who you are, all of those things may make your life easier or not as easy as someone else's. Certain types of stress may also have a larger impact on some people than others. Something to think about from that standpoint.
Dedeker: Stress is also influenced by hereditary predispositions, as well as expectations of the society and culture that you're growing up in. Again, you could already be at a certain advantage or a disadvantage toward experiencing eustress more easily or more naturally. All that to say is just, be gentle with yourself. We want y'all to be able to gently move in the direction of experiencing more types of good stress in your life rather than bad stress, but if you're experiencing bad stress, it doesn't mean that you are a failure by any means. Something that can help shift the balance towards more of this eustress and away from distress is enjoying new things.
It's as simple as experiencing new things and if you believe that experiencing novelty in some way has an importance in your world, you're more likely to experience flow. It is really funny, I read a study that came out right when the pandemic was happening, right when lockdown was just kicking into gear and the study was like, yes, it turns out that novel experiences are really fundamental to our happiness as human beings so enjoy sitting in your house for, however, many months from now.
Emily: Yes, no wonder, Jase. Perception of control is another thing that can help get that good stress in your life, as opposed to maybe the bad stress. People with an internal locus of control, they have an increased chance of flow or being in the zone as we talked about because they believe that they can increase their skill level to match the challenge. That's really interesting. Again, that's perception of oneself and just, hey, I feel like I can overcome this challenge, however big or small it is. It's an interesting thing to think about in terms of one's stress responses.
Jase: Yes, actually, when Dedeker was talking about the novelty being so important and thinking about being stuck at home, that I know I've seen online, at least that a lot of people early on in lockdown picked up new hobbies or things like that. Actually learning a new hobby is specifically something that's mentioned in a lot of the research and the writings about eustress. That that is an example of not just doing a hobby, but learning a new one because there's this kind of like, I don't know how to build ships in bottles or whatever it is. I don't know how to do that, but if I'm excited enough by that challenge, then I can get in the zone and learn it.
Emily: Yes, I started cooking a ton more during this time and new dishes that were a little bit more challenging that required more prep and forethought and stuff and my partner was like, "Why are you cooking so much?" I said, "Because it's helping me cope, it's helping me get my stressors out and do a fun, new challenging thing."
Dedeker: She's looking at a gift horse in the mouth, come on now.
Emily: I know seriously. Thank you. Many studies show, especially in work settings that the more decision-making power an employee has the greater their commitment to their role will be, and this translates into increased levels of performance and job satisfaction. That makes sense.
Jase: I think this one's so cool. We talked about the internal locus of control versus external. If you believe you have some power over your situation, if you believe that you have the power to overcome something, you're more likely to experience eustress and flow, but that if you think about a workplace where there's somewhere it's just like, "Do what I tell you and don't think about it," versus, "Okay, here's the thing, you can make some decisions about how to go about that." That that's actually-- I think ironically if we think about the industrial revolution and treating people like machines, that that actually makes them less focused, less healthy.
That's what leads to that costing the US economy $200 to $300 billion a year in the sick time and things like that, that come from the extra stress that we put on people. I think that was just so cool.
Emily: Well, totally when I think of the micromanagers out there that I've had in jobs and how you just don't feel like you have any kind of autonomy over what you're doing in any way, versus those leaders who really let you figure things out on your own and come up with projects or whatever it is on your own and how much better you feel from that. I think that that has something to do with this as well. Also finally, predictable stress. This is really interesting to me. Even if it's very serious, predictable stress is less harmful than unpredictable stress.
Again, if something like catastrophic happens but you knew that it was coming versus something out of the blue happening, then it's going to be less harmful than predictable stressor versus the unpredictable out of the blue one.
Jase: Let me tell you about this wild study where some of this data comes from this is looking at the medical records of people in Europe during bombings in World War II. What they found is that the incidents of ulcers caused by stress were actually lower in urban populations where the bombings were more regular compared to the suburban ones where the bombings were just occasional. They were more surprising and random. Actually, they extrapolated that to mean that the actual experienced stress was more physically harmful to the people where it was unpredictable.
Even though you'd look at that from the outside and go, "Getting bombed all the time as much worse than getting bombed sometimes." That's what we mean by even a very serious stressor. That's not to say both groups were probably experiencing very high levels of distress. It makes me think of something like if you know that at the end of the month is when your job just gets super busy and it's going to be really stressful or maybe you're a postal worker and you know that Christmas time is going to be the busiest time of the year.
