Your Stress Threshold

Our Constitutional Nature

Hans Selye (the father of stress studies) once wrote of the rabbit and the turtle. Some of us approach life more like a rabbit, running from place to place, nibbling when we can, shooting off in all directions. Others approach life more like a turtle, proceeding methodically from point to point with careful attention to detail, taking things one at a time. Both extremes are healthy. What is unhealthy, or stressful, is trying to be different from our nature. For example, the rabbit says to her or his turtle spouse, "You never want to go anywhere or do anything." The turtle, feeling guilty, decides to become a rabbit for the night and go barhopping with the rabbit spouse. That, Selye says, is what causes stress- being untrue to our nature.

Our Conditioning

We all have our limit, our "breaking point", the point at which we will be tripped into a "fight, flight or freeze" state.  Our constitutional nature determines a set point for this threshold. However, this set point is often lowered (it now takes less to evoke a stress response) by past conditioning.  We have more resources than ever to raise our stress threshold level, including setting it somewhat above that determined by our constitutional nature. Read Nature and Nuture below for further understanding.