“Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.” ― Jane Wagner

I knew something was wrong the moment she answered.

“Your father had a stroke,” my mother explained. “He’s in the hospital now. The doctors are trying to find out more.”

The memory of my grandfather rushed to mind — a man I’d only ever known to be in a wheelchair from a stroke he’d had years before I was born. We used to watch Wonder Woman and eat popsicles together. He’d get pissed because I thought it was funny to hold the popsicle just out of his reach. It was a dick move, even for a four-year-old, and the sudden image of him reminded me just how helpless he could feel at times. It made me wonder if my father would suffer as he did.

Three days later, my wife received a similar call.

“I’m going to the hospital,” her mother explained. “I’m not feeling well, and I think there’s something wrong with my heart.”

As it turned out, my mother-in-law had a heart arrhythmia and was diagnosed with heart failure. Both her and my father’s issues were caused by, according to their doctors, high blood pressure from associated stress. It was the same diagnosis my wife had received a few weeks earlier at the dentist. She’d gone in with terrible tooth pain, thinking she needed a root canal. It turned out she was just clenching her teeth.

Had my father’s stroke occurred a year before my mother-in-law was hospitalized for heart issues, I wouldn’t have connected the two. Had my wife’s emergency dental visit happened a year after, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But with such serious events happening only weeks apart, my pattern-matching brain couldn’t help but see a connection. All told, these three important people in my life were suffering from chronic stress manifesting itself in physical ways.

And how couldn’t it be? They’d turn on the news for a minute and be inundated with stories of death, destruction, and corruption. They’d open social media for a second and be hit with hateful, ignorant comments from so-called friends who claim the moral high ground and dismissed their views and opinions wholesale.

I know my blood pressure is up over the past year. Never before have I been so consumed by the happenings in our world. Whereas I used to pride myself on not spending a second worrying about things I couldn’t change, I now feel the need to feed on every fact, every opinion, and every article on politics, social injustice, and the global pandemic.

My parents did too. And I hope that changes. Because stress and anxiety and hate are literally killing them.

And me.

And you.

Stress and anxiety and hate are literally killing us

Stress doesn’t look like a murderer. It’s not dressed all in black, hiding in a dark alley, waiting to jump out and stab you. Even so, it kills. In fact, the American Institute of Stress claims that work-related stress kills over 120,000 people every year. Not with a knife, but with a drug called cortisol.

Cortisol is the hormone our bodies produce while under stress. It’s our body’s way of kicking off our fight or flight response — releasing the regulatory substance to increase our heart rate, slow the supply of blood to our digestive organs (so our brain and body can use it), and tighten our muscles in preparation for what’s to come. While these reactions are helpful for threatening situations, they are damaging when the stress doesn’t relent.

Increased cortisol levels linger for hours. By adding more stress before giving those levels a chance to decrease, cortisol levels simply stay high. That’s called chronic stress, and that’s when the body starts having real problems.

“The stress hormone cortisol just ravages our bodies when it’s dumped into our system repeatedly.” — Dr. Cynthia Ackrill

Chronic stress, according to the American Psychological Association, is linked to the six leading causes of death:

Heart Disease
Cancer
Lung Ailments
Accidents
Cirrhosis of the Liver
Suicide

Too much cortisol in the body for too long causes inflammation that, in addition to these six causes of death, can lead to autoimmune diseases, asthma, and allergies. It can lower the amount of blood the heart pumps out, causing cardiovascular problems such as heart attacks. Even our skin can be affected. Acne and other problems pop up with elevated levels of cortisol in your body. Add breathing issues, headaches, migraines, depression, insomnia, pain, bloating, and nausea to the list, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

Which is precisely how I would describe modern media — a disaster.

We’ve got stressor after stressor hammering our brains. We click the clickbait, reading about how our world is falling apart. We slurp up the nightly news, seeing riots and death and ignorant politicians devising even more ignorant plans for our future. We read through every hateful and morally superior comment, feeling angrier and angrier over the cluelessness and hatred and idiocy on display. As such, our stress levels increase, our jaws tighten, our brows furrow, and our cortisol levels rocket higher than the SpaceX team on their inaugural launch.

But we can’t get enough of it. Not because it’s interesting (it is). Nor because we like feeling this way (we don’t). No, we keep going back for more because we’re biologically wired to.

We’re wired to mind the screaming

Imagine yourself in a jungle.

All around you is dense green foliage. The tree branches above creak quietly as they bend in the breeze. Birds chirp. Leaves rustle. Dewdrops pepper the ground from the canopy above.

It’s peaceful.

Suddenly, a chimpanzee shuts out the silence with a blaring shriek. Another joins him. And another. Until a cacophony of screaming fills the air.

You’d believe in an instant that something was wrong, and your body would prepare itself accordingly.

That chimp wouldn’t have to prove himself to you. He wouldn’t have to cite a peer-reviewed, double-blind study justifying why he sounded the alarm. No, he’d scream, and you’d react. Better to prepare yourself to fight (or flight) than to be caught by a predator on the hunt.