Whatever it is, that's less stressful than something else where you have maybe a very unpredictable boss who just lashes out at you or assigns you lots of extra things at certain times or something that feels more out of control.
Dedeker: Interesting. This, this locus of control thing also reminds me of self-efficacy as well but we can have a sense of, "Oh gosh, well, I don't know how to do this task or I don't know how I'm going to tackle this task, but I think I can figure it out." Having that sense versus if it's like, "I have no idea. There's no way I can figure this out." Which, again, may be appropriate in certain situations but yes, it's like that sense of self-efficacy can be something that really carries you through a very stressful situation.
Jase: Next one, here is your support network. We've already talked about this one a fair amount already but basically, that social support and especially touch will help to increase your oxytocin, which helps to combat the glucocorticoids which are these steroid-like hormones that your body produces during stress. That basically when we think of stress, we tend to think of adrenaline or epinephrine which happens right away. That's within seconds of feeling stress. You're feeling that high. These glucocorticoids are the ones that then take over in the longer term.
These are the ones that let you run for hours to run away from that saber-toothed tiger as opposed to the one that makes you react really quickly right in the moment.
Emily: Your body like literally gives you steroids if you need to run away from a tiger?
Jase: gives you steroids, yes.
Emily: Wow. I guess that generally doesn't happen anymore.
Jase: It does, actually.
Dedeker: Well, I think we've seen the stories, I feel like the story that most often gets cited is the mom who purely on adrenaline is able to lift up a vehicle that her child is trapped under because it's that very extreme stress response but ultimately a good thing.
Jase: This actually tends, I'd say in modern-day to mostly cause us harm because those steroids being in are what do damage especially to organs like our heart which is why stress is very much linked with heart disease. That the oxytocin helps repair that as well as clear out those glucocorticoids. That's why that social support and touch-- Don't isolate yourself during these stressful times is really important.
Emily: That's tough right now, again, for some people, for sure.
Jase: Before we move on to our next few categories of how you can have more eustress in your life as well as a little exercise that you can do along with us at home, we're going to take a quick break to talk about how you can keep this show coming for free and spread the good news of Multiamory.
Dedeker: We're back. We're going to keep talking about the things that will shift you closer to eustress and further away from distress. We're going to talk about motivation, persistence, and perfectionism which is-
Emily: Your favorite.
Dedeker: -a little bit up my alley in kind of a bad witch sort of way. If you know what I mean.
Emily: I appreciate it how you were like, "Jase, can you throw yourself under the bus here. Not me under the bus. I don't want to throw myself under the bus perfectionism.
Dedeker: I was asking Jase to tackle this question so that Jase could be the one throwing me under the bus instead of me having to throw myself under the bus. Here we are. Persistence, which I think is related a little bit to the stuff we were talking about on self-efficacy or perception of control but persistence is positively related to being able to get into flow and also closely related to having intrinsic motivation for getting through a stressful situation or a stressful assignment. However, perfectionism is negatively related to flow. Basically, a perfectionist will downplay their own skills.
They will make the gap between what they feel like they can actually do on this task versus what the task requires a little too big ironically, and they'll perceive that the challenge to be too large to actually experience flow. As in, they'll perceive that performance gap to be a distressing thing rather than a eustress producing thing. However, on the opposite end of perfectionism, if you're able to let go of perfectionist tendencies, there's an increased chance that you'll be able to get into flow on a task. Is this why I avoid writing all the time even though I feel like I am maybe possibly good at it.
Emily: You're very good at it.
Dedeker: All I do is I populate my Google Keep notes with writing prompts and ideas of stuff I would like to write about and then I do not write.
Jase: It could be related to it. That for you, with the perfectionism, might be making you feel like the gap between what you want to do and what you think you can do is too great or where you're at now versus where you want to be is too great. I don't know.
Dedeker: The thing is that I find that once I start writing and I do get into that flow, then it's like, "Great." Then I'm like, "I love this."
Jase: I can totally relate to that. I think that one comes up.
Emily: I'm terrible at practicing. I hear you.
