You are a week late with a project, the boss has asked you into his office for a 'chat', you feel yo...
You are a week late with a project, the boss has asked you into his office for a 'chat', you feel your throat constricting, your heart is beating faster and you wonder if they have just switched off the air conditioning because you suddenly feel extremely hot.
That is normal - you are in a state of heightened arousal because you are facing a challenge. But how long will this physical discomfort and mental anxiety last? Will it last 10 minutes? 30? A day? A whole week? What if it never abates?
Stress is common and stress can be good. Life without anxiety would be meaningless - we would never get anything done without a burst of fight or flight adrenaline programmed into us from long ago when that extra edge of fear allowed us to perform at our physical and mental peak and escape from predators.
According to Professor Stephen Palmer PhD, director of the Centre for Stress Management in London, stress is when pressure exceeds our perceived ability to cope. Professor Palmer emphasises the word 'perceived' in this description because of course many of us are under the same pressures, but how we react to them is dependent upon how we view them.
Negative thoughts
Our cognition of an event determines our behaviour to a large extent. Take the earlier example: you go into your boss's office to explain why the project is late. You know it is due to legitimate reasons, external ones beyond your control. But instead of giving you the benefit of the doubt, your boss tells you that you are stupid or incompetent. Now that in itself is damaging, but it becomes dangerous when you internalise it as the reason for everything you 'fail' at.
Professor Palmer says: "All or nothing extremes of thinking are damaging. The first step in dealing with them is to look at our negative thoughts, the ones we access immediately when things go wrong. Then the aim is to modify these thoughts.
"Role models such as parents and teachers, significant people in our lives, have a huge impact on our perception. As children, we learn by example. There is a danger that, if we are told off enough times, we start to believe we are our behaviours which sets us up for stress in the future."
Since 1977, many discoveries have been made about the internal workings of the brain. We now know that chemical messengers in the brain allow our brain cells - our neurones - to talk to each other and produce thoughts and actions in us. It is believed that we have 'happy' and 'sad' messengers in our brains. And there is evidence to suggest that under duress we produce less happy-messengers leading to depression and/or anxiety.
The most well known of these happy neurotransmitters is of course serotonin. Since the Prozac revolution we have been inundated by new antidepressants, many of which also act as anxiolytics, that is they reduce anxiety. Psychiatrists and GPs prescribe anti-depressants to up the level of our happy messengers.
Blame the genes
But in reality it is far more complex than that. There is genetic inheritance to consider. Some people may be born with less ability to produce serotonin, which aids sleep; noradrenalin - which gives us energy (a cousin of adrenaline); and dopamine - for pleasure and pain (intrinsically linked to endorphins).
There are tell-tale symptoms that accompany the drop in levels of serotonin, noradrenaline and dopamine. When you lack serotonin, your body clock loses time and you may find yourself sleeping too much or too little.
The level of these chemicals changes in accordance with our stress tolerance. We fall behind in production of these transmitters when we are under pressure and if this happens easily or often, we are said to have a low stress tolerance.
Noradrenalin failure leads to lethargy and fatigue. And reduction in dopamine levels makes us more sensitive to pain because the level of our natural pain regulators, endorphins, also drops, hence complaints of aching muscles and a tight chest. There may also be a loss of sexual appetite as dopamine also runs the body's pleasure centre.
There has been much written for and against the use of drugs in the treatment of anxiety. Tranquillisers have received particularly bad press because they are addictive, although they are still widely prescribed in countries outside the UK, such as the US and South Africa.
Some professionals support the use of sedatives and anti-depressants in the short term; others believe that as with a diabetic using insulin, so a depressed and anxious person needs continuing chemical support. Many refute the use of drugs at all, mainly because there is the danger that they will be used as a crutch, or worse still, become an addiction.
Dr Derek Roger, who heads the Stress Research Unit at the University of York's psychology department, believes in preventing stress before it escalates into a serious disorder. He says: "There are probably a core of people diagnosed as having a biochemical imbalance and drugs may be necessary for them. Our programme at the Working Skills Centre offers dedicated training to give people the skills to manage their stress.
"Some 10 years of research has been applied to the course. Our methods may be considered eccentric by some, but I think the conventional approach to stress is garbage. It involves three things: symptoms, life events and relaxation.
"Symptoms are merely events and do not tell us the cause. Life events are usually presented to a patient in a list. But what constitutes a very stressful life event for some people may only be mildly stressful for another. And as far as relaxation goes, you are taught to relax your body which is a lump of meat, it is the mind that must be relaxed. The conventional view of stress is misleading and pessimistic."
Controlling attention
Dr Roger believes stress is related to our attention. He says: "Everybody is capable of controlling their attention but we let it get snatched away by the past or the future.
"We feel anger, fear and resentment when we are stressed which causes a physiological reaction such as increased heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol levels (cortisol is the body's chief stress fighting hormone). This is arousal and it is not bad thing. The problem arises if it is sustained and that is when stress becomes dangerous, if we do not return to the resting state."
Dr Roger analogises this malingering stress to a sleeping cat: when approached by its owner the cat awakens, in a state of arousal, hackles and ears pricked, ready to run if danger threatens. However, when the cat recognises that there is no danger it relaxes almost immediately. We, on the other hand, ruminate over our stress, remain alert to more threats and this state of tension becomes a habit. The good news is that habits can be changed.
Karen Loly is a freelance journalist
