Higher costs, current events, and fear about the future are stressing people out. Knowing what stress is, what it does, and how to fight it can improve your health and quality of life.
Kristen Lindgren, a clinical psychologist at UW Medicine and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, discusses stress in a Q&A. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What is stress?
A: Stress occurs when there is a mismatch between our needs and resources. When we don’t have the resources to meet the demands of an event, that’s when we end up stressed. That’s why two people in the same situation can experience different levels of stress.
Q: What are the long-term effects of stress?
A: Stress can disrupt our lives and make us moody and irritable. Chronic stress can weaken our immune system, making it easier to get sick and harder to recover, harm our cardiovascular system, and disrupt our social and work life, leaving us isolated.
Q: How can people reduce stress?
A: The biggest thing you can do is ask yourself a single question: whether the stressor is something that you have control over. Depending on that answer, there are two different pathways to reducing stress. If you have control over the stressor, that pulls you to do good problem-solving. If you don’t have control over the stressor, it can be helpful to develop strategies to cope, such as improving your sleep routines, getting regular exercise, and setting limits at work or in relationships.
For situations you can’t change, use in-the-moment strategies: breathing exercises, meditation, mindfulness, and cognitive reframing. Across the board, whether the stressor is something you have control over or you don’t, good social support can always be helpful. That will come from a person who cares about you but will also give you a nudge when there’s something you can do to tackle a problem.
Q: What is worry? How can people reduce it?
A: A classic thing that goes along with stress is worry, a state of distress about an anticipated event. If we’re spiraling all the time and we’re having trouble staying present, one of the best tips is to look for triggers. For lots of people, that’s media exposure. Limiting your dose is effective.
Other things that can be helpful are postponing worry, which is reminding yourself it’s not time for worry right now, and coming back to the present. Then at the end of the day, you can give yourself a little time to sit with those worries, the uncertainty and the discomfort, and then move on. Most of us don’t like the feeling of worry. There’s also a secondary consequence, which is feeling less present in the day-to-day, and we’re losing all the good stuff.
Q: Does stress have any benefits?
A: Lots of folks find it very uncomfortable and want all stress out of their lives, but there’s a downside to that because some kinds of stress can be helpful.
What I think about is the right-sized dose for the right duration of time. The upside of stress is that it can challenge us to do something new, something we didn’t think we were capable of. When we face and meet those kinds of challenges, we learn we’re more capable than we thought.
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