Jase: There's so many things for me, like editing our shows, like editing Drunk Bible Study. Or like making music for me is something that it's so hard to get myself to do it but once I do it, it actually is pretty easy to get into that flow where I'm just in the zone. It is hard to get myself to do it in the first place sometimes. Maybe that causes me distress.
Emily: There you go. Something to think about for all others.
Dedeker: Connecting the dots.
Emily: Let's talk about helping others. This is a good thing. Get outside of yourself, help someone out. A 2013 study about stress and death showed that even with large stressors like financial difficulty or family crises people who spent time caring for others saw no increase in mortality compared to a 30% increase for people who didn't. If you are caring for someone in some capacity, then again, like I said, it can get you outside of yourself and help you to maybe not be so stressed out or to take that stress and put it somewhere else unto helping
Dedeker: Not just dump it all to your partner
Emily: -helping someone else, it's very important.
Dedeker: I have heard this piece of wisdom of when you're feeling stressed out or confused or sometimes even awkward, that it's like put your focus on somebody else, and getting to know somebody else and getting to care for somebody else and figuring out what somebody else needs. It's like this little brain hack that not only is good because it's helping other people but also just helps you to shift that felt sense.
Jase: This is actually very much related to our last point of this section which is about your mindset and essentially that with all of this, I think dear listener you get that here that a lot of this is about how you approach these things. Studies have shown that optimistic people or people with high self-esteem are more likely to have eustress experiences and that that positive mindset increases the chances of a more positive reaction to a stressor as opposed to a negative one. I'd recommend going back and you could check out our episode on self-esteem or other ones that we've done on those sorts of topics about that.
I think that's not really surprising that that does help with all of this more resilience or self-efficacy or self-esteem. This is the one that I thought was very interesting. A similar study to the one that Emily mentioned where, as we know, stress causes negative health effects. Specifically, a lot of the studies tend to measure it by how many people in the study group die within five years after the study was done or a certain amount of time.
Emily: Goodness!
Dedeker: Gosh! Jeez! Brutal.
Jase: It's maybe a grim field of research. Stress has been very demonized. Like in that one, Emily was talking about, people who had large stressors like financial difficulty or family crisis, were 30% more likely to be dead within five years than the people who weren't unless they cared for others. In which case, they didn't have that negative effect at all, which is pretty wild. There's another study that found a very similar thing. This one was in 2012, it was a study of 30,000 people that asked them if they were under a lot of stress right now or not, during the last year, I think is what it was, "Would you consider yourself under a lot of stress?"
Then the second question was, "Do you believe that stress is inherently healthy or unhealthy?" This study found that people who found the negative effects of stress were the people who identified as having it and also who believed it was unhealthy, as opposed to the people who believed that stress could be good for you didn't experience the same increase in mortality over the next few years. Which I think is maybe oversimplifying it a little bit butI do think of it, it indicates that correlation between your approach to stress. Maybe that's because those people felt better equipped to handle the stress in their lives.
There's a lot of other questions. I do think it really points to there being a strong impacts to how you handle your stress, and not just what stress is around me happening to me, but also how you approach it, how you think about it.
Dedeker: That makes a lot of sense. I would also like to shift the emphasis away from I don't want anyone to feel we're implying that it comes down to this individual moral sense of, do you personally as an individual think your stress is healthy or unhealthy. That's going to be the thing that either damns you or blesses you for the rest of your life because I do think that on a macro cultural level, and micro cultural level, we can be really influenced by these things.
I do think that there's a lot of cultures that are non-Western non-American cultures, where the response to stress is maybe a little bit more feeling like stress is going to be a predictable part of life and an understandable part of life and it's going to happen versus I do think that American and to a certain extent, other Western cultures have received more of this baggage of, you need to be working all the time. That's how you are good. You shouldn't really be stressed about that and it shouldn't really be bad, and your life should be comfortable.
If you're doing things right, you'll be built working all the time and also not stressed about it. Think about it. Everyone tells you growing up, if you find your dream job, you're never going to work a day in your life, which is not true. If you do have your dream job, it's still going to be stressful. I do think that, culturally, this is so influencing that I think we've been really fed, essentially, a message of you should be doing things that are going to be inviting a lot of daily stress into your life, but you're not allowed to really complain about it. Anyway, this is me getting on a soapbox and starting to do a TED talk so I'm just going to stop.