To your body, his scream saved you from certain death. His warning triggered a cortisol response that increased your heart rate, redirected blood to your brain, and tightened your muscles in preparation for a fight to the death. This, of course, is extremely helpful if a tiger is on the prowl. The problem for modern society is, our brains can’t distinguish between a predator and a hateful social media comment. We don’t have a separate system for dealing with global pandemics and big cats on the hunt.

When we read about the dangers of a viral outbreak, our brain hears a screaming monkey. When we see another murder on the nightly news, we hear a shriek. “PAY ATTENTION!” our brains say. “I’m warning you that your life could be in danger!”

In other words, though our thinking brain can tell the difference between fake news and a prowling tiger, our reptile brain kicks off a series of bodily reactions as if that tiger were breathing hot air on the back of our neck.

And if a tiger were breathing down your neck hour after hour, day after day, night after night, you’d get really fucking stressed.

We need a more balanced stress-diet

We need a more balanced diet. Not one of food. One for our mind.

In my new book, Home Early, I discuss the balance between too much stress and not enough. Bottom line upfront? Stress is not completely terrible. Stress, in measured doses, can actually be a motivator.

While too much stress can cause us humans to get really grumpy, too little stress results in an inactive lifestyle. You might recognize such a person as lacking drive or being too laid back; they just don’t seem to care about getting anything done and are under no pressure to produce results.

In reality, stress sits on a continuum starting with too little (the inactive couch-sloth) and ending with too much (the hospital-bound burnout case suffering from heart problems or a stroke). The right balance is managing your stress level to an optimum amount, right up to when you feel fatigued, but before exhaustion sets in. This is best illustrated in the Yerkes-Dodson chart below:

In 1908, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson set out to test the effects of stress on rats in a maze by, get this, shocking the shit out of them. When the rats were left to find their way out of the maze on their own, they managed, though it wasn’t an inspired performance. When the rats were given a mild shock, low enough to stimulate and motivate them, they performed better yet. When the shock was too strong, the rats panicked. They dodged around randomly, trying anything and everything to escape. In short, a certain level of stress increased their performance while too much destroyed it and eventually resulted in a panic-induced breakdown.

I’ve felt like a rat in a maze occasionally. You probably have too. Maybe, like my parents and wife, you’re feeling it now. Thinking about stress like a cup of water helps make sense of it all.

High-pressure situations add water to the cup. Stressful news articles do the same. Everything seems fine until you read that one ignorant social media comment. You feel okay until you see some asshat breaking windows out of historic buildings in our nation’s capitol. That’s when the cup overflows, and you feel pissed beyond belief. If you don’t take the time to pour some water out — by laughing, having sex, chatting with a friend, relaxing, sleeping, or otherwise recharging — the cup will eventually overflow, and you’ll end up feeling like a shocked rat in a maze.

You’ll know you overdid it if you feel some of the psychological and physiological symptoms of stress — tension, headaches, boredom, ulcers, high blood pressure, and lack of appetite, to name a few. Keep this up for too long, and your body won’t wait for you to destress. It will start shutting itself down with one of the six leading causes of death described above.

We have to get off the rocking chair

I get it. There’s reason to be stressed. Sometimes (most of the time?), it feels as if the world is burning down around us.

We hear the chimpanzees screaming from the trees about disease, injustice, fraud, conspiracies, and murder hornets (if those are even still a thing). As such, we feel compelled to consume every detail on them. We believe that, if we could only just come to know every fact, we’d be able to figure out a solution and protect ourselves from certain doom. But we forget that not everything is in our control. Sure, we’re concerned about these things, but they are not within our circle of influence.

In Steven Covey’s popular self-help book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he discusses the difference between our “circle of influence” and “circle of concern.”

The circle of concern is filled with matters we care about. Things like our health, our children, getting to work on time, who the next president is, polar bears in Antarctica, and how many people have tested positive worldwide during a global pandemic. Some things we have control over. Most, we don’t.

Contrast that with the circle of influence, which is filled with issues that we have some ability to change or affect. Things like our health — which we can affect (either positively or negatively) through eating, exercise, and stress — fall in our circle of influence. Our children, the height of our lawn, and getting to work on time are others.

Our circle of concern is a superset of our circle of influence. In other words, the things we care about and can’t control (our circle of concern) is far, far bigger than the few things we can control (our circle of influence). As such, the amount of time we can spend worrying over just about anything is limitless. But in the wise words of Glenn Turner, “Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere.”

“Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere.” — Glenn Turner

If we’re going to worry, let’s at least worry about the issues that fall squarely in our circle of influence. That way, we can stop our rocking, get up, and do something about it. We can turn our concern into action.

For all our other concerns, those that fall outside our circle of influence, we need to ignore them or let them pass lest we stress out (and potentially kill ourselves) over matters we have no ability to change.

