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South Bay SDA Church

Phil Mills

Thriving With Stress

And I'm happy this morning, let's see if I get this, to have the opportunity to share with you Christian's resources that help us thrive with the inevitable and unavoidable stresses of our lives.

Christians have resources that no 1 else has.

To enhance our learning, I would like to begin with a little test on your impression about stress.

I don't want this test to cause any of you stress, however, so I'm not going to grade any of your papers.

But please answer mentally with a true or false.

True or false, stress is an important factor in nearly 45% of diseases.

Unfortunately, in our present society, most stress is unavoidable.

Stress lowers blood glucose and diabetes.

It is a fact that most of the effects of stress are outside of our control.

The latest study suggests that stress is a contributing factor not in 45%, but actually 80 to 90% of diseases.

Again, for number 2, the answer is false.

Unfortunately, in our present society, some, though not most, stress is unavoidable.

Stress elevates blood glucose, and those of you who are diabetic know this by experience.

While it is true that some of the effects of stress are outside of our control, most is under our control.

Sometimes the media seems to give the false narrative that everything causes cancer, everything gives stress.

Sometimes we almost want to throw up our hands that we're just helpless victims caught in a lifeboat and bobbing along the sea of life.

But I hope you see by the end of this lecture that there's much we can do that is powerful and effective, that God has provided to his children to relieve the stresses of our everyday life.

But what do we mean when we use the word stress?

As Laura said this morning, there's some complicated definitions.

Clinically, the term stress is referring to a partial or full activation of the body's alarm system for fight or flight with the release of powerful chemical stress hormones.

The 3 major stress hormones are cortisol, GH, and norepinephrine.

But there are a number of others involved as well, and I'm sure you want me to go through all the biochemistry.

Stress is related to feelings and negative emotions such as anger, discontent, jealousy, envy, hatred, fright, worry, guilt, shame.

And of course the opposite of stress is peace.

This is associated with positive emotions.

And perhaps you've seen the scientific studies linking love to endocrine and neuroendocrine hormones, powerful hormones, that are released, and their associated health benefits.

Stress, which causes this fight-or-flight response, has profound physiological effects on us.

It increases our cholesterol levels, blood pressure, blood glucose levels, and heart rate.

It redirects blood flow from the stomach to the skeletal muscles.

And though this response is designed to protect us, when even a minor stress response is prolonged, it can contribute to serious disease.

Stress effects depend upon 4 different factors.

First, frequency, how often the stress is present.

Second, duration, how long the stress lasts.

And third, intensity, how strong a biological reaction the stress induces.

And lastly, the sensitivity of the individual, what is needed to trigger a stress reaction.

The first 2 stress effects depend on the stress itself, the stressor, the agent of stress.

The last 2 stress effects depend on how we respond to the stress.

The first 2 stress effects have to do with external, environmental factors, and the last 2 stress effects have to do with our internal, our individual physiologic and well as psychological reactions to the stress.

Our aim is not to remove all the stress from our life.

Unfortunately, in Chattanooga, we're surrounded by crime, greatly increased with the rampant use of drugs.

And as a precaution, when we built our house and just moved into it, my wife and I installed a security system on the house with a perimeter surveillance of a system running 24-7.

It's Tuesday night at 2 minutes before midnight, Sherry awakened me.

When the chirping continued and I continued sleeping, Sherry woke me up and whispered, there's someone on our front porch.

As I told you, we have every inch of our home perimeter secured by 10 surveillance cameras.

So putting on my glasses, I looked at the video images coming from our alarm surveillance system.

Sure enough there was movement on the front porch.

A spider was actively spinning its web directly over the camera and its motion detector.

Do you think the solution is turning the security system off?

Or do you think the solution is adjusting the sensitivity of the motion detector.

Of course, I did the obvious and turned the security system's sensitivity down a notch.

Our aim is not to indiscriminately eliminate stress alarms from our lives, but to properly adjust the sensitivity to triggers and events.

For example, alcohol can lower our body's stress response, but it is an indiscriminate lowering.

Our aim is always to have an appropriate stress response.

And alcohol increases the risk of injury or death because we don't respond adequately to stress.

In some areas of our life, we may need a decreased anxiety level and decreased stress response.

But in a few areas of our lives, we may need to be aroused to danger.

In these areas, we may actually need an increased stress response.

Just as a security system may be needed in our crime-filled society, our body's stress alarm system is needed for our danger-filled society.

A stress response can motivate us to get help.

A proper stress response now may mean decreased stress later.

I'm sure everyone here is familiar with the myth that a frog will boil to death if the water is heated gradually.

This myth originated in an article published in a psychology journal in 1897.

Though the myth has been shown to be false like many other myths that continues to be popular and taught as truth Though this myth is not true for a frog.

It does make a point that is all true true for for humans in Noah's day only Noah and his family were saved by the ark.

The rest of the world received no stress, and they sought no help.

Though some of our stress is necessary and helpful, much of our stress is unnecessarily necessary and harmful.

Perhaps some are here this morning that have allergies.

Those who are allergic have a body that's overreacting to harmless substances, triggers, like pulling a fire alarm when there's no fire.

The body is unnecessarily reacting strongly to these harmless substances.

This illustrates how we can overreact to harmless triggers in life and have anxiety where anxiety is not needed.

So our aim is to have a fully functional alarm system that gives us a proper warning of danger when we need to fight or take flight, but not sounding an alarm from insignificant triggers.

We can control stress by controlling the environment, and we can control stress by controlling our response to stress as we learn better stress management skills.

How can environmental stresses be controlled?

The first way is called primary prevention.

Where possible, avoid the stress to begin with.

Obviously, this is the best kind of stress control and wherever possible we should try to prevent stress in the home, work, school, and recreation.

Primary prevention requires responsibility, order, and discipline with organization and schedule, appropriate caution and care, and interpersonal relationship skills.

Much unnecessary stress can be eliminated by proper planning, time and money management, and interpersonal disciplines with prompt and clear communication, meekness, humility, and in the home, a lot of forgiveness.

But prevention is outside the scope of our time together this morning.

Even if we're so organized, careful, and disciplined that we somehow manage to prevent all preventable stress, we would still face some environmental stresses that we cannot control.

What controllable factors determine our responses to stress?

By understanding and learning these controllable factors, we can greatly minimize the negative stress effects in our life.

A seminal and often quoted study on this topic was done by psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe in 1967.

They found that the death of a spouse was the most intensely stressing event individuals face.

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Thriving With Stress

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