Stress: How to De-Stress without Doing Less (9 page)

Winning ground back from anxiety can take time but it is worth it! If you are aware that anxiety is starting to take over your life, do go and talk it through with your doctor. They may be able to refer you for some treatment to help you to start winning ground back.

I wonder if, as you have been reading this book so far, you have identified with the kinds of signs, symptoms and experiences that have been mentioned where stress is concerned. Issues with stress are obviously more common if you go and talk to people who work in very stressful jobs, or people who pack in a lot around the edges of their job – parents who juggle work and childcare, or people who work full-time but also do voluntary work in their ‘free' time. But the truth is that people vary in how much stress affects them. You may know someone who works with you, or a friend or family member, who seems immune to stress. They appear to be able to work under immense pressure, to juggle many demands and responsibilities at once, to take tests and challenges on their shoulders without the slightest struggle. They manage all these things and still seem unruffled, perfectly calm and together. We all know people like this – and we love to hate them! Why can't we manage that same degree of cool efficiency? Of course, one possibility is that it is all an illusion and they are just very good at bluffing (we hope!), but it remains true that some people are just less affected by stress than others.

Meanwhile, others (you may place yourself in this category) find themselves struggling with stress much more than many around them. They find themselves utterly frustrated as they realize the impact stress is having on them, and often feel a total failure when stress forces them to scale back what they do. Some are forced to give up jobs they love
or things they really long to do, simply because they find that stress has too big an impact on them, on their family life or on their health. So, what is it that makes one person so much more prone to damaging stress than another?

At the root of some of this variation is personality – the way our minds are made up, the things that make all of us think and react in different ways. Personality factors, which often pass down families, very strongly influence things such as the way we think about and see the world around us, as well as have a role to play in the development of our own identity – what we think about
ourselves.
The interesting thing about personality is that all personality features have a good and a bad side. For example, you might get someone who prides themselves on how reliable and precise they are. This is a great thing in some careers and probably something they would say is one of their good qualities, but someone working alongside them might talk of how impatient they were, how they were not very good at delegating tasks because they felt they always did them better themselves. The same personality can look good – or bad – depending on the perspective you take!

So, how does personality relate to stress?

Remember that there are different kinds of trigger for stress. On the one hand, stress is caused by the genuine physical demand that certain tasks place on our bodies. If we are trying to work hard for a long period of time, there is a physical need to concentrate and focus on what we are doing. However, much of our modern-day, twenty-first-century stress is caused by social and emotional triggers. These are things such as emotions, triggered when our brain detects
something we might need to respond to, or social situations (often linked with those emotions) in which we have to react and interact. Although personality cannot change the physical triggers of stress, it is a bit like the filter through which our brain sees the world. So, although personality can't change, for example, how much attention is required to drive a car for four hours, it can affect how we respond to incidents that might happen on that drive. Personality can also influence how likely we are to put ourselves in situations that will prove to be stressful. Personality can take the base level of stress
anyone
would have experienced and add to it.

It might not be surprising, therefore, that certain personality traits seem to be more prone to problems with stress than others. Perhaps you have heard about Type A personality? People like this are very competitive and impatient. They push themselves very hard and often expect the same high standards of others around them. They are typically very intelligent and willing to put in hard work to get results. They love to work in high-adrenaline environments and often pursue leisure pursuits outside of work that are just as high-adrenaline. Sound like anyone you know? Type A personality has been linked with a statistically higher risk of many of the physical consequences of stress, such as cardiovascular problems.

Perfectionism

Probably the most common personality trait linked with stress is that of perfectionism. In fact, perfectionism is something linked with a lot of negative health outcomes – mental and physical. Perfectionism is a complicated personality type, which can be expressed in various different ways. On the
whole though, people who are perfectionists push themselves very hard and can be single-minded in their pursuit of the things they are aiming for. They set themselves high goals and are often very hard on themselves. What is interesting about perfectionism is the way that it is linked in research both with high achievement (many successful sports stars score highly on charts of perfectionism, as do high achievers in other areas such as business) and with various mental and physical health problems. It's clear that something about personality features like this can be both very positive but, at the same time, very negative. Perfectionism is linked not just to stress but also to an increased risk of many emotional and psychological problems. Some experts have even called for it to be declared an illness in its own right!

