Healthy Stress Newsletter

In my new book, Stress Less, Live More: How Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Can Help You Live a Busy yet Balanced Life (New Harbinger 2010) I refer to the human brain as a 24/7 thinking and feeling machine and compare it to a computer. Like a computer, it constantly processes information and is capable of running multiple programs at the same time. These programs are your thoughts, personal scripts, mental images, and emotions. I call these your internal potential stressors (potential stressors that originate in your mind).

Thoughts are the basic building blocks of how and what you think. Your thoughts are related to a host of things including your IQ, health status, life experience, body chemistry, emotional state, and so on. Some of your thoughts are based on empirical evidence and facts, while others are not. Some of your thoughts are rational and logical, while others couldn't be more irrational or illogical. Some of your thoughts spring out of the emotions you're feeling or the mental images you're focusing on at any given time. Others originate in your conscious effort to create them, while still other thoughts just come and go like the wind.

Your thoughts combine to form personal scripts about specific aspects of your life and your personality. Your personal scripts are the little story lines that you've created for all of the experiences you've had in the past, are living in the present, and imagine will occur in the future. You have personal scripts about your childhood, work, school, relationships, politics, and the world at large. Like your thoughts, these scripts can be logical or illogical, factual or inaccurate, neutral or emotionally charged, and real or imagined. Many of these scripts are outdated and based on your past failures and painful emotions. You carry these around in your brain, and they often interfere with your ability to enjoy the present moment and take valued action.

Mental images are the internal pictures you see when you close your eyes and observe your thoughts and personal scripts. If personal scripts are the story lines of your life, your mental images are the little video clips that accompany them. Mental images can be neutral or linked to emotions. Some of your mental images are accompanied by pleasant emotions like hope, love, and satisfaction, while others are linked to painful or negative emotions like jealousy, fear, worry, and anxiety. In his book The Happiness Trap, psychotherapist Russ Harris (2007) calls these latter types of mental images "scary pictures" because when you "see" them inside your head, you take them so literally that they scare you as much as if they were actually happening to you in person instead of just existing in your mind.

Emotions are essentially impulses to act. They're the result of an evolutionary process that forces us to stop, pay attention, analyze the threat associated with a situation, and act, all within a split second.

Your thoughts, personal scripts, mental images, and emotions are related to both parts of the stress definition we discussed in the first newsletter. They are part of what goes into determining the threat posed by a potential stressor and your perceived ability to cope with it. In other words, your mind can churn out thoughts, personal scripts, mental images, and emotions related to a potential stressor that contribute to you perceiving it as threatening and beyond your coping ability. Whether the information your thoughts, personal scripts, mental images and emotions give you is factual or not doesn't matter. If you view a potential stressor as threatening and beyond your ability to cope with it will trigger a stress response. In the coming newsletter I'll talk more about this and give you helpful tips to manage you internal potential stressors.

The following activity, The Bus will help you learn how to accept your internal potential stressors and move forward while coexisting with them.