When we go about our day to day lives, we have desires, passions you might say? These passions direct our motives and transform them into actions. There are times when they are so intense, they overwhelm us. Sometimes this is not even a choice we make, but rather our limbic system begins to malfunction.
Most people have had multiple experiences of fear, worry, and stress in the same day. What are some of the ways that stress can manifest itself? (Consider the whole person: body and soul, mind and spirit.) What are some of the ways that people can (be helped to) cope with stress?
Stress is a daily encounter for some people, even if only during nightmares. “We are pulled in different directions, and, instead of finding peace, we become restless”. Spiritually we will either find ourselves in a deep turmoil or surrender our deepest anxieties to a higher power (in our case Jesus), preventing anything more than baseline strife. On the spiritual level, the source (or at least the perpetuating forces) of stressors are cut-off or consistently hindered at their root by a certain loving abandonment to surrender, knowing well that “all things work for the good of those who love God”(Romans 8:28 NRSVCE). Contrary to the Christian spiritual method of coping with the deepest/most efficacious level of stress, the popular culture recommends that the only help is either pharmacological or therapeutic (typically a consistent indulgence of predominant desires). Thereby, non-Christians assume that either the spiritual level is not relevant/nonexistent, that it is a place of total self-invention, and/or that there is nothing we can do about it, that we must only focus on the physical, or even worse, that is only spiritual. Rather, Christian spirituality suggests that in divorcing oneself from such assumptions one can come to value eternal things and the trivial no longer has a grip on our emotional state. Christian spirituality, in fact, would claim that any application/aspect of the aforementioned "modern methods" of coping is purely a cover-up of what is true (emotion-focused) and will only increase our anxieties. One may argue that what we call the “spiritual level” is actually just our baseline conscious/unconscious mind, and they would not be incorrect per se. In our conscious mind, we tend to dwell on the stressor, losing focus on other more important things. The consciousness of stress is revealed to us both in conceptual preoccupation as well as the body’s physical reactivity. Physiologically we experience stress in “palpitations, sweating, dry mouth, shortness of breath, fidgeting, accelerated speech, [increased] negative emotions…, and longer duration of stress fatigue”. This physiological response heavily affects every other part of our body from immune defense to cellular regeneration.
In conclusion, we should not act as though stress and peace are perfectly contradictory. Rather, we should accept that we are a composite being and that our physiological experience is not our only experience. Being stressed, does not immediately mean that one is not trusting God, but at least that they (are) experience(ing) intense expressions of hope and/or determination. Of course, however, we should not expect that our ability to trust God is well formed since on this front there is almost always great room for growth here. We can quell our anxieties by frequent prayer and genuine efforts at trust, and "hope does not disappoint"(Romans 5:5). In this way, we know that a life lived for God is the healthiest life not only spiritually but with regard to every aspect of our nature. Often, psychology is restrained to the secular, but faith intersects every aspect of our being, and as seen above, so also does psychology. Pharma does provide a wholistic answer to anxiety, depression, etc. but sometimes a little help is necessary. Insofar as we are a composite being there must be a composite answer to stress.
Written by Carter Carruthers
