Stress Forces | Stressed Perception | Stress as a "Scriptwriter" and "Story Library" | Stressed Motivation | The Stressed Self

So far, we’ve seen how fear etc. can force entry into our mind, secretively stealing in through the “doorway” of the amygdala and hippocampus. A similar trick was used by the ancient Greeks, who broke through Troy’s city gates by offering the Trojans the gift of a giant wooden horse - inside which they’d smuggled a platoon of crack troops.

The equivalent, here, are the stories that “stress forces” cook up and ship aboard our hippocampus turned “Trojan Horse”. Now, this brain structure forms a springboard from which fear etc. can sneak past our defences and bombard us with fictions and propaganda.

Take compulsive desire, for instance. This can fabricate such rave reviews for given “desire objects” that these start to seem the answer for our every need.

When it turns its rose-tinting inwards, this “stress force” gets to raving about us. Now, compulsive desire dabs touch-up paint onto our self-portrait, exaggerating our plus points and airbrushing away our flaws. The effect is to render us so much the apple of our own eye that we’re oversupplied with entitlement and self-praise. Our head swells and we end up as a “Prima Donna”.

Another of the self-representations by which stress can delude us is the exact mirror image, namely the “Cinderella”. Here, we see the opposite effect, where compulsive desire takes back its praise, and our self-image is subjected to a downgrade, like we were a waste of space. This humiliation is, of course, arranged by gloom. This glum little chum can run us down, and leave us floundering in doubt like we’re nowt but a clown.

Gloom can collapse our mood through tales as morbid as merchants of doom, whereby it lays waste to our animal spirits and appetites. Gloom’s stories can knit together a narrative so dire, it’s like we’re perennially drenched in rain. Day after day, these can drain our world of meaning, and paint the bluest skies as grey. We can find ourselves pulled down by yarns of how “bad” or “worthless” we’ve been of late, and felled by fallacious guilt and shame. Our halo now vanishes without trace, with a dunce’s cap to take its place.

These gloom-fed stories can puncture our self-belief and demotivate, shredding our self-esteem and plaguing us with hopelessness.

Besides making us too big for our boots or down in the dumps, stress can give us the “spikiness” of anger or the “trembling terrors” of fear.

Fear’s stories mould our “head shape” by having us read danger wherever we tread, and can leave us full of deep-set insecurity and fret. They can leave us trapped inside a prison of suspiciousness and avoidance, and make it hard for us to take anyone or anything on trust. Fear can also play tag team with other “stress  forces”, as when it lends weight to defeatist gloom. 

In the meantime, anger can do its darnedest to fill us with resentfulness and vengefulness, so we stew away like a pressure cooker. Soon, such might be our aggravation that we blow our lid and boil over.

Anger can make us read “badness” into whomever and whatever it highlights, leading us down the road of impatience, intolerance and contempt. Now, we can find even the loveliest persons and things to be irritants.

Maybe anger has us mark out our territory as the local big shot, kicking over trash cans and toting out insults. Or it might make us act up just because our fiancée arrives the tiniest bit late on a date.

Neither do anger’s flashes and flares necessarily leave our own self spared. Especially when gloom rears its head, anger can mar our self-image with bruises and scars. Now, we can find ourselves turned against ourselves, overrun by shame, and wearing the blame for every misfortune and mistake, adding weight to any self-portrait bearing the Cinderella stain (see above).