Stress and Anxiety

    

Stress is a big part of all of our lives. In fact, stress is a good thing. The reason why most of us think stress is a bad thing is that we don’t react to it in a way that we should. When someone says that they are stressed, they are actually using the wrong word. This is something that I didn’t know before this week. Stress is the event that can result in distress. Distress is the reaction we have to it and can become severe if we don’t treat it well. 

    When we think biologically about stress, it is almost like an inherited response to danger. However, some people don’t have this. For example, if you were out hiking in the woods and you see a bear, your heart would start pounding, you wouldn’t move very fast, and you would be getting really nervous. As you may know, we call this the fight or flight response. We wouldn’t go up to the bear and start petting it because it’s cute. However, I think we all know at least one person that would try.

    The example I just shared doesn’t just bring stress, it could also cause us to feel a sense of anxiety. When we are in distress, we have a perception that we are in danger. This also goes for anxiety as well. The bad form of anxiety is when we aren’t in any perception of danger but we are still nervous or think something bad is going to happen.

    With being from a family that has high numbers of anxiety, I know exactly how that feels. I have irrational fears of things that I simply don’t have control over. My mom has really bad anxiety and I have heard her say that she worries about having nothing to worry about. When I was younger, I thought she was crazy. But now that I am older, I understand anxiety more. 

    David Burns introduced something called “10 Forms of Twisted Thinking.” The first is all or nothing thinking. This means you think in black and white categories. If a situation falls short of perfect, you see it as a total failure. The second is an overgeneralization. This means you see a single negative event, such as a romantic rejection or a career reversal, as a never-ending pattern of defeat by using words such as "always" or "never" when you think about it. The third is a mental filter. This refers to when you pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively. This alone is really good at darkening our mood. The fourth is discounting the positives. This means when you do a good job at something, you tell yourself it wasn’t good enough. The fifth form is jumping to conclusions. You interpret things negatively when there are no facts to support your conclusion. You might think someone doesn’t like you just based on a look that they gave you. The sixth is magnification. This means you exaggerate the importance of your problems to make yourself worry more. The seventh is emotional reasoning. You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are. For example, if you are scared of flying in airplanes, it must be dangerous to fly. This isn’t always true. The eighth form is “should” statements. You tell yourself that things *should* be the way you hoped or expected them to be. This isn’t healthy because you automatically assume things of yourself that you can’t control. We usually say a should statement after the fact. The ninth is labeling. Labeling is an extreme form of all-or-nothing thinking. Instead of saying "I made a mistake," you attach a negative label to yourself like “I’m a loser.” We think this will help because once we label something, we stop thinking about it. Lastly, it is personalization and blame. Personalization occurs when you hold yourself personally responsible for an event that isn't entirely under your control. 

    After this week, I have learned that having anxiety and depression all have to do with our mindsets. Granted, we can’t just think “think happy thoughts” and it all just go away, but we can’t constantly be throwing ourselves a pity party. We have to take the right action to try and improve our mental health. Some things we can do are participate in physical activity, eat healthier, and be involved in more social events. These have been proven to increase one's mental health.