Stress remedy: Keep the perspective

If you haven't noticed, there are no longer saber-toothed tigers roaming Main Street. The good news here is that there is no real need anymore to be crouched down on the corner of Main and Broadway with a spear in hand.

Yet this reality of life today is at odds with our inherited genetic response, according to Dr. Jay Winner. In his book, "Take the Stress Out of Your Life," he writes, "The appropriate response to a stressful situation [these days] is simply to grin and bear it. And that's the problem ... because those stress hormones, triggered by ancient genes, still scream at us to do something physical. The stressful tension created by that inner urgency, and the inability to act on it, isn't just uncomfortable, it exacerbates almost every type of illness you can think of."

Dr. Winner, an M.D., is surprisingly psychological in his approach to dealing with stress.

I asked him, and he assured me that he has tested all of his many practical strategies in the book himself. "When I get to the end of the day and see a stack of dictations to do, I let go of the complaining thoughts and instead dictate one word at a time. When I'm at the grocery store in what turns out to be a slow line, I reframe the wait as a time to take a break from the busy day. I remind myself that when people are rude, they are usually suffering in one way or another. I routinely remind myself of blessings in my life for which I can be grateful. I notice my temptation to argue just to be right and instead aim to communicate effectively and empathically," the doctor said.

One chapter in the book that I found particularly important was the one on keeping life in perspective. As a psychotherapist, I have noticed that most psychological ills and challenges are indeed stressful and an important skill to counteract that stress is to find perspective.

Dr. Winner proposes a five-step approach to keeping your perspective when life becomes stressful.

1. Find gratitude. He points out in his book that our brains often lose sight of what we have to be grateful for because the stressors demand so much of our limited reservoir of attention. Making gratitude a conscious focus of our attention can bring a stress-freeing perspective to our lives.

2. Discover purpose and altruism. Research has shown that people who do meaningful volunteer work live longer than those who don't. As Dr. Winner writes in the book: "Helping others shows you what is important and quiets your mind from its preoccupation with complaints about relatively small problems."

3. Find humor in life. Of course we all know this is true, which is why we love to listen to comedians. It is a great diffuser of stressful situations and a great stress buster, as any of us who have burst out laughing in the middle of a funeral know.

4. Make accurate assessments. One sure way of increasing stress is to miscalculate risk. If you think flying in a plane is more dangerous than driving down the highway, then you are needlessly pumping up those stress hormones when in flight.

5. Remembering that things change. Simply put: This too shall pass. If we remember this then we have perspective on the ever-changing, fluid nature of reality. Closed doors make for open windows, but, as Helen Keller observed, we often spend too much time looking at the closed door that we don't even notice the open window and what it can bring into our lives.

Dr. Michael O.L. Seabaugh, a Cape Girardeau native, is a clinical psychologist who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif. Contact him at mseabaugh@semissourian.com.