We all suffer from stress in some form or other, and our bodies are designed to react to stress through the "flight or fight" response, a prehistoric necessity when faced with animals that saw humans as their dinner. Although we don't have those type of stressors anymore, the human body still reacts in the same way to stress - the heart beats faster, blood is diverted to the muscles, making thinking clearly, objectivity, difficult, and away from the stomach, inducing nausea.
Stress and anxiety, the DSM-IV categorizes as a mental disorder, afflicts a huge proportion of the population, particularly in today's society with all its pressures. People deal with stress in a variety of ways, or rather they don't deal with it, but react to it: drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes/drugs, taking hard drugs, excessive exercise, working harder, isolating from their families, and their thinking becomes obsessive and negative. They cease to take care of themselves, and the ability to think positively and to put life into perspective diminishes. The ability to laugh is almost absent. Stress kills.
Rumination is a well researched factor of depression, for when people focus solely on their problems and the difficulties in their lives, their negative thinking reinforces the stress and then their depression.
The way to break this cycle is to think positively. "Easier said than done," I hear the negative thinker say, but this is where humor comes into its own. Humor forces people to think positively, and I want to share with you a day in my life when stress could have driven me crazy but humor came to my rescue.
"Some days are better than others. Today was a disaster from start to finish.
I woke up early as I had to go into work to relieve my colleague who needed to leave early. I work in a behavioral health care facility for children and adolescents and it can be very stressful. I was ready to leave the house when by chance I called the hospital to make sure she still wanted to me come in early. She had called in sick. "Well, that's nice," I thought sarcastically, "I could have slept in more. She could have called me," I muttered around the house. Then I embarrassed myself when I found a message on my answer phone from her. Oops!!
So I used the extra hour I then had to write to my father who is in a nursing home, but when it came time to shut the computer down to go to work, it wouldn't let me save what I'd written (which was boring compared to this). So I didn't shut it down because everything I'd written would be lost, but I was very anxious to leave my new computer on, having just lost one to a lightning strike.
I grabbed my old laptop and printer to take to work for my colleague to install everything from my dead desktop computer and to download the printing software so that I could still use my old printer. I was running late, flustered, and couldn't remember how I got to work. I knew I'd forgotten to put my work key in my pocket, something I religiously do every day before I leave the house - it lets me on the elevator and unlocks the unit doors. When I parked the car I opened my bag and put the key in my pocket and hurried into the hospital. When I got to the elevator I couldn't find my key. It wasn't in any of my four pockets. I was panicking because you can get fired for losing that particular key because if a child got hold of it, he could get out and escape. I hitched a ride on the elevator with someone who had a key, clocked in and then began to panic like crazy. I borrowed a friend's key so that I could go back outside to my car to see if it had dropped on the ground. Scary, that meant that if a crazy person had picked it up they would have access to the hospital, and here in the US crazy people can have guns. I searched the parking lot and found nothing. I felt like I had pigeons in my head for brains and couldn't focus on anything. I was about to report myself for total incompetency when after searching through my two bags twice, I found the key lying lazily in the bottom of my tote bag along with my fat-free hot chocolate sachets and pantie liners.
I uttered prayers of thanks aloud and tried to calm down thinking, "Okay, all is well; okay the letter to my father maybe lost in cyberspace, but that's okay, I'll just write another." But then the elevator door opened and a colleague brought a child back to the unit. His nostrils were flaring and the kid said, "I've got pooh in my pants."
Normally the charge nurse (me) wouldn't have to deal with that but everyone had left the unit. Moments earlier I'd wrestled with my conscience wanting a plate of fries and some lime green jello, but suddenly my appetite deserted me. My colleague left quickly, so I donned a pair of rubber gloves, thinking, "So this is why I studied for twenty years, and eventually got my PhD, to wipe crappy bottoms."
The kid had indeed pooped in his pants and I tried everything to avoid contaminating the rest of his body with his waste. He had underpants on under a diaper! Had it just been a disposable diaper I could have binned the lot but no, his "package" was in his bright new underpants, which if I threw away, his mother would likely sue the hospital.
With my appetite totally gone, I reframed my revulsion and thought of it as mud and proceeded to wipe, but it was everywhere. The only thing to do was to put him in the shower, so I did what was actually considered unethical. I, a female, stood with him naked, (not me) a male, and directed him how to wash his body.
There was "mud" everywhere and I smelled it all evening, although no one else could - I was becoming psychosomatic. Every time he said his tummy hurt I sat him on the toilet and prayed for my colleagues to come back to the unit. Eventually they did and my appetite slowly returned as the evening wore on.
