How to avoid background stressors

Your unconscious mind is roughly 98% of your neurological power. It is vast, and you will probably never use more than 10% of it. But it is literal. It cannot make decisions. It doesn't hear a negative, like the word “not”.

It behaves like a seven-year-old child, for most of us, that loves us totally and utterly, and would never do anything deliberately to hurt us; But do seven-year-olds always get it right? Do they sometimes get confused, and do they sometimes have a “hissy” moment? There’s problem number one!

Your unconscious mind’s role

Your unconscious mind has two jobs, and only two jobs.

1. Keep you alive.
2. Keep you safe.

But point two can very much be open to interpretation - through the eyes and ears of your seven-year-old inner self. It may be generating fear, anger, anxiety, and stress because it thinks this is keeping you safe. It's mistaken, but that is of little consolation to you because you are experiencing the stress, etc. There’s problem number two!

What can cause background stress?

Evolution is a wondrous thing, but it moves very, very slowly. So, 5,000 years in evolutionary terms is like the blink of an eye. 5,000 years ago, we would have been living in small family groups, and we might have known what was happening in the next settlement, but that was about it. It occurs to me that we are not designed to know about the atrocities and natural disasters going on 8000 miles away.

For some people, every time they read a news feed, see the news or read a paper detailing bombing runs in the Middle East, the threat from Russia, or Iran or wherever, their background stress rises one notch. But because we are constantly surrounded by information, minute by minute, these people don't have an opportunity to “drop” that stress before they come across the next news snippet, which adds to it. And so over the course of weeks and months, unbeknownst to the individual, their stress keeps rising due to background elements.

Now, some people have little or no issues with being bombarded with negative news feeds, but for others, it can significantly affect their ability to deal with real-life issues, not ones that they have no bearing on, on the other side of the planet.

Are more people getting stressed?

I personally have seen a significant increase in people suffering with stress and/or anxiety within my coaching business, particularly in the last five years, and it seems to me that there is a split within our society, between those who can deal with the background stressors that ongoing news feeds, etc. bring, and those who cannot.

Identifying where you sit with this is key. If you don't know that you don't cope well with hearing about daily disasters, week after week, month after month, then there’s nothing you can do about it. But if you have the conscious awareness to realise that, like many, many people, you react negatively to an ongoing barrage of negative media, then at least you have a choice.

What can I do to reduce my background stress levels?

Check in with yourself - if you are unaffected, emotionally and stress-wise by negative news feed, then you need to take no action, unless of course you want to.

But if you identify that you are affected by these things, you can reduce your exposure to them. I have had clients who stopped watching the news, stopped reading papers and stopped reading news feeds, and within a few short weeks, their ability to cope with everyday, real-life stressors increased because the background stress level had dropped.

Does this mean I cannot find out what’s going on in the world ever again?

No. Not at all.

If you reckon you are negatively affected by background stressors, you do not have to eliminate them altogether. You could for a while if you wanted to get to a stress/calm equilibrium rapidly, but you do not have to.

I recommend to my clients that they do not watch TV news at all, they don’t listen to radio news and they qualify the news feeds they open.

For instance, I've talked about keeping things in equilibrium elsewhere. If you're going to read a news feed about hostilities in Ukraine, then balance it by reading an amusing story.

And beware. “News” isn't a very accurate description for what we “consume” these days. “Bad news” seems more accurate. If you want to feel good about yourself, read stuff that makes you feel good, and you want to feel bad about yourself, read stuff that makes you feel bad.

And beware twice over… awful things happen every day somewhere on the planet. I’m not saying you should not be empathetic. Of course, we should. But if you are vulnerable to these things affecting your stress levels, then you might want to experiment and see and feel what happens if you choose to reduce them.

Now, while I am not advocating shutting yourself off from the world, I am aware, having been a coach and mentor for over 20 years, that the level of background stress we all live with seems to be rising.

This notion may be useful if you cannot affect something, do you need to know about it. Tragic though it is, I cannot affect the situations in Ukraine, Tehran, and I cannot prevent future tsunamis in South East Asia. I can only affect things “on my manor”. And this is the mindset I encourage my clients with acute stress issues to adopt.

What if I cannot control my stress levels, background or otherwise?

Feeling stressed may be a signal from your unconscious mind to do something. A final warning to pay a bill that landed three days ago, you've done nothing, and you feel stressed, for instance.

So if there is something you can physically do to reduce your stress load, then simply do it.

(Note: There have been many, many articles written about the benefits of exercise to reduce stress, and I’m not going to repeat those here.)

And, if you need help, find a coach that you connect with. Stress feels absolutely awful, and crushing to the person enduring it, but it really is relatively straightforward to deal with when you are working with someone who has the skills, expertise and experience to show you what you need to do, and how you need to do it.