Dancing with Stress

An essential but hazardous ingredient for growth

Welcome back to The Ripple. I’m excited to begin writing again now that life has settled a bit after the birth of our son. It turns out that having two kids is a good bit more to balance than one!

As a refresher, this newsletter explores how we can reconnect with our bodies, learn from nature, and embrace change. Now on to today’s post about Dancing with Stress.

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Dancing with Stress

One of the surprising things about becoming a parent is how much disagreement there is about, well, pretty much everything. Each activity and every stage somehow morphs into a spirited debate. If you want a taste, just poke around any online discussion about feeding, sleeping, schooling, or disciplining.

But one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that parenting inevitably involves added stress. So much so, that the Surgeon General recently released a 36-page Advisory on “Parents Under Pressure.”

It’s a powerful read and an important call to action. “Raising children is sacred work,” and “the well-being of parents and caregivers is directly linked to the well-being of their children.” We cannot have a healthy society without healthy parents and healthy kids. So, we should all be advocates for actions that communities, companies, and people can take to reduce the stress of parenting.

Yet, the more I consider it, the more I believe that we need to tweak how we view and approach stress in the first place.

Defining Stress

In the report, the Surgeon’s General defines stress as “A state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation.”

This is a common definition that conceptualizes stress as a psychological state, as in, “I’m feeling stress.” It’s the outcome of internal or external pressures. It’s the impact of when challenges in our lives snowball and stick with us.

Yet, viewing stress in this way feels too narrow and negative to me.

If I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that all of my moments of greatest growth involved added stress: starting my first business, having our first child, and pushing through double sessions with teammates.

Everyone who exercises quickly discovers an important lesson. Stress is a key ingredient to growth. New challenges create new capabilities, and increased efforts unlock greater capacities. Added stress opens the door to new growth.

But it’s a fragile balancing act. Take on too much stress and the reverse happens. Instead of growth, there’s decline, decay, and sometimes even death. It’s the ultimate double-edged sword.

Stress can sharpen us and it can kill us.

So, perhaps it’s more useful to view stress through the lens of its broader and more neutral definition, where it is simply “a pressure or tension exerted on something.” Instead of an outcome to avoid, it’s a mechanism to harness.

Framing stress in this way reminds us that stress isn’t just something that happens to us. It’s a process we participate in. We cannot avoid stress but we can increase our capacity to absorb and respond to it.

Stress is Everywhere

The Surgeon General’s report does a beautiful job of highlighting how parenting weaves together so many stressors. From the practical reality of decreased sleep, increased time demands, and greater financial strain to the more existential questions of how to balance societal pressures and prepare your kids for a changing world.

But it’s not just parents that face increasing stress. Our modern culture emphasizes productivity and performance over recovery and rest. Our environment introduces us to increasing toxins, viruses, and pollution. Our technology inundates us with never-ending information, addictive alerts, and FOMO.

Everything we do exerts demands on us (both externally and internally). Simply eating a meal is a form of stress on the body… but so is not eating. Just as exercising is a form of stress… and so is not moving.

These daily demands challenge our state of balance and encourage or require an adaptive response.

Stress is Interconnected

The difficulty is that nothing happens in isolation. After our son was born this spring, I stubbornly tried to maintain the same exercise routine. Within days, everything hurt and old injuries were reemerging. Not only was I not progressing, I was moving backward.

Even after I dramatically lowered the volume and intensity, I still ran into issues. When I started deadlifting again, I slowly worked the weight back up. Nevertheless, on the final rep of the final set, I felt a sharp pull in my back, and my whole body froze up.

The same demands that were leading to growth had become detrimental and led to injury. Stress in any area is dynamic and interconnected. The safe and beneficial amount is always changing. Our capacity to handle stress in one domain is influenced by stress in other domains.

Stress is Contextual

This back injury reminded me of a frustrating lesson I learned last fall when I cleared out the woodland edge behind our house. We removed a dense section of invasive shrubs and vines around our well-established trees. Then, just days later, a rainy wind storm blew down our tallest cherry tree. It was dead in an instant after decades of growth.

The fallen cherry tree at the edge of the woods

This tree was unable to handle the stress of the wind gusts without the support of the surrounding plants, just as my back was unable to handle the stress of the deadlift without the support of my pre-newborn habits like quality sleep and consistent movement.

Precedent influences the impact of stress. Our historical environment and previous experiences shape our ability to absorb stress. It’s overwhelming to recognize that everything we encounter and do contributes to stress. Yet, it’s inspiring to appreciate the ways we can increase our ability to adapt and grow in response.

When we exercise effectively, we strategically increase the external demands to encourage adaptation. We train our bodies to positively benefit from increasing levels of physical stress.

In a similar way, we can build an increased capacity to respond to all kinds of stress. Spend time in cold water and even freezing temperatures feel more tolerable. Sit fully with your emotions and even the most intense ones feel more welcome. Practice public speaking and even the largest crowds feel more comfortable.

Stress is Compounded

When you have your first child, everything is new. Each day represents uncharted waters. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the unknown and uncertainty. Novel and unfamiliar experiences introduce stress because we are calibrating to a new reality. Yet, once we adjusted to these new demands, it felt like our family stress stabilized quickly.

Having our second kid was entirely different. None of the experiences with him felt particularly new or uncertain. Yet, the stress felt constantly higher. The best way I can describe those early months is relentless. Looking back, it’s a perfect example of how stress compounds. Any challenge, tension, or exhaustion from caring for him bumped into the needs and challenges of supporting our toddler. Stress and overwhelm rippled across the family. As a result, it’s taken twice as long for things to stabilize into our new normal.

Given how stress compounds, one of the best responses to added stress in one area is to decrease it in others. We may not be able to remove our stressors at work or at home, but we can likely find a few areas to introduce more rest, more connection, and more support.

Stress is Unsolvable

A natural response to all of this is to seek control and certainty. We buy wearables that provide real-time biofeedback and a proprietary algorithm for our “stress score.” We frantically attempt to better measure the inputs and monitor the outputs.

Yet, if we try to be too scientific about it, we only create a mirage of understanding and a false sense of safety.

The dynamics of stress are simply too intricate for purely analytical solutions. The variables are too interconnected and the context is too fluid.

If I had lifted 10% less weight, would I have still hurt my back? Could I have accurately measured my readiness to absorb the force of the barbell or our cherry tree’s need for a wind barrier?

Instead of seeking to answer these unknowable questions, it seems more prudent to cultivate a deep appreciation and curiosity about the role of stress in our lives.

To notice all of the different areas where these dynamics are at play. To hone our intuitive grasp of its holistic and interconnected nature. To build an embodied awareness of its power for growth and destruction. When we appreciate how complex stress is, we naturally begin to respect it.

We cannot “solve” stress, we can only learn to dance with it.

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Thank you for reading! Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any ideas, reflections, or questions by adding a comment or replying directly via email.