Measured in terms of contribution or practical and personal gain, we may be fortunate, successfully negotiating our way in the marketplace and social arena. However, despite our achievements, when we take our measure experientially—that is, in terms of our fulfillment, satisfaction and equanimity, or our enthusiasm and optimism—we likely weigh in tense, out-of-sync, stressed.
How stress affects us differs from person to person. Based on a variety of genetic and cultural factors, such as extreme poverty and brutal oppression, a body’s reaction to external forces and abnormal conditions can strain or exceed its adaptive capacities. A significant percentage of all disease and suffering is stress-related because the disruption of the body’s homeostasis or balance affects the nervous, endocrine and immune systems.
The stress rendered by the force of poverty, oppression or ill health is one matter. However, other forces that leave us with life-orienting goals, for the most part, cause our stress. Our deeply felt commitment to reveal and manage them is a means to making it matter that we lived at all.
In the first instance, our life-orienting goals are driven by primitive instincts for which we are not a good adaptive match. Most of us don’t thrive in waters too deep and too murky for our personal, social or professional resources. So, we want to interrogate previously unexamined goals that have set us off in the wrong adaptive direction.
In terms of our actual experience, when should we persist with our brute desires? Or get that we’re in “over our heads?” Or admit that we're qualified to move up the ladder, but the work is so stressful that we’ve lost sight of what matters? Or see that we have an unquenchable thirst for recognition and refuse to be fulfilled before we’ve secured the trophy of envy?
This rivalrous impulse to be envied, part of our biological intelligence, is not just an occasional factor. It is also a (usually unrecognized) piece of our life-orienting goals. While this instinct is harnessed to support the survival of the species-at-large, nature cares not that the individual lion, dog or human suffers terribly for it. Indeed, the suffering of “lower” animals and humans throughout time at the hands of an indifferent universe (and other humans) is more than we can bear to think about.
Nonetheless, in order to fulfill our unique promise, we must come to grips with goals driven by raw instincts that leave us constantly stressed.
In the second instance, we must also come to grips with the intimidating social force that promotes mimicry and conformity as the most acceptable means to achieving our objectives. This intimidation infests our life-orienting goals and, by definition, leaves us stressed.
Even so, corralling the human beast has never been an easy task. Seduced by incentive, fenced in by threat of punishment or temporarily stupefied by jack-booted pressure to conform, still, we resist. Why? Because such intimidation we endure contradicts a countervailing force—the force we term deliberative independence. What it wants of us is an authentic voice and a positive contribution to the sum total of human experience.
However, until we 1) interrogate the life-orienting goals that place us in harm’s way, 2) learn to read our experience and 3) use that measure to plan and manage our lives, stress will continue to unnerve us and those who depend on us.
For more on this subject, please see my 10.13.14 post titled, Life-orienting goals and my 09.15.14 post titled, Generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity.
Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and leader of its Retreat Workshops and Advanced Classes.