Stress Relief: What does getting upset mean?

Human beings are endowed with the ability to experience hundreds of emotions. Most of them are negative or painful emotions. Positive emotions are precious few: joy, happiness, contentment, ecstasy, peacefulness, etc. Of the hundreds of negative or painful emotions, I have listed here thirty five as the most important in our understanding of stress. I made up this list after carefully listening to thousands of stressed-out patients. When upset for whatever reason, we experience one or more of these thirty five painful, potentially toxic emotions in our mind:

Fear, hurt, anger, sadness, guilt, shame, disappointment, frustration, helplessness, hopelessness, humiliation, hate, bitterness, resentment, envy, jealousy, terror, horror, disgust, embarrassment, rage, exasperation, insecurity, despair, dejection, remorse, regret, worthlessness, hostility, vengefulness, dread, sorrow, sinfulness, despondency, uselessness.

It is these painful, potentially toxic emotions in the mind and the brain that make us feel and look upset, cause changes in the brain chemicals and make various stress symptoms to appear. If we can make these painful emotions go away from the mind, the brain chemicals go back to their normal state, and stress symptoms disappear. The simplest way to look at this is to imagine the mind as a balloon.

When we are calm, the balloon/mind is empty of painful emotions and so it can be seen as deflated. When we are upset, the mind/balloon is inflated with painful emotions, and stress symptoms appear immediately. If we can somehow make the painful emotions disappear from the mind/balloon again, it deflates again, the brain chemicals go back to their normal position, and symptoms disappear immediately. See picture below.

Here is a gross example. As you step into your bathroom, you see a six foot long cobra in the bathtub. Scared, your balloon inflates immediately, your brain chemicals change and you experience many stress symptoms: fast heart beat, shortness of breath, trembling of hands, anxiety, sweating, etc. Your first response is to get away from the bathroom. After mustering some courage (the antidote to fear) you decide to prod the snake with a long stick. It does not move.

You get a little closer and discover that it is just a real-looking rubber cobra put in the bathtub by your kids as a prank. You get a good laugh at this innocent prank. Your balloon shrinks, your chemicals go back to normal and your stress symptoms disappear promptly.

This inflating and deflating of the balloon/mind happens continually day in and day out in response to various upsetting events and problems we face in life. Even when we dream in sleep, our balloon could become inflated and we could experience various stress symptoms such as fast heart beat, shortness of breath, sweating, etc., in response to the danger we perceive in it. If you dream of being chased by a ferocious bear, you would feel very stressed. When you wake up and realize it was merely a dream, your balloon would shrink and you would feel calm once again.

Those of us who are able to keep our balloon shrunk on a daily basis live free from stress. Of course, there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of accomplishing this. If for whatever reason one is not able to keep his balloon shrunk, his stress symptoms would become persistent, get worse over time, and he would need a shrink to do the shrinking for him. Now you know why we psychiatrists are called shrinks!

In small to moderate doses these painful emotions are very useful for normal emotional growth and maturation, just as a small dose of fertilizer is essential for plants to grow to their full potential. In large doses, however, these emotions could become toxic and damage normal growth and maturation of people, no different than a large dose of fertilizer ruining the health of plants.

This is especially true if one mishandles these emotions. A 16 years old boy involved in a fender-bender car accident could benefit from this scary experience, and learn to be a better driver. A total car wreck with loss of several lives could, on the contrary, leave permanent emotional scars on the same 16 year old, resulting in life-long suffering, especially if he did not deal with this tragedy promptly and in an appropriate manner

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