Are you aware of the stress in your life?
Can you FEEL it when stressors are building up and you think you may pop? Do you ever feel like you’re right on the verge of a meltdown?
I think most of us are familiar with these scenarios. We can only take so much stress.
When I was an ecologist, I had a vision for my life’s work. I planned on studying how aquatic ecosystems resist or integrate stressors before they break down. Some streams were beautiful. Full of a diversity of life, clean water, and complex habitat. Other systems were homogenous. Devoid of most life. Ugly and plain.
The difference, I hypothesized, was stress.
I wanted to test the hypothesis that ecosystems integrated stressors, meaning they didn’t change, up to a point beyond which everything changed. In other words, a natural system would resist change until it experienced too much stress. After that point, or threshold, the ecosystem would change entirely and likely never return to the previous condition.
I call this the Cumulate Stress Hypothesis and, though I retired from being an ecologist, I now apply the same model to human systems. Individuals and communities.
So what is the Cumulative Stress Hypothesis?
First, I’ll define the individual terms:
Cumulative — something that accumulates, builds, increases, or becomes larger.
Stress — an undesired condition that can cause harm or interrupt equilibrium or homeostasis.
Hypothesis — a testable question you either support or fail to support
The Cumulative Stress Hypothesis suggests that a human system, individual or collective, will resist a shift from homeostasis by integrating stress. However, beyond some threshold of accumulated stress drastic and irreversible changes to the system will occur that are deleterious.
In an aquatic ecosystem, when human activity in a watershed becomes too intense, the streams draining that watershed will shift in characteristics from pristine, diverse, and heterogeneous to damaged, plain, and homogenous.
In an individual human system, our health will shift from good to bad, well to sick, or healthy to unhealthy when a threshold of stress is passed.
In a community, peace becomes war, cooperation becomes competition, and life becomes death.
We all experience stress in various forms.
These can be work deadlines, familial responsibilities, paying bills, or coming down with COVID. Communities experience stress, too, when jobs become scarce, rent gets too high, or crime gets out of control.
Fortunately, human systems, communities, and ecosystems can resist or absorb stress. Small and regular stressors can be successfully integrated into a system without causing any change or harm.
Everyone gets now and then. We deal with the runny nose, watery eyes, and drowsiness but go on with our regular lives. We all experience hardships and losses. Sometimes we lose our jobs and have to scramble to make ends meet. The lucky ones recover from these discomforts and not much changes. We don’t have to move, sell our houses, leave our families, or remarry.
To effectively integrate small stressors without inducing dramatic shifts to our livelihoods we need to be healthy. Essentially, being healthy is maintaining a state of minimal stress BELOW some threshold. Small stressors like job changes, mild sickness, or even moving to a new city don’t cause much harm because our healthy state facilitates the absorption of these changes.
The problems arise when a small stressor pushes us over the threshold.
Many of us, and most communities, are operating just below the threshold. This is too close for comfort. When the accumulation of background stressors is very close to the threshold we run the risk of drastic change. The closer we get the more risky a blowup gets.
Blowups or shifts beyond the thresholds for individuals include health changes like cancer, failed relationships, lost jobs, and the general inability to manage our day-to-day lives: suicidal ideation, hopelessness, and even death.
When human community thresholds are passed we see things like inequality, social injustice, resource scarcity, and war. In short, I think many individuals and most communities are experiencing too much stress.
I argue that the maintenance of individual and communal human health requires us to stay well below our Cumulative Stress Threshold.
Doing so requires an effort or practice.
For individuals, this is a combination of a healthy diet, exercise, mental health management including meditation and mindfulness, maintenance of relationships, and general awareness of all of these things.
For communities, this means having some form of healthy government, affordable amenities, good infrastructure, and balanced economies.
Maintenance of sub-threshold homeostasis requires a few elements. We must be aware of our stressors, how they affect us, and how close to our threshold we might be. To do this, we need to pay attention to what is happening and how it affects us. The same goes for communities. To manage our human systems below the threshold requires effort.
A healthy practice helps us minimize the accumulation of stress.
Being healthy means being able to process, integrate, and move beyond the daily stressors that occur. It can even help us reduce the effects of major stressors. But our practice also requires monitoring.
Monitoring stress in our lives requires awareness and attention. We need to constantly inventory the stress coming in and our proximity to the threshold. In essence, we need a stress budget. Knowing how stressed we are and what new stressors threaten our health is critical.
Fortunately, having a practice allows us to maintain the required awareness. In my experience, maintaining our physical, emotional, and mental health goes a long way to nurturing the awareness necessary to budget our stress and maintain it below the critical threshold.
In essence, this is how we maintain health, happiness, and contentment. It is also how we minimize suffering. I can imagine a world where many more humans can do this. Once we change ourselves, we can change our systems. Changing our systems is how we change the world.
This article is based on an episode from The Neurodivergent Professor podcast.
Audio stream:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/14631766
YouTube video:
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