It's the reaction, not the stuff

But you think it's the stuff.

Photo by Strange Happenings on Unsplash

A week or so ago I was talking to a wise friend and Great Work reader about how this time of year makes my heart sink. (Apologies, readers in the Tropics or Southern Hemisphere, for the perspective bias.) As the days become short, cold, dark, and wet so does my mood.

Well, my friend pointed out, it doesn’t have to be like that. You can look forward to the hygge of the dark months, to soups and baked things, to the sound of rain outside, to warm clothes and autumn leaves and frost and the imminence of spring. I could even let go of my once-but-no-longer-justified dread of Christmastime.

The point’s obvious, but I apparently needed to hear it from someone I respect before I could embrace it. For the last week the days have been short, cold, dark, and wet, and I’ve found myself enjoying it. My frame of mind’s lighter. If I can stick with this, my life will be transformed.

Which is exactly this week’s topic.

(Prefer to listen to this? There’s an audio version above—which you can also find, as The Great Work Podcast, in all the usual podcast places.)

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It’s the reaction, not the stuff

The point’s been made by many. The ancient Greek Stoic slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus observed that “It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgments concerning them.”¹ Around six hundred years before Epictetus, Buddhism’s founder Siddhartha Gautama—the Buddha—is said to have spoken of two arrows or darts, one swiftly following the other. You can’t control the first, but the second—your own reaction to the first—you can. Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius echoed Epictetus and the Buddha: if you are troubled by some external thing, he wrote, it is not the thing itself that troubles you, but your own judgment of it.² As an angsty Hamlet put it in Act II, Scene 2, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”³ Holocaust-survivor, philosopher and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl observed that, even in the unimaginable horrors of concentration camps, they could not take away “the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”⁴ In her novel Seduction of the Minotaur, Anaïs Nin wrote that “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” When I was more prone to stress, each morning I would read a note I’d written to remind myself that “It’s the reaction, not the stuff.” You see why I’m a doctor, not a playwright, philosopher, or novelist.

Problems are shaped by the circumstances, and by how you handle those circumstances: they can be shaped by nothing else. For the mathematically-minded—and doesn’t everyone love a nice equation?—we’d put it like this (f means ‘is a function of’):

\(problem = f(circumstances, handling)\)

If Hamlet were right that there’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, we could never complain about anything, since nothing would be objectively bad—a brutal moral relativism in a world plagued by much that’s unambiguously awful. We’d be dealing not with the equation above but with this:

\(problem = f(handling)\)

That would be to say that all your problems are down to how you handle things, and that’s obviously wrong. Some situations would distress anyone. Others call for anger, disgust, grief. If the problem at work is, say, harassment, an objectively impossible workload, or unsafe working conditions, then it’s not (or not just) the reaction: it is the stuff. And we’ll come to ways of fixing the stuff.

But there’s a point here more subtle than problem = f(handling). What Hamlet says isn’t unqualifiedly true, but it contains an important truth. Commonly, it’s not the circumstances, but how we react to them, that is the nub of our problems. If you start by considering how you’re dealing with something, you’ll often discover you don’t need to worry about what it is you’re dealing with. If, when faced with a challenging situation, you can choose a wry smile or tears, smile.

Stress

Take stress. The prevailing narrative is that it’s unpleasant, bad for us, and should be avoided. But—if this at first sounds perverse, stick with me—that’s often demonstrably wrong, and a growing body of research suggests that it’s our view of stress that is the problem. This is not to say that we should just put up with stress, let alone seek it out. The point is that we’re all going to have negative feelings sometimes, and there’s good evidence that valuing those feelings protects people’s emotional wellbeing, social integration and physical health. (This response may be more normal in some cultures than it is in the Western culture I know best.) It’s been called a ‘stress-is-enhancing mindset’, in contrast to a ‘stress-is-debilitating mindset’. Seeing stress as giving you a boost doesn’t undermine you or debilitate you: it optimizes you for dealing with the demands you’re facing. As the authors of one review put it, “stress is not inherently negative for performance, health, and wellbeing, but can be utilized as a resource for goal achievement.” Solid research shows that, if you see stress as useful, if you treat it as an opportunity, you’ll be happier, more satisfied with life, more mentally flexible and experience fewer symptoms of depression or anxiety. This is not an argument for sucking it up. It’s a technique for feeling, and doing, better.

The benefits aren’t only mental. Reappraising stress—simply recognizing its enhancing potential—has been shown to increase cardiac efficiency, lower vascular resistance (improving blood pressure, and improve our bodily biochemistry in ways that may promote resilience and buffer against stress. Just by thinking differently.

The psychological benefits spill beyond work, too. Believing that self-control is energizing rather than depleting, and believing that willpower isn’t a resource that can be used up, protect you not only during the working day but also from feeling depleted after work, at home.

A change of perspective

It seems to me that all this is saying something radical. When we’re stressed and unhappy, the problem not necessarily (or only) the stress itself, but how we see it. Recognize stress as a healthy response that will help you, and you can become happier, healthier, and higher-functioning.

It doesn’t take much. One study showed participants three three-minute videos—less than ten minutes in total—and, compared to the control group, those participants experienced markedly improved mental wellbeing, and their own ratings of how well they were functioning at work improved. Another study—which showed both psychological benefits and stress-hormone benefits—used just one three-minute video. Reading about this here, and really taking it on board (switch off your screen and think about it!), may be able to do the same thing for you. If you want to do more, you could do a brief—less than an hour—free, online ‘rethink stress intervention’ produced by Stanford University: click here.

Unwilling to tackle how you react to things you find hard, and reluctant to confront that unwillingness? The reasons for this can be complicated: personality, or an unexplored belief that maladaptive reactions somehow validate you, or no previous successful experience of changing something about yourself. But the thing that’s most likely to make a difference may be the thing that only you can do, and there comes a point at which you’re making a choice to continue with things being the unsatisfying way they are. If that’s you, hold this idea in your mind, the idea that it’s probably the reaction, not the stuff. Nudge yourself. The benefits are waiting for whenever you allow yourself to push past whatever part of you is holding you back.

It’s the reaction, not the stuff. This shift of mindset takes practice: recognize when you’re having feelings you haven’t liked, and reappraise them. I can benefit from this. This is making me stronger. If there are butterflies in your stomach, a knot of anxiety in your chest, or jaws clenched in anger, allow that it may take a bit of practice for those to recede. But practice may be all you need to progress from stressed out to the wry smile and “Bring it on!”.

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Thanks for reading.

1. Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings, trans. Robert Dobbin (Penguin Classics, 2008), Enchiridion, ch. 5.

2. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Martin Hammond, Penguin Classics (London New York Toronto: Penguin Books, 2006), 8:47.

3. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. GR Hibbard, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

4. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 66.