Have you read the Stress in America report by the American Psychological Association yet?
These are just a few of the highlights:
- 70% of adults reported they do not think people in the government care about them and 64% said they feel their rights are under attack.
- 76% of all adults said that the future of our nation is a significant source of stress in their lives, while 68% said this is the lowest point in our nation’s history that they can remember.
- The vast majority of adults (83%) see inflation as a source of stress, and the majority of all adults also said the economy (69%) and money (66%) are a significant source of stress.
- Around a third of adults (34%) reported that stress is completely overwhelming most days. Some groups were even more likely to report feeling this way. For example, adults ages 18 to 44 were more than twice as likely than their older counterparts to report feeling this way.
Go back and read those bullet points again.
Did any of those points resonate with you? Did reading any of them suddenly raise your stress level?
If you will allow me to slow things down for a moment, I’d like to share something that has transformed how I think (and, ultimately, reduced my stress to all-time lows).
When our brains perceive a threat, two very specific parts of our brain gets triggered. They are called the amygdala and they are these almond-shaped bits that control our emotions.
If you read the bullet points above and started to feel stressed or were simply reminded that you are already stressed, your amygdala were kicking in.
They started to hijack your thoughts. They started to inject fear into how you processed information. And I can guarantee that you felt negative and critical.
And that’s the key. You felt negative and critical.
You see, we often think that stress begins the moment we feel overwhelmed. But I want to say it begins the moment you feel negative and/or critical.
In other words, stress begins the moment our amygdala get triggered. It is NOT after we let that negativity build up to create anxiety. That state, my friend, is WAY past the on-ramp of this highway to crazy town.
Pause.
How often do you get triggered by what you read… Weekly? Daily? Hourly?
I ask this because many of us are now reading some form of “news” during every free moment we have. We have a break (or create one) and pull out our phones. We start scrolling. Embedded in the flow of entertaining bits are headlines and statements designed to make us stop scrolling.
And this information has specifically been engineered to trigger our amygdala. Over and over and over again. Nonstop.
My hypothesis is that overall stress will only continue to increase as long as people keep triggering their amygdala.
But here’s the tragic bit… we are not only triggered by what we read when we scroll.
Our brains get triggered by anything that causes us fear. These moments can happen at work in a meeting/on a call, driving to/from the grocery store, or even sitting at home with family. Random moments trigger our fears.
And this is what worries me most: we are afraid of things that are truly not dangerous.
As I’ve written extensively about before, our three biggest fears are:
- The fear of failure
- The fear of rejection
- The fear of risk
None of those things are truly dangerous.
But we seem to have reached a feverish level for all three of those fears. And our (social) media feeds are consistently turning up the heat on those topics. Over and over and over again.
“You will fail if you don’t…”
“You will be rejected unless you…”
“You will not be safe until you…”
And someone, somewhere is getting those messages and is not aware of the response their amygdala is producing. They’re letting their fear hijack their thinking. And triggering a need to share their fear with anyone who will listen to their rants. And if that rant generates another fear response in the person listening (which can also include fear of the speaker – not just the information), a domino falls.
And to be clear – every negative/critical response is one in which the amygdala is hijacking. For both speaker and listener. One domino after the other.
I think that domino effect is the true pandemic. And THAT is genuinely dangerous. Stress is affecting us all.
Collectively, we have the power to end this pandemic. Collectively, we can literally change history.
I do realize that’s a gigantic hope. There are so many obstacles. But you know me. We have to try.
And to that end, I decided to create a short, 10-minute video on my YouTube channel that walks people away from their stress. It covers the core explanation of what I use with my clients. Specifically, instead of “helping” people bubble wrap the universe to their personal definition of good, it is designed to help them eliminate stress at the root cause – by giving them a radical new way to feel/think.
I’d be honored if you checked it out here. And feel free to share it with a friend or three if you see an opportunity to take some dominos out of the chain.
Because every domino we remove stops the stress from spreading.
Holomua. Onward and upward.
All the best ~ Tim
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