There are estimates that up to 90 percent of all visits to physicians are for complaints related to stress.

How do you think marriages, jobs, and families fare under all this stress?  Mental and physical abuse, addictions, depression and anxiety are all characteristics of stress and all are on the rise in our modern lives.

The key to beating stress is to stop it before it begins.  Taking time to consider your beliefs, and how they affect your response to activating events is key.  If you can’t stop stress before it begins, then learning stress management techniques that can help to minimize the adverse effects of the stress you do experience is a requirement.

The Body’s Response

The fight or flight response is the body’s protection system. At the moment a threat is realized, the body quickly prepares itself to either do battle with the threat (fight) or run away from it as fast as possible (flight). Physiologically, the stress response activates the body’s sympathetic nervous system, which results in the release of chemicals (hormones) into the bloodstream. These chemicals (adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol) are released by the adrenal glands, located on top of the kidneys. These chemicals are delivered to every cell in the body with the message of “get ready for action”. In an instant, the body reacts in the following ways:

• Increased mental activity
• Increased heart rate and blood pressure
• Increased breathing rate
• Increased muscle contraction
• Increased blood coagulation (which helps clotting)
• Increased blood sugar to nourish muscles
• Shunting of blood away from the digestive system to the muscles
• Increased sweat gland production
• Immune system suppressed
• Saliva dries up
• Pain perception decreases

When the stress response is activated, the autonomic nervous system is the part of the body’s nervous system that steps up and takes control of the body. It is largely an unconscious activity that is beyond our direct control. It is controlled by the hypothalamus, a pearl-sized portion of the brain that is considered our most “primitive” relic.

Today’s Version of the Stress Response

In our modern world, we are not confronted with many live or die scenarios where the fight or flight response is appropriate. However, our primitive hypothalami still interprets many of our everyday events as those live or die scenarios. Consequently, our bodies are continuously experiencing the same response as those of our ancestors with lions or bears chasing them, even if today it is simply a traffic jam where we are going nowhere soon.

Understanding that the hypothalamus controls our fight or flight response, largely independently of our consciousness, makes our ability to control stress in our lives that much tougher. But it can be done. By understanding the ABC Model and how our beliefs causes our consequences, as well as learning stress management techniques, we can begin to “teach” the hypothalamus what are really “live or die” scenarios in our modern world and begin to live with much less stress.

When it comes to reducing stress in your life, your beliefs play a very big role.  No, I’m not talking about your religious beliefs, or your beliefs in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, or even whether Elvis is still alive.  What I am talking about are the thoughts, attitudes, and reactions you have toward your activating events, those situations that could cause you stress.

Actually, your thoughts play a significant role in creating your stress. Yes, really!   How you were raised (Did your parents get angry when they had to wait in line?), the people you are around (Does your spouse get stressed when you’re in a traffic jam?), and even the media play a part in developing your thought patterns regarding stress.   If you can recognize your thoughts as causing your stress and not the activating events (your environment), you will soon be on the path to less stress in your life.

Not an easy task, you say? You’re right. It’s like quitting smoking after a lifetime of engaging in it.  It’s so automatic to react negatively to activating events that you don’t even know it’s your thoughts that are causing the reactions.

Did you ever wonder why a particular event (or circumstance or situation) causes you to be annoyed to no end, yet others around you do not seem to even notice the event at all?  It’s the same event for all of you.  The difference is in your beliefs.  You have the belief that the event is intolerable.  Others probably don’t even think about it at all.  An example of this is a crying child, such as in a theater, church, or meeting.  You feel the parent should leave with the noisy child.  With each minute, the crying grates on you even more.  Yet no one else is giving menacing glances to the little fella.  Only you.  This is your beliefs in action, causing you stress.

Can you always remove the stressful events in your life?  In the example, you could, but you probably would end up in jail.  Instead, take a look at the beliefs you hold toward those stressful events and see if you couldn’t change your outlook on those.  Beliefs are easier to change than the stressful events in our lives.

In more formal terms, those stressful events are called “activating events“.  This term was coined by the psychologist Dr. Albert Ellis, who developed a model of emotional distress he called “The ABC Model“.  In that model, the “A” stands for activating events.  Activating events are potentially stressful situations, or “stressors”.    These are the stressful triggers that cause you to get stressed.  Knowing what these triggers are, you can begin to control the stress that is a part of your life.

For example, if waiting in a line stresses you out, ask the clerk when you do check out when the slow times are at that store. Plan to visit that store during those slow times. If traffic causes your blood pressure to rise, plan a route that avoids congestion. Or just leave earlier (or later).

Obviously, changing your environment may be a big task. You may not always have the luxury of changing your route to avoid traffic or you may not be able to visit a store at any other time.  What is key to remember, as the ABC Model explains, is that to get a stressful response to an activating event (the “C” or consequence in the Model), you must also combine the event with your beliefs.  Your beliefs about the activating events in your life are what really causes your stress, not the triggers by themselves.

This helps to explain why you may be stressed to no end with a crying child on an airplane while it seems everyone else is oblivious to the ruckus.  You can get rid of the stress in your life by either changing the activating events, or changing your beliefs.

The key to all of this is to find the right balance in your life.  Changing all the activating events in your life, as well as the beliefs you hold about those events, are impossible tasks.  Besides, it’s not good for you to have absolutely no stress.  You can’t grow as an individual without some stress to make you stronger.

This methodology can help all of us in understanding how we deal with stress.  Within this methodology, Ellis created a very simple model that looked at emotional distress.  He called this model the ABC model.  Here is how it works:

An Example of the ABC Model

Waiting in line can be a stressful event in many people’s lives.  If you’re checking out at a supermarket, you’re faced with deciding which line will move the fastest.  Once you’ve made a decision to join a particular line, you now gauge your progress based on the other lines you could have chosen.  If you notice that every line other than the one you’re in is moving faster, you’re now faced with an activating event (which could also be called adversity).  Something you have noticed in your environment has the potential to cause a reaction from you.

This situation by itself doesn’t have any effect on you, positive or negative, until you couple the situation with your thoughts about the situation.  You may feel thankful that you have some time to yourself, perhaps to review whether you have picked up everything you needed at the store.  Or you may feel angry at the people ahead of you in your line because it’s taking too long to move in comparison with the other lines.  These thoughts represent the consequence, or what happens to you as a result of how you view the activating event.

As you read previously, there can be positive or negative consequences.  Why is it possible to react differently to the same event?  Different reactions portray different beliefs, or ideas about how a situation impacts you personally.  Beliefs refer to your values, your sense of right and wrong, or your perceptions about how the world should work.

So the activating event is standing in the slowest-moving line.  If you have a belief that you have plenty of time and need to review your list of items in your cart, then the consequence is that you have a pleasurable experience knowing that you purchased everything on your list.  If you have a belief that you should be in the fastest moving line, then the consequence is that you are angry at the people in front of you for causing you to not checkout as quickly as everyone else.

How the ABC Model Works

From the example it can be seen that it’s really your beliefs that create your consequences.  If you can change your beliefs, then you can change your consequences, which means you can reduce or eliminate your stress.

The activating events stay the same, even though once you realize what are activating events, you can take steps to avoid them, particularly those that cause you problems because of your beliefs about them.

Summary

A is for activating events.  These are the situations in your environment that have the potential to cause you stress.  B is for beliefs.  These are the thoughts and feelings we have toward those activating events.  And C is the emotional consequence of holding certain beliefs regarding a particular activating event.

In a nutshell, to reduce the stress in your life, use the ABC Model to change your beliefs about the events that cause you stress.