Stress: Epidemic phenomena, or Spiritual Crisis?

Stress is an integral part of everyday’s life. People excerpt some amount of stress to perform tasks, achieve goals and make changes. However, this century is witnessing a phenomenon where stress seems to outgrow people’s capacity to contain it.  As a result, the word stress has entered the colloquial vocabulary of the health care profession, economics, politics and culture, prompting an urgency to respond to the many ways this seems to be affecting people individually and in their relation with others, the environment and the world at large. 

Today, the natural men’s in-build capacity developed through the millennia designed to adjust to external threat allowing him to survive a hostile and unpredictable world, is being constantly and increasingly challenged by a new reality marked by competitiveness, speed, consumerism, and an overwhelming bombardment of information and communication transactions, product of our High-Tech revolution. 

This new relation and dependency in machines and sophisticated technology is unconsciously changing the way people relate and understand time and space, and as they undergo this unconscious change, they pay the high price of information overload, contact overload, and environmental overload (Bradley, 2000). In addition, through the media people are now constantly confronted with the reality of an unstable world: millions of people killed in wars and the associated famine and disease caused by them (Last, 1993), vulnerabilities of ecosystems and instabilities in climate reflected in a continued increase in greenhouse gases, global warming, and climatological swings (Eisten, 1995), population growth, sustainability of the food supply and the shocking reality that “nearly 1 billion people in poor countries who go to bed hungry each night do so because they are extremely poor” (Daily, 1998, p1)

          Stress seems to be embedded in an unconscious race to adjust to multiple changes happening in a pace of life that feels faster and faster. With the rapid evolution of human beings in a social context, fight or flight responses to situations where the perceived threat may not be a threat to physical existence at all, does not allow for physical reaction to the faced stressors. When the fight or flight response is continually called into play, excessive demands are placed upon the entire physical and emotional system, and when stress and the resulting excessive demands on the body become great enough, the experience is ‘pain’. For this reason, it is not surprising that mind- body medical research is discovering important links between stress and conditions such as heart disease and hypertension, sexual and reproductive dysfunction, gastrointestinal disorders, skin problems, and cancer. 

Furthermore, Ellis (2002 cited in Rathus, 2004) “noted that our ‘beliefs’ about events, as well as the events themselves, can be stressors” (p384) and that people carry with them irrational beliefs that are conducive to distress which engender more problems and diminish the person’s self-efficacy expectation. It seems that beliefs are at the root of every human interaction. If the threat calling upon the stress response is not about physical death, what other real or perceived annihilation is hidden in its core?

As Yalon (2008) proposed, self awareness is a human condition that brings with it the scary reality of our mortality. To avoid the monumental effect of this fear people extend themselves throughout their children, they strive for power growing richer, more famous, more knowledgeable, or become dependent in an ultimate almighty. People ‘do’ to avoid ‘being’ (Corey 2001).  Existentialists call this fear ‘neurotic anxiety’. This may be linked to May’s suggestion on men’s experience of aloneness when confronted with the fact that there is no one to depend on for self confirmation, that only the individual can confirm and give a sense of meaning to life (Corey, 2001).

Although the human condition is described by the paradox that we are existentially both: alone and related, unawareness or fear in dealing with this reality can immobilize people, fix perpetuating behavioural patterns plasticized in ‘identities’ acquired in early childhood, or crystallize in physical and psychological symptoms Corey, 2001). Furthermore, hidden in these behaviours is the existential search for meaning steaming from a deep sense of incompleteness. Grof (1994) call this the “craving behind the addiction”(p9), and linked it to her experience with a Buddhist teaching highlighting that life is impermanent, and people attach and cling to objects, ideas, and perceptions of the “I” that are constantly changing, denying the reality that this is the very cause of their suffering.

According to the Dalai Lama & Cuttler (1998), the body has been designed for physical action, drove by either the mind or the intellect. Taking in consideration that the intellect is the faculty of reason, analysis and judgment, and that the mind, as the seat for feelings, emotions, likes and dislikes, has no direction on its own, if left uncontrolled by the intellect, produces stress.  With a latent fear of ego’s death and the insatiable craving to ‘become’ at the core, part of the global population is creating a madness that is destroying not only their own lives, but the life of the others, and the planet itself. Perhaps that is why new views and approaches are constantly emerging and adjusting in its pursuit  to help people to find answers to their questions, and new ways to live their life fully and authentically.

One of those approaches is Mindfulness Meditation which rest on the principles of awareness, presence, impermanence and emptiness. 

Through mindfulness meditation, people become present and accepting of what is unfolding, the illusion of time is revealed, all the fabrications of our mind realised, and contentment emerges bringing the focus back from the ending goal in the future to the eternal here and now of our journey. Anxiety has no longer a place in life's equation. We could say that we have turned the concept of stress as an epidemic phenomena, to stress as the symptom and emergence of a spiritual crisis.

Written in Spring 2012, by Maria Lopez-Bravo