What is Stress?
What is stress? Think of all the ways we use the word “stress”. We say “That is stressful,” to refer to something about our environment. We say “I feel stressed,” to refer to how we feel about a situation. And we say “I am stressed,” or “I am stressed out,” to refer to physical sensations such as muscle tension, shallow breathing or fatigue. Clearly, using only one word for several different experiences will cause confusion.
To address this confusion I developed a new model of stress called the Unease Modulation Model. The UM Model is unique from other stress models because it provides clear and actionable techniques that people can use to better manage stress in their everyday lives.
For an in-depth explanation of the Unease Modulation Model
The UM Model is based on several key principles. The first is that stress is caused by the combination of difficulty and unease. Difficulty is the level of effort necessary to complete a task measured against our available resources (such as time, social, financial, etc.). Unease is our feeling of desire or aversion associated with the task or an anticipated outcome.
The underlying foundation of the model is simple: when unease decreases, we experience a sensation of pleasure. This sensation makes us want to continue reducing unease, even with behaviors that actually increase difficulty. For example, say we need to clean the bathroom. Most people do not particularly wants to clean the bathroom so there is an aversion to completing the task, which makes us feel unease. To reduce our unease, we may put off cleaning the bathroom til tomorrow. This avoidance allows our unease to temporarily go down, but the difficulty of the task will go up. The longer we wait to clean the bathroom, the dirtier it will be and so the longer it will take. The next day our unease, our aversion, has increased because we know the chore is going to be even more unpleasant and time consuming. One of the techniques I teach people using the UM Model is to separate difficulty and unease for a task, and focus on reducing difficulty.
The other components of stress include activation and modulation, our physiological reactions to stress, and reserves, our energy resources. These five components cover the both the emotional experience of stress, the strain it places on us, and the physiological affect of stress on our bodies.
- Difficulty: The demands we face compared to the resources we have available to meet those demands.
- Unease: Our desire for something we do not have or aversion to something facing us.
- Activation: A physical process that energizes our body so we can meet demands, associated with our flight/fight response.
- Modulation: A physical process that regulates how activation is expressed through the body as well as a rest and repair system that helps us recover from meeting demands.
- Reserves: Reserves refer to the energy we have available to meet demands. We have both short term and long term reserves.
By breaking down stress into these components, we can see exactly how stress is affecting our lives and learn targeted skills to affect the components most contributing to our stress.
In my online courses and corporate workshops, I teach about the components and how they interact in more detail, the specific skills needed to identify and decrease unease, and various applications of the model. Based in physiology and mathematics, this model can be used to break down human behavior in everything from anxiety and depression disorders, relationships, addiction, group dynamics, performance, parenting, and more.
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