Emily: There are stresses that we as three white people don't have to deal with that people of color do just on a daily basis living in America. That's something to think about as well that we don't have to deal with that. That's just an added stress on other people's lives that we don't even think of potentially, that we don't have to deal with on a daily basis. There's a lot to unpack here, when it comes to what stressors we each have going on in our lives.
Jase: I think that brings us back to the key thing that we started this whole section of the episode with, which is it's not realistic to say you're never going to feel distress. That's just not going to happen, that just will not happen. There's even some research that makes the argument that we need a little bit of distress in our lives to. It's not realistic, and also not even desired to get rid of that entirely. This is really about for each individual, rather than comparing yourself to other people or some gold standard that you've been taught about how much stress you should or shouldn't feel and how much work you should or shouldn't do.
Of instead looking at, "What in my life am I feeling distress about that maybe I can turn into feeling eustress instead or what are some areas of my life where I could be taking actions to decrease the amount of distress causing things in my life or what are some ways that maybe I could be leaning into some experience I avoided because I thought oh, that's a stressful experience, I should avoid it, that's what I've been told to do." Instead go, "Actually, maybe that one's the good kind of stress and if I had more of that in my life, that actually might help these other things not feel so bad."
That's all it's about. It's just wherever you're at, is there any little thing that you can do to shift yourself a little bit away from the bad stress and toward the good stress? In that spirit, I have an exercise. Are you ready?
Emily: Of course.
Jase: You want to do this?
Dedeker: Do we get to dress up like good and/or bad witches?
Jase: If you want to add that to it, totally.
Emily: Halloween happened a little while ago.
Jase: Halloween wasn't too long ago. You could drag your Glinda the Good Witch costume out of there.
Dedeker: Finally, I can dust it off.
Emily: I can't imagine you in a big pink outfit, Dedeker considering currently you're wearing a black bat outfit.
Dedeker: Since the lockdown, I've definitely shifted much more into this dark business witchy kind of direction. Formal witch direction is what I found myself slipping into which is surprising. All stories of surprising things have come out of this year.
Jase: Dedeker, the office witch.
Dedeker: Your friendly office witch.
Emily: Love it.
Jase: Here's the exercise. In doing this at home, ideally, you'll try to come up with more things, but I would love for you, Emily and Dedeker to just try to come up with one of each. Let me explain what this is here. First of all, think of, or ideally, write down some stress experiences that you've had in the last few days or weeks or months, sometime relatively recently. Try to think of at least one experience that is more of a distress where you felt overwhelmed or panicked or just out of control or let down or something like that. Then try to think of at least one where the odds seemed stacked against you, or you were in over your head, but you did succeed.
This could be something big, or it could be something very small. That distress and eustress happen both in big and small scales. This could be anything from financial troubles to work stress or relationship stress. It even could be something just like, I did a really challenging hike, or I beat my personal best lifting weights, or I started dating someone new, or I moved or even watched a scary movie or I played a horror game in VR. That's personally something that was distressing to me. I don't think I could do it. Write whatever it is, big or small. Do you each have one, one of each?
Emily: Yes.
Dedeker: Yes.
Jase: Can you share?
Emily: One of the big that you said financial troubles, and I had a lot of debt at the beginning of this year. When I got laid off, I was just like, "Jeez, I'm not going to be able to pay off this debt and it's going to be yet another year where I haven't paid off this debt." In reality, I was able to because I'm at home all the time, and I'm not traveling. I'm not doing anything else, I was actually able to pay off way more than I ever expected this year. It's been one of the really good things for this year. That initially-
Jase: That's like a eustress example.
Emily: -was a huge-- It was a huge distress in my life for years. Potentially by the end of the year, I'll be debt-free, which I haven't been since moving to Los Angeles.
Jase: That's awesome.
Emily: That's cool. The other one that I was going to say is that I got called on Sunday because I did not look at my schedule and I was supposed to be at work when I wasn't there and that was really bad. When I got to work, I'm always second on Sundays. For whatever reason, they scheduled me first, didn't look at the schedule, because it never changes. They called me and they're like, "Yes, it's 10:00 and you're not here." What? I went 80 down the four or five.
Jase: Those are great examples. Please be safe on the road. Dedeker, what about you?