You’ve got to stop the screaming

At the time of this writing, we (Americans) spent the past year (2020) dealing with a global pandemic, racial injustice, riots, a hate-filled presidential election, and election fraud claims convincing half of Americans that our government was corrupt beyond measure and the other half that America was going bat-shit crazy. The rest of the world had their own problems.

Knowing now what we know about stress, is it any surprise to come across statements like this:

“Shilpi Khetarpal, a dermatologist at the Cleveland Clinic, used to see about five patients a week with stress-related hair loss. Since mid-June, that number has jumped to 20 or 25. Mostly women, ages 20 to 80, are reporting hair coming out in fistfuls…”

Or this:

“Throughout the pandemic, people who never had the coronavirus have been reporting a host of seemingly unrelated symptoms: excruciating headaches, episodes of hair loss, upset stomach for weeks on end, sudden outbreaks of shingles and flare-ups of autoimmune disorders. The disparate symptoms, often in otherwise healthy individuals, have puzzled doctors and patients alike, sometimes resulting in a series of visits to specialists with few answers.”

Or this:

“As of July 9th, [2020,] there were 153,000 more deaths than normal that were not covid related across 28 countries.” (a number that rose to 412,000 as of November 20, 2020)

It’s frightening. And it’s exactly why we have to stop the screaming.

If we know that stress causes all these issues, and if we know that our monkey brain hears articles and social media banter as a stress-inducing threat, and if we know that a single hateful news broadcast can increase our blood pressure, increase our anxiety, and make us worry about the state of the world as if our life depended on it, then why the fuck are we listening to that shit? What’s the use in stressing out, thinking about everything wrong with the world, then going to bed realizing there’s nothing we can do about any of it?

It just breeds a feeling of anger, despair, and hopelessness — all feelings we can avoid, or at least temper, to save ourselves from the ill effects of chronic stress.

The world we live in is the one we focus on

“This is an unprecedented disaster for most of us that is profound in its impact on our daily lives. But it’s different from a hurricane or tornado where you can look outside and see the damage. The destruction is, for most people, invisible and ongoing.” — Ann Masten, PhD

Just like anyone else, I want to live in a virus-free world. I want my kids to grow up in a just world. But in order to live in that world, I have to focus on the changes in the world that I can actually make, and I have to stop fretting about the bullshit happening everywhere else that doesn’t affect me (or that I can have no effect on).

It’s time we stop gnashing our teeth over a news cycle that’s specifically aimed at engaging our emotional brain centers to get a reaction. It’s time we stopped participating in hateful, hurtful, personal attacks on social media that will neither change the others’ mind nor solve the problem at hand. It’s time to refocus on what really matters, recognizing what we can control and how we react to stress in our lives. As Marci Lobel, director of the Stress and Reproduction Lab at Stony Brook University in New York said, “During this period of the pandemic, we are all experiencing a high level of stress. What matters is how we respond to it.”

From this moment forward, we can all replace stress-generating activities with nourishing ones:

Instead of getting depressed or angry or spun-up by the news on shit that’s completely outside of our ability to control, we could meditate or take a walk or pray.
Instead of fighting with so-called friends on social media over ideals and about shit that will literally help nobody nor change anything, we can disengage from hateful content and turn our social media feeds into an inspiring place with pictures of friends, family, and positive messages.
Instead of doom scrolling through Instagram, comparing our lives against useless images of influencers sprawled over their Lambo’s in front of their 6,000 square foot mansion, we could exercise.

We could talk to family, even if only virtually. We could learn a new hobby. We could volunteer at a local shelter. We could buy a gift for a friend. We could have sex.

Any one of these activities are completely in our control and will add value to our lives.

Should all else fail, we can shift our focus to being aware of what’s happening. We can mentally step back from the stress and view it from afar, recognizing and acknowledging how the news, social media, etc. are making us feel. Then, and most importantly, we can recognize that we are fine. We are alive. We are breathing. We are safe. And, what’s happening elsewhere in the world doesn’t have to affect us unless we let it.

I am extremely grateful that my father walked out of the hospital a few days after being admitted for his stroke where half his body didn’t function. I am wildly lucky that my mother-in-law left the hospital on her own a few days after being admitted for heart arrhythmia that left her short of breath and fearful of a pending heart attack. In some sense, his stroke and her heart issues were a warning shot across the bow — a wake-up call that the stress they felt could have severe consequences, the worst of which could be death.

It was a wake-up call for me, too, inspiring the research and message of this very article.

I hope it does the same for you.

Because stress and anxiety and hate are literally killing us. And, as dismal as it sounds, nobody’s coming to save us. It’s up to each and every one of us to be aware and do what we can to leave the jungle of screaming monkeys and find a different, more peaceful, more meaningful space for our minds.

References

How can you live a balanced, productive, and meaningful life?

Hell if I know, but I think about it. Like, a lot.

Every once in a while, I write something that matters. And, when I do, you’ll be the first to know. Sign up for my newsletter and I’ll immediately take you to one such article, 10 Ways to Massively and Immediately Improve Your Life.

Originally published on Medium.com.