On Stress and Anxiety: Part 1 —The Mistake Lasted Minutes. The Anxiety Lasted Four Days.

One sunny autumn afternoon, I was tossing a football with my two sons. I stood on the deck overlooking our yard, wearing shorts and a tee shirt, heaved the ball high, and watched them maneuver to win the catch. It was great fun.

The phone rang. It was a client, the CEO of a manufacturing company. Her question punched me in the gut:

“Are you on your way?”

It was twenty minutes past the hour I had agreed to lead a training session for 38 managers who had left work early and driven to a hotel meeting room for a long-planned afternoon with me.

Embarrassed is too mild a word. Horrified is closer. I stammered, admitted I had completely forgotten, and reasoned aloud that it was too late to dress and drive to the site. The CEO responded with unexpected grace, though I could hear the disappointment in her voice.

The call lasted perhaps two minutes.

What followed lasted days.

Stress in the moment

Minutes earlier, throwing the football, I was in a state of relaxed, unhurried arousal, a state of play.

Then a single question introduced a real stressor. Thirty-eight people were in a room and I was not in it.

My alarm system fired before I could think. Adrenaline surged. My speech went ragged.  That’s how short-term stress works.

This was not an imaginary problem. I had made a serious mistake. My client had trusted me. I failed to show up. I owed her an apology, an explanation, and some form of repair. 

I did not owe anyone four days of self-criticism.

Anxiety after the fact

Long after the immediate stressor had passed, I continued to berate myself, almost as if self-loathing would compensate for what I had done.

Why was I still punishing myself when the event itself was over?

I began inventing stories about what the mistake meant: that I was unreliable, that I let people down, that I could not be counted on.  What would she think of me now?

My rumination eventually clued me in to an old voice. The harshness of my self-attack mirrored a family standard I had carried since childhood: as the oldest sibling, I should always be counted on. I could not make the mistakes others make. I was acceptable only if I was reliable, responsible, always there when needed.

The stressor was over. The mistake was mine. But The intensity of my reaction had a much longer history. It was ages old, belonging to my family of origin.

A mistake is not a verdict

Responsible persons don't minimize a mistake. They own it, repair what they can, learn from it, and resume functioning.

Chronic anxiety turns a mistake into a verdict.

“I failed to show up” becomes “I am unreliable.”

“I broke a commitment” becomes “I cannot bear having someone disappointed in me.”

My family training had taught me a lie: Trustworthy people don't make mistakes.

Stress and chronic anxiety

Stress naturally arises in response to threats we actually encounter.

Chronic anxiety, on the other hand, is sustained reactivity that becomes disproportionate to the actual threat. With chronic anxiety, the intensity of our response is not determined by the present event alone. We bring our history with us.

Families develop patterns of responses to threat: worrying, blaming, distancing, controlling, over-functioning, under-functioning, avoiding conflict. These patterns unconsciously transmit across generations.

We inherit them, participate in them, and, unless they are consciously interrupted, we pass them along.

Consider the founder who thinks, “If I don't stay in control, they'll ruin what I built.”

Or the leadership team that weighs the owner's mood before speaking: “If we upset him, there will be consequences.”

Or the adult daughter who cannot make a decision without assessing her mother's reaction: “If Mom is unhappy, I must be doing something wrong.”

Or the brother who has rescued a sibling for decades: “If I stop, he'll fall apart, and it will somehow be my fault.”

The circumstances differ. The process is similar.

Over-reacting to a problem becomes a bigger problem than the problem.

Weather and clothing

A friend I've hiked with in harsh weather likes to say, “There's no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.”

Anxiety is the weather. No family, organization, or individual escapes it. Illness happens. People disappoint one another. Leaders make mistakes. Children make choices their parents don't like.

We don't get to choose the weather.

How we function in its presence is the clothing.

In Part 2, I'll take up what that clothing looks like: the slow, unglamorous work of knowing and managing yourself, becoming less easily set off, and learning not to add your own reactivity to an already anxious system.