Emily: Don't do that.
Dedeker: Do you want the good witch first or the bad witch first?
Jase: Let's go the same as Emily, good witch then bad witch.
Dedeker: In the last few months, this is a little bit of a joint a shared good witch, as it were, we wrote a book proposal the three of us for Multiamory. I did my part in that. That's another experience where I think writing anything for me, honestly is a little bit stressful, and writing out the book proposal will stressful. Figuring out how the three of us co-write together was stressful. Working through six different versions of this book proposal was stressful, but we did it and I did it. My part that I was writing of, I did it, and completed it and got it all signed off on.
That felt really good at the end.
Emily: Someone pick it up, please, if you listen to this.
Dedeker: If you happen to run a super successful publishing company and you're into this, then let us know.
Emily: We have a following.
Dedeker: My bad stress, my bad witch was, gosh, a couple of months ago when I was visiting my mom and we ended up needing to take the dog to the emergency vet because of a situation, we were there for eight hours. It didn't help that my mom, I think is generally a very distressed person most of the time. I fed off of that and we got through it. It was funny on the other side of it, but it was a really rough time the whole time dealing with the situation.
Jase: This is perfect. That's step one is to make this list and if you're doing this at home, or if you too want to do this later, come up with more. Come up with as many as you can and try to have some in each category.
Emily: There are many.
Jase: Just write them down. Step two is to then categorize them as eustress or distress. If you want, write them in two different columns, like, these are the eustress ones, these are the distress ones. Now for each one, write down or think about the physical and mental symptoms that you felt during that time. For example, my heart was pounding. I was super angry, or I felt energized, or I wanted to collapse and give up, or I got super focused, or I felt powerless, I felt alone, or I felt aroused, or something like that. Whatever it is, or I felt tingly or whatever it is.
What were the physical and mental things that came along with each of those experiences? Then write those down, ideally next to them. For you two, we can just talk about it, but if you're doing it at home, so then write down some notes. Write about, I felt dizzy, or I felt energized, or whatever it is. You got that?
Emily: Yes.
Jase: Now look at your list of distressing situations. Can you identify any common patterns either in what causes them? You two only came up with one example of each, so you're not going to see as much of a pattern here, but you might be able to think about this is, do you see any common patterns in either what causes them or what you experienced? For example, it could be, I noticed that the ones in my distress column are all caused something surprising. Like maybe Emily's example of, I got a call from work saying I was not at work when I should be, that it caught me by surprise.
Or maybe it's, I noticed that all of the bad feeling ones, I feel angry or all of the bad feeling ones, I just want to collapse and go back to bed, whatever it is, identify patterns. Anything come to mind for either of you in the distress category for that?
Emily: Yes.
Dedeker: Yes. Go ahead Em.
Emily: Yes, they're like feeling like something happens that I have little to no control over, or it's surprising. Although I will say, I don't know, those really intense situations, I do feel like I handle them fairly well in the moment. I can just calm down. At the beginning of this year, when I was coming back from China, I left my passport in the taxi.
Jase: Right. I remember that story, Gosh.
Emily: It was intense because I had to make a flight. I couldn't get back otherwise and Disney was paying for it and all of this stuff. I felt like I got in the zone because I had to problem-solve in a different country with a bunch of different-- with a different language that I couldn't speak. I don't know. I think that that is a pattern. Even with the thing a couple days ago not going to work on time, I was just like, "Well, I can do it. I have to go and just get ready in seven minutes and freaking get out the door and speed. That's what I have to do."
Whereas the other one at the beginning of this year, when I felt like I was not going to be able to pay off my debt, that felt like I was really powerless. I was just going to have to keep spending money on my credit card because I'm broke all the time or whatever, which was interesting. The empowerment comes from those intense, stressful situations for me at times. Whereas the long-term ones where I'm just like, "Well, this is how my life is and I just have to deal with that."
Jase: Just more powerless maybe.
Emily: That's interesting.
Jase: What about for you, Dedeker, do you notice anything?
Dedeker: With the distressing ones, definitely, when I'm thinking about other very clearly distressed bad witch stress situations in my life, it feels like the things in common are a sense of collapse and wanting to give up or much more body tension than when I think about more positive stress situations. Also feelings of powerlessness. Ironically, when I think about that situation with my mom in the emergency vet and things like that, it felt like it was two sides of the same coin.
