Stress...

I felt an unusual amount of stress at work yesterday. I was the acting supervisor of my unit in a treatment program for young men who are addicted to drugs, and the added burden of having to do my job and someone else's job was almost too much for me. It happened to be a particularly difficult day with these patients and the amount of work was exponentially higher than had I been working with just my own patients.

At the risk of sounding like I'm whining here, I want to assure readers that I am not complaining about the work itself, or the patients. Rather, I'm commenting on the stress. Stress can be very diffiult to deal with and we know that it is a silent killer. It raises blood pressure, levels of a dangerous stress hormone called cortisol, and contributes to what used to be called a nervous breakdown. For me, the definition of stress is "change" - either for the good or the bad - that comes into daily life. Whenever things change, there is stress. Good examples of this can be seen in the old "stress scale" that lists out various life events, from most stress as in "Death of a child or spouse" to least stress "Picking clothes to wear". When you check off all those you have experienced within the past 6 months, you get a total score that indicates the level of stress you have. I consistently score in the upper 25% on the stress scale.

I think one of the reasons for this is what I do for work. But, I truly believe that the major cause of this stress is that I am a recovering addict. Addicts and alcoholics hate change of any kind. As human beings we usually want to know what is going to happen next, but addicts take this to a whole new level. We not only want to know, we want to control the outcome to ensure it goes a certain way. We manipulate and arrange people, places, things, or situations to what we think is our advantage. While it is common to all of us that we do it, for addicts it is dangerous because when these plans fall through (as is most often the case) we tend to use drugs to compensate for the disappointment. We drink or take drugs to combat the stress that comes from not being so powerful that we can change life's events, and the higher on the scale these events are, the more we use.

There is a wonderful little book, "Who Moved My Cheeze", that I would recommend to anyone who is experiencing stress...particularly addicts. In this wonderful, inspiring allegory, the author describes what happens to the characters (ultimately us) when subjected to change. All recovering people ought to read this book largely because it shows there is a way out of the wilderness of stress. I re-read that book last night and immediately felt more relaxed. I recognized that rather than feeling as if I were the victim of stress, I was actually empowered to do something about it and manage to not only avoid the stressors itself, but also avoid the consequences of stress on my heart and my mind. We all have the power to redirect our energy based on reframing our view of a situation so that we find the possibilities for mastering change instead of succumbing to it. It's just a matter of getting out of our own way and allowing ourselves to move on. This fact is comforting.

So today, as I begin a new work day, I feel less stress already and more capacity to deal with whatever comes into my life. As I seem to say a lot in this journal...as long as I follow that way I have nothing to fear.

All the best, Roger W.