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Stress - just thinking about this word causes much - well, stress. Stress is all around us. We feel it, both emotionally and physically. It causes much pain and anguish. We hear about it all the time, in the news, the health reports and from our doctors.

"Stress is bad for your health."
"Lower your stress and you will be healthy."
"Stress kills."

Makes sense. But what exactly is stress? Stress is not something we can hear, taste or smell. In fact, we often don't feel stress until it has turned into a serious physical ailment. There's so much talk about "stress", yet it is so hard to identify, to grasp, to understand. How helpful are people who tell us to lower our stress levels when they can't even explain what stress is?

"Lower my stress levels? Sure, if I only know what stress is!"

In this 3 part series, I will offer you my viewpoint of what stress is, where it comes from and how you can use this understanding to better manage the stress in your life. My goal is to give you a new and different perspective of stress. After reading these articles, I hope you will will look at stress in a totally new way.

New definition of stress

Think of your body as a system. As a system, anything your body takes in is input and anything it produces is output. Stress is simply the input in this system of inputs and outputs. Another way to to say this is that stress is load. Load is demand. Therefore:

Anything that is input or demanded into a system causes stress onto the system. For example, if I place a rock on a table I am adding load/demand/stress/input on the system(table). The table in turn supports this demand by outputting the same amount of force in opposition to this load. The force that this table produces can be thought of as output or work. This is simple physics, Newtons third law of motion states: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

For our purposes:

Now think about this, what if I were to place a rock that is too heavy for the table to hold up? Well, the table would collapse right? That's because the amount of work (output) that the table can produce is insufficient to handle the amount of stress (input) that is demanded of it. From this, we can derive that the amount of stress a system can handle is dependent on its ability to handle load. The more load it can handle or the higher it's stress capacity, the better the system is able to handle a given amount of load (input). Stress capacity can be thought of as the total amount of output that a system can produce.

I warned you, I was going to give you a new perspective on stress.

Stress and your body

Lets take a closer look at the relationship between stress and your body. Like I said above, if you were to think of your body as a system of inputs and outputs, then what is inputted into your body is stress or load and what you output from your body is work or production. The law of conservation of energy states: energy can not be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.

If the input is greater than the output, then your body is out of balance and like the table that cannot support the heavy weight, it will eventually collapse. Make sense? You can also think of it this way - if the output of your body is greater than its stress capacity, your body will also eventually collapse. Meaning, the ability of your body to handle stress (stress capacity) is insufficient to meet the demand (stress) that your body is taking in.

What about the reverse? What if the input was far less than the system's stress capacity? See if you can work this out for yourself.

Now, if you look at this closely, it may become apparent to you that one cannot have output without first having input. All output is first taken in as input. What are the consequences of this? Well, it would be safe to say that stress is a necessary component in our lives. In fact, it is required for us to function, to produce and to work. Therefore:

If you get anything out of this article, please just remember the above. It is so important, I will repeat it again: It is not stress that is causing the "health problems" in our lives, rather it is our ability to convert the stress into healthy output that is important!

You see, we can look at our body as essentially an energy convertor. It is transforming one form of energy (input) into another form of energy (output). It is converting stress into work! Now, for all you physics buffs out there, yes I know that not all energy can be transformed into "usable" meaning "productive" work. Some of this energy is "lost" "unusable" in the form of what we call entropy. Think of it as "wasted" energy. The ability of our body to have as little "wasted" energy as possible, is what I call "efficiency."

But I am digressing a bit from the focus of this article. More on efficiency later...I know, this is may be a lot of stuff to handle in one reading and I thank you for bearing with me - but trust me, it gets even - tougher.

Two fundamental ways to decrease stress

With this sytem of input and output in mind, one can see that there are only two fundamental ways to decrease stress.

The first way most likely makes sense to you. Lower your stress by lowering your input. Simple. The second way may need a bit of clarification. Essentially, what happens here is that we are increasing our body's output ability (work). The way this decreases stress, is that it makes the same amount of stress "appear" easier to handle. Let's take a closer look at this. Let's say we have the same amount of stress (X). Now, we place this stress into two systems. One system (A) has a higher load capacity than another system (B). Which one of the two systems A or B will be better able to handle the stress (X)?

If you said system A, then good for you! You see, from the system's point of view, the amount of given stress (X), "appeared" LESS because the system has a high stress capacity. It is this relationship between stress and stress capacity that is important here, or the ratio of stress:stress capacity. Can you see this?

The overall picture

Think about all the self-help advice you've been given throughout your life. What are they trying to accomplish? How are they helping you? Does it make sense to you if I say that ALL the techniques, advice and help is essentially about how to either lower your stress (input) or increase your ability to handle stress (output)? It is my feeling that self-help advice will ALWAYS fall into either one of the two fundamental ways of decreasing stress. You will either learn how to lower your input, or you will learn how to increase your stress capacity. Meaning, you will either learn how to lower the stress coming in to your life or you will learn how to be more productive with your life. At a certain point, you will begin to see that these two points are not mutually exclusive. The next two articles will discuss these concepts in further detail.

Read onto Managing Stress Part 2: Lower Your Stress Input