On the one hand, I felt like what really increased the stress in that situation was like, I'm the only one holding this all together. I need to hold my mom together, I need to hold the dog together. I need to hold my grandfather, who's the actual owner of the dog together. It was this weird combination of, oh my God, I'm extra stressed because I need to hold all these people together, but then at the same time, I do feel like that caretaking thing kicked in of, well, I have to take care of other people. I don't have a choice to be the one who collapses in this.
That also got me through it until I could get to the end of the evening and then just cry myself to sleep.
Jase: Gosh. Now, we're going to do the same thing, but with our eustress column. I feel like you two have already gotten into that territory a little bit, but what do those experiences have in common, either in what caused them or in how I felt with them? You've talked about it a little bit already, but it sounds like feeling like there's something you can do about it.
Emily: Having that pressure on me to problem-solve in the moment is something that I think I can handle well. I don't know. It makes me very focused and that's something that I feel like I'm good at. Whereas other people do just fall apart in really intense situations, but I'm able to veer into them. That can turn, in my opinion, really stressful situations into more of a eustress situation for me.
Jase: It's interesting you bring that up because something that we're going to talk about a little bit more in the bonus has to do with the time urgency of things. We'll get into that a little bit in the bonus.
Emily: It tends to be good for me, which is not-- I wish that I was not a procrastinator, but sometimes I am and it actually is helpful to me to focus me.
Jase: That's interesting that you pointed out that the more distressing things earlier tended to be longer term that you're just like, "Well, this is my life." As opposed to a more acute stressor, you're more likely to be able to get into eustress of like, "Okay, I'm going to focus, I'm going to get this figured out." That's a good pattern to notice. What about you, Dedeker?
Dedeker: Well, when I think about the more positive situations or positive stress situations, what I find in common are things like feeling energized, but also sometimes combining that with also a sense of wanting to procrastinate, and wanting to push things off. Feeling, I don't know, for me, it feels like this rollercoaster sensation. That's what I get out of it. Honestly, I have a mixed relationship with rollercoasters in general, like a love-hate relationship. That makes sense where it is this combination of like, oh gosh, this is really scary. I can feel my heart pounding and I can feel my adrenaline kicking in, but it's also going to be really exciting and fun.
I know when I get to the other side of it, I'm going to feel pumped or alive or excited or stuff like that. I feel like for me, when I think about what's in common with all these kinds of more eusressy situations is like that rollercoastery feeling.
Jase: It sounds like also having the end in sight, at the same time helps you to weather the roller coaster.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely.
Jase: Very cool. Okay. Last part of this is then just looking at that. I think this is something that you could keep doing ongoing, you could check in with yourself every week or a month, or when you do your journal at night or whatever it is, and essentially to look at those patterns that you've identified between the two. Then to say, okay, for all of these things, for all the stressors, I essentially have two options. Either, I find a way to eliminate as many of the bad stressors as I can. Just like, okay, maybe one of my distressing things is this particular relationship or in this particular area of my life.
Maybe that's something that I need to change. Whether that's going to counseling or therapy for that, or that's ending that relationship or changing it somehow or something. Just as an example. Option one is, find a way to remove as many of the distressing things as you can, you won't be able to do all of them, but whatever you can. Then your other option is to see if there's any way that you could look at those patterns and turn that thing from distress into eustress. Could be, is there a way that I could maybe break this longer-term thing into shorter-term things where the end is more insight?
Or I feel like, okay, I'm like, I have to get this done by one hour from now, so I'm going to do it because I know that that engages me in that way. Or maybe it's that I need to have something on the line. Like I need to tell someone else I'm going to have this thing done by next month. Don't you even worry, I got this. Then you have some like pride on the line if you don't do it. Or perhaps it's lowering the stakes a little bit or lowering the goal a little bit to make it feel just attainable enough to get you into that eustress mode. There's lots of different ways.
I think that the whole point here is to just be creative and look at those patterns for yourself to try to see, okay, what makes me more likely to end up over here? Is there any way I can add a little bit of those things to these distressing ones?
Emily: Cool.
Jase: Well, thank you two for joining me in this exercise.
Dedeker: Let me go get out of my Glinda, the Good Witch costume. Just give me a second here.