In his book, When the Body Says No, Dr. Gabor Mate identifies three components of the experience of stress. Understanding these components can help you respond in a more meaningful way to the presence of stress in your life.
Before we look at these components it is important to have a good definition of stress. Stress is the debilitating and maladaptive physiological, emotional, and behavioral responses from the appraisal of a situation and the ensuing belief that one does not possess adequate mechanisms and resources for coping. This somewhat technical definition capture the three components of stress.
The first component of stress is the stressor.
This is the event, physical or emotional, that you interpret as threatening.
Often, the stressor is described as a major event that is highly disturbing or disruptive. Examples include the death of a loved one, the sudden loss of a job, or a major illness. It makes sense that these major events are a significant source of stress for most people. However, we all have chronic daily stressors in our lives. These chronic stressors can be more threatening and more harmful in their long-term consequences. These stressor are internally generated, so they can take their toll without in any way seeming out of the ordinary.
One of the reasons for this is these chronic stressors are unique to each person. The major events listed above, most likely, would be stressors for anyone. But all of us have unique circumstances in our lives that we interpret to be stressful. We can experience stress in our relationship with others, at work, or with the way we manage time.
The second component of stress is the processing system.
This is the system that experiences and interprets the meaning of the stressor. In the case of human beings, this processing system is the nervous system, in particular the brain.
The truth is we go around appraising situations all the time. Most of them are within our normal range of experience, so we aren't even aware of our appraising. But if we decided that a situation has some degree of danger, some threat to our security (physical or emotional), or is something we can't handle, our whole body responds. The simple definition for this response is the "fight/flight/freeze" response.
Because there are lots of different types of stressors, there are lots of ways to assess them. You might think of these stressors on a continuum or spectrum. At one end of the spectrum are stressors that, if not avoided, will destroy life regardless of how we perceive them. Some examples would be high levels of toxic chemicals or radiation or being hit by a bullet.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are many forces that impinge on us that nobody finds particularly stressful. You are experiencing several of these right now. We are all feeling the gravitational pull of the earth, or the seasons and the weather, but these are so present in our lives we don’t thing of them as stressors.
Most stressors fall into a middle range, where exposure is neither lethal nor basically benign. With these, what makes them stressful is how we assess and interpret them. So, if in response to this vast middle range of stressors, our fight or flight response is chronically activated, it begins to change or biology and our psychology, and we experience stress.
The final component of stress is the stress response,
This is made up of the various physiological, cognitive, and behavioral adjustments we make in response to a perceived threat. We don’t have any real control over the physiological responses. The fight/flight/freeze response happens automatically. But where we do have some control is with the cognitive and mental adjustments we make.
The key here is awareness. When we feel the stress in our bodies, it is easy to believe the thoughts that our minds give us about the stress. It is easy to believe that the actions we take make sense in response to the stress. But what if we experience these beliefs as reality? What if we aren’t even aware of the beliefs? It is easy to assume that the stress is something we have to endure.
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is a program that can teach you how to address all three of these components of stress. If you would like more information about MBSR, please visit my stress reduction specialty page.