This post is Part 1 of a series.
In my book, The Language of Emotions, I focus on stress as a weasel word (a word we use to mask awareness) that hides emotions.
My work with emotions helps people unmask weasel words and identify the subtle emotional aspects of traits we generally don’t see as emotions. For instance, motivation is an aspect of anxiety, while behavioral self-correction is an aspect of shame, and our capacity for fairness is an aspect of envy.
All of our emotions exist in many subtle levels of intensity that we’ve mostly learned to describe with weasel words.
Stress Is Our Most Overused Weasel Word for Emotions
What are you feeling when you’re stressed? Are you angry or ashamed? Are you anxious or confused? Are you feeling panicky or embarrassed? What are you feeling?
“Stressed” is not a helpful answer to these questions because the way we’ve been taught to view stress leaves us with very few options except to calm ourselves down somehow. When we misidentify our emotions as stress, we disconnect ourselves from what’s actually happening.
From The Language of Emotions:
The word “stress” doesn’t even come from the world of emotions; it comes from the world of physics and engineering, where it’s defined as a pressure, pull, or force exerted on one thing by another, or the internal resistance of a thing to the external forces applied to it. Interestingly, this word that refers to things—to inanimate objects—has found its way into our emotional vocabulary.
And our emotional definition of stress nearly equals the definition given to us by engineers; it has helped us view ourselves as objects being acted upon by forces instead of living, agile, and resourceful organisms. The word stress has become a universal catchall for emotions for people who don’t have a functional emotional vocabulary. Now if we’re sad, furious, frightened, exhilarated, exhausted, despondent, ashamed, mournful, panicky, or even suicidally depressed, we can use the word stress to describe our condition. This is not a sign of emotional awareness. (McLaren, 2023, p. 377)
Being able to identify and name our emotions is essential to our well-being. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and her colleagues have found in study after study that having (or developing) a robust emotional vocabulary—all by itself—can help people develop stronger emotion regulation skills. Simply having more words for your emotions helps your brain and your body categorize them accurately and respond to them appropriately.
Which is why it’s a shame that we aren’t taught that our “stress” response is an emotional response. If we don’t know what’s happening inside us, we may not develop the skills we need to understand and regulate our necessary emotional responses to stressful situations.
But if we can learn how to identify and name the emotions that are hiding under the weasel word of stress, we can learn how to regulate them.
Uncovering the Emotional Vocabulary of Stress
In my applied work, I teach people to identify and name emotions, and then work with them directly instead of trying to repress, ignore, or exchange them for something else.
When I listen to people talk about stress, I see three emotions very clearly: anxiety (the emotion of motivation, task-completion, and deadline-awareness); panic (the emotion that steps forward when our lives are in danger); and anger (the emotion that helps us set and maintain boundaries around what we value).
Of course, other emotions can be involved, because each of our emotions contains intelligence and skills to help us navigate through the world, but these three are almost always present in our stress response.
Here are some simple ideas for engaging with these emotional responses to stressors:
Anxiety
- Anxiety helps you organize, plan for, and complete your tasks and meet your deadlines. Stressors require some kind of action or