Then I was faced with a 7 year old tyrant who when had to see the dearest doctor ever, collapsed on the floor in defiance and refused to talk or cooperate. I was called to deal with him, so I tried humor first. "Oh look, he's a little doggy," and I scratched his back. He squirmed away from me and his pose then resembled a Sam's Club oven-ready chicken - very disconcerting. "Oh my, he looks like he's a chicken but he's not stuffed," I said, and the doctors tittered, and as an image of him in a baking tray popped into my head, I felt my day slip a little further into an abyss. In the end, chicken-boy got up from the floor with a promise of a dessert, but first he had to talk to the doctor. His mother called saying she's terrified of him. He went to bed with pudding inside him, smiling.
The rest of the evening rolled on calmly and without any more drama until my glasses broke. They didn't just break; they died on my face. Metal fatigue! One half just broke away from the other. I hate wearing glasses but this was the best pair I've ever had and I really liked them. They sat separately by my teabag box, which has a message taped on it, "Never miss an opportunity to shut up," and I spent the whole evening blind. Okay, so I'm short sighted, so I was able to write my notes with clarity but when the kids and staff wandered down the hall towards me, I had no idea who was coming and I wanted to call, "Who goes there?" For the most part the kids thought I was a sweet old granny who was just "precious," especially when I said, "I can't hear you, I haven't got my glasses on," which is the truth - I lip-read a lot and I don't know why.
So then the kids went to bed and my evening suddenly improved. I had my key, I resisted chips and green jelly, suffered poop without making the poor child feel humiliated, and I coped with the loss of my precious glasses and my blindness. (The teenagers were so gracious when I continually asked their names, being blind. They said, "But Miss Celia, we just talked." I apologized profusely, hoping that my temporary blindness had not added to their already low self-esteem. "I'm no one; she can't even remember me from just half an hour ago.")
I settled down to wait for the end of my shift and the scary prospect of driving home blind. A colleague suggested that I put half my glasses on my face and drive with one eye shut. I tried it and it worked, but then I thought, "Just because my glasses have broken in two, doesn't mean I can't wear them in halves, so that's what I did. I didn't dare move my head for fear of dislodging one half of my vision, or worse, piercing my eyeball with the dangerous jagged edge of the bridge of my glasses that was perilously pointed towards my vulnerable right eye. I'd had all the body fluids I could take today and seeping aqueous humor from inside my eyeball was just one step too far. I value my vision: I need it so that I can hear!
The journey home was tentative and I felt like I was wearing a neck collar, such was the rigidity in my neck. I looked out of the corner of my eye to see if it was clear to pull out onto the next road, and I made it home just fine. I took the two parts of my glasses off my ears and went in search of my backup pair. I couldn't tell if they were cheap reading glasses because when I peered through them they were covered in bacon fat, being stored close to the cooker, (I'm not good at housekeeping) but after washing and shining them, all became clear.
So my day, close to midnight, was coming to an end - thank heavens. I managed to save my father's letter, although compared to this one, he'd be bored to tears, and then I decided to buy a keyboard from eBay.
Now I don't even have the knowledge to describe what happened when I tried to access an account I apparently already had but had forgot about because I don't buy anything - I just buy stamps to send brochures to schools to try to stop kids committing suicide. You wouldn't believe what a mess I made of trying to buy a second hand electric keyboard so that I can fulfill my childhood task of learning to play the piano, chords and arpeggios. I screwed it all up for two hours and then still couldn't buy the keyboard. (The next day when I got on the Internet I realized I'd bought two!) So I went to bed in disgust thinking, "I may well be losing my marbles and it's all downhill from here on in," and I put my night time glass of water and a glass of wine on my bedside cabinet, and heaven only knows how it happened but the glass of water was swept away by one of my hands and cascaded EVERYWHERE, all over my Merchant banking machine, (that's serious) all over my precious Twilight book, all over the magazine that my work features in, my Sudoku book, my British Psychologist journals, my slippers (house shoes), the carpet, my alarm clock, toilet roll (for my rhinitis), my ear plugs and my lilac Christmas card from my beloved husband, and as I grabbed a towel and attempted to blot the waterfall, (how can a pint of water go so far?) I gave up.
Today was a disaster from start to finish, but as I wrung out the towel and mopped everything up, I smiled and then started to giggle until I was crying with laughter. I had found the key to stress. Laughter! I didn't get fired for mislaying my key, didn't throw up at the child's poop and humiliate the little darling, didn't moan, complain or bewail, "Why does this always happen to me," nor blame the Internet for my computer inadequacies, but focused of the joy of all joys, I spilt the water and not the wine!!"
So despite experiencing the physical symptoms of stress - sweaty palms, panic, inability to think straight, rapid heart rate, nausea and hopelessness, having a sense of humor changed my frame of reference and negative thoughts into a positive ones. I survived the day, and realized that things could have been much worse.
Surviving life's stress is all about thinking positively. We have a choice as to whether we focus on the negative, which adds to and generates more negative thoughts, or we can search for a sense of humor, which will automatically change negative thoughts into positive ones and beat the human being's prehistoric response to stress.