So, what is it about certain mindsets that can sometimes cause people to start to struggle when they are under stress? In fact, it is research into the personality trait of perfectionism that gives us a chance to understand better the issue of personality. Studies into perfectionism in people who have become unwell often look at those with eating disorders such as anorexia. The personality trait of perfectionism is hugely more common in those with anorexia than the general public. These studies look at the ways in which people ‘show' their perfectionism before and after treatment. What this research is interested in is whether recovery from anorexia includes ‘getting rid' of perfectionism or not, telling us something very important about the impact that character trait can have. In fact, what they show is that recovered sufferers tend to continue to score highly on measures of perfectionism; however, the way that perfectionism is expressed has changed – and something about that seems to have taken the sting out of it and stopped it having such a damaging effect. This message is really important as it shows
us that managing stress more effectively isn't about trying to change the people we were made to be. What it does mean, though, is that something about our personality might carry with it a potential weakness that makes us more vulnerable to stress – and that we can change.

What is it that can make some personalities so risky in times of stress? Again and again, two issues are shown to be significant. The key is not simply whether we are a perfectionist, or a Type A personality, or anything else; the key is something to do with what those kinds of mindsets might lead us to do in order to compensate for something else we struggle with. Research shows that we are most likely to start to have problems if we use aspects of our personality for one of two things: either to cope with anxiety or as something we build our self-esteem on.

Let's look at those two things in a bit more detail. Anxiety, as we've seen in the previous chapter, is a hugely common problem and one that tends to be exacerbated by stress. Stress stimulates the release of adrenaline, which makes us feel even more anxious, and very soon it can become a vicious cycle. Often it is tempting to deal with anxiety by trying to do things to help us to feel in control of the things we are anxious about. We looked at the example of checking that the car is locked in order to get rid of the worry that it might be broken into. That checking behaviour makes us feel more in control – we start to think, ‘Because I have checked, it won't get broken into' – and that is why it makes us less anxious.

Now, if you are a perfectionist, you are already more likely to have a basic belief that you should always do things to a very high standard. People who score highly on measures of perfectionism are often the kinds of people who will write
themselves lists, check things off or have mental checklists of things they feel they need to do. It's not a great leap to a place where you start to slip into using this natural tendency, which you are very at home with, to try to control anxiety. If stress at work or at home is starting to trigger a lot of anxiety, you might find yourself more and more having to check that you have done certain things properly. Visual things such as tidiness or orderliness might start to become more important. You might find your brain running anxiously through checklists of things you need to do and emails you have to send, tasks you have to do and people you need to see. Some people might transfer their stress to other areas and start to push themselves very hard, perhaps in some kind of sport, constantly trying to improve their personal best or always having to achieve a certain level or standard.

Behind this is a sense that if we manage to do these things, the source of the anxiety will go away and the WCS, whatever it is (although exactly what it is you are anxious about may be very vague if you are just generally stressed), will not happen. Sometimes it is a more general goal that is used to control anxiety. So, we might feel fine as long as we are achieving at a very high standard but start to dread making an error and being proved imperfect. We expect the best and push ourselves very hard because we know that if we don't, that fear might become overwhelming. That is how people with a personality that makes them prone to perfectionism can easily get caught in using it to control anxiety. Thinking in that way is linked to a whole host of problems, from eating disorders to workaholism, as they struggle to try to control everything in their life.

Self-esteem

The second common way these personalities can cause problems is if we build our self-esteem upon them. Self-esteem is an interesting and significant phenomenon, which we'll explore in much more detail later. It's about that vital issue of what we think about
ourselves
, and it is very important to have ‘good enough' self-esteem in life. We don't have to think we are amazing, but we do need to think enough of ourselves. Without ‘good enough' self-esteem, people simply don't try anything because they don't have the belief in themselves to think they might be able to achieve it. This becomes another vicious cycle, then, as they see themselves as worthless and failures because they never try: they never get the chance to build up their self-esteem. If we are someone who is very intelligent and tends to achieve very highly, we can easily see how our self-esteem might become based around that. So we grow up with a belief that we are valuable
because
we are good at things. After all, self-esteem is built from the messages about themselves that children get back from adults around them, so if the message is constantly related to how well they have achieved, it is easy to get the message that they are valuable
because they achieve well
. Fast-forward that child on twenty or so years and we have someone working in a high-achieving, hard-fought world; someone who cannot take their foot off the accelerator because ultimately, when it comes down to it, achieving is
who they are.
Without what they do, they are nothing; they are not sure why they would have a purpose or a value. We all get some of our self-esteem from what we do and achieve, but this is someone whose whole world is built on that basis. Theories about the root of Type A personality suggest that it describes someone using perfectionist tendencies to try to make up for or disguise a
problem with low self-esteem. This is someone who is using a tendency they already had to push themselves hard and achieve very highly in order to try to stop themselves feeling insecure. Someone who does this runs a much greater risk of stress having a negative impact on their life.

Ultimately, both of these tendencies are risky because they place so much weight on something that just isn't possible. They both lead us to make rules or goals in our mind that are very hard to live up to. So we say, ‘I must always get things right,' or ‘Everyone must always like me for me to be acceptable.' And that's the key to why stress tends to end up having an emotional impact: it leads us to attempt solutions that simply are not going to work in the long term. No matter how hard we try, no human can ever manage to be totally perfect. But many of us have found ourselves under tremendous pressure to be just that, living with a belief that we must continue to achieve the near impossible. Every time we fail our brain triggers more emotion, and we put ourselves under renewed pressure to try to get it right. This means that many of us go through life as humans trying to be super-people. We might keep it up for a while, maybe even for a long time. With enough work, enough brains and some good luck, we can manage to maintain the illusion of perfection for a while, but it will take its toll. And that is when, if we have so much resting on it, we may start to find that some basic things about our world and what we think about ourselves will start to crumble. Trying to be a super-person is exhausting and very stressful, because at any moment our cover could be blown and it might become apparent that we are…just human.

How do we know if we have a personality that might be making us more susceptible to stress?

One clue might be in the kinds of thoughts that we are prone to. There's more about those in Chapter 10, but if aspects of our personality are putting us under pressure, it is probably apparent in the way we think. This is likely to be a more reliable measure than just whether we think we are a perfectionist or not. In my experience, I have found that a lot of people who put themselves under pressure because of this tendency in their personality really resist any suggestion that they are a perfectionist because they think they are nowhere near good enough to be perfect! Or they will proudly point out the total chaos and mess on their desk and claim this is proof that they cannot be a perfectionist. But there is more than one way in which this kind of personality is expressed, so do not fall into the trap of the stereotypes you might read about. In fact, if I look from day to day at the kind of behaviour that is triggering stress for people I work with, it is often subtle things that are causing the problem. It isn't aiming to be
perfect,
more just pushing ourselves to do that little bit more than most people would. So it isn't good enough to just do something well enough; we want to do it
really
well. It isn't just getting the kids off to school on time; it is making sure that they never forget anything and are all immaculately dressed, with their hair done and everything looking lovely. It isn't just making sure those friends we invite round have a nice evening; it is trying to make it
really
good, cooking all the food ourselves, tidying frantically so the house is beautiful, remembering to buy candles for the dinner table… (Note that this last one can often masquerade as us being terribly caring about those other people and wanting to do it for
them – we need to watch out for perfectionism expressed as wanting our relationships with other people to be perfect!) It isn't just getting ourselves out of the door on time; it is that little thought that says, ‘If I really rush, I could get the washing on before I go out.' Those little subtle things can be the way that perfectionism, or a tendency to push ourselves hard, can gradually add to our stress and leave us starting to struggle.