STRESSORS OR REACTANTS?

It is true that life is filled with stressors sometimes, but it is true that people are more stressed from being reactive towards life than from life’s actual stressors. What is the difference between a stressor and a reactant?

A stressor is any external event or situation that causes stress or tension in an individual, such as work deadlines, financial problems, or relationship conflicts.

A reactant refers to the response or reaction that an individual internally generates in response to a stressor. The reactant is the way in which an individual responds to the stressor, whether it be through emotional, cognitive, or behavioral changes.

At the age of about 18yrs, I posted a photo of me in a bum short and a halter neck blouse on Facebook and 99% of my followers commented positively and liked the picture. However, a church member inboxed me to tell me how immoral it was to post such a picture of myself and it immediately started a moral suffering in me. Eventually, I didn’t delete the picture and the church member didn’t unfriend or unfollow me on that platform however judgmental he acted towards me afterwards.

After days of directly asking the friends that I trusted about what was wrong with the picture and telling them the story of what had happened, my female friends said he was attracted to me and was trying to control my behavior, and my male friends flat out asked, “how is his opinion your business?”!

How was his opinion my business? It wasn’t my business. I had become agonized and stressed out over something that was of zero importance. I had created a reactant when there was no substantial stressor and exerted time and energy on it.

Of course I hadn’t yet learned my lessons at that point. I continued getting trapped in needless suffering that was all a product of made up stress and this spilled into actually stressful situations that left me feeling overwhelmed, creating a catastrophe out of nothing, and living in the irresponsible lane of thinking that the stress in my life far surpassed that in everyone else’s lives and so I was entitled to acting out my stress.

But with continued observation of the human behaviors and thinking patterns on social media, it eventually became clear that a lot of the times, our self-generated reactants to an otherwise non-threatening situations make up the highest percentage of what gets us worked up unnecessarily, and most times, these reactants come from the place of rebellion.

I found this repeating itself in everyday life especially in shared road usage. I have never been able to wrap my head around humans looking at a very random vehicle and decide that they are going to act nasty towards the vehicle.

We never stop to remind ourselves that we actually can’t even tell if it’s a man, woman, older or younger person who is driving the vehicle. We just move to project our assumptions on a locomotive object and then attack it! And, aggressive road users are reactive mostly through the inwardly generated misconception that an otherwise honest mistake from another road user is “deliberately” targeted towards them and they need to teach them a lesson by themselves becoming aggressive and hostile!

In my experience, I became less prone to whipping up unnecessary whirlwinds in my life using a few strategies that I am about to share here:

1. Build Self-awareness: self awareness opened me up to identifying if the things I consider stressful are actually stressful or if my responses to them created the stress. With self awareness, I made a proper assessment of my life to establish what actually passed as a stressor and what didn’t. I was also able to recognize and gut the need for childish rebelliousness in myself and that dampened my reactiveness and greatly reduced my stress levels.
2. Recognize your privileges: like made up stressors, there are made up privileges as well as real privileges. What I learned is that the more you are able to remain firm and not lend your reactions to a made up stressor, the more people considered you privileged (in a derogatory and borderline dehumanizing way). However, self-awareness taught me that my privileges actually did interfere with my ability to determine how much of a stressor a situation actually is to other people. So I learned to stop trying to save others from doing what probably seemed like an alleviating response to their perceived problems.
3. Recognize that Emotions are Contagious: this meant that I did not need to get dragged into sympathetic emotionality just because someone else is unable to differentiate a real problem from an actual problem. Empathy means understanding that people feel entitled to their emotions and acting out on them, but that didn’t mean that I have to lend my energy or presence to the reactive whirlwind going on around me.
4. Check your projections: indeed, we suffer more from our projections onto a situation than we suffer from actual problems arising from the situation. Yes, there are indeed dark hearted people out there, but it is best for us not to assume that everyone we come across or every situation we encounter is designed most deliberately to hurt or harm us. Projecting creates needless paranoia and reactiveness. Simply replace your need to project with empathy. Having empathy for someone you consider a bad person is way more protective of your energy than it stresses you out.
5. Be Mindful: mindfulness is high intelligence in motion. Practice reflective urgency in your daily life. Slow down, literally. Very very few things in life require urgency and even much fewer things require emergency. Learn how to maintain your pace. You are a great problem-solver if you live an even paced life and keep a mind that is not easily hijacked by gimmicks.
6. Trust yourself: The more I have trusted my ability to make it through a quagmire of a situation, the more likely I find solutions and quickly too. Reactiveness is distracting in much the same way that alcohol sways! Don’t indulge it. Recognize how you feel about a situation and let it be. You don’t need to follow the rabbit hole that your emotions open up. You need to lend your energy to immediately generating interconnected brain cells that can address the situation at hand effectively.

As you go through your week, I want to encourage you to make mental notes of how many things draw a reaction from you, why they draw them, and how you can retrain your responses to these situations. Define what constitutes an actual stress to you at this stage of your life. Recognize when you are projecting and how it affects you much more than the actual situation. Lastly, share this article with your friends to help them stay in charge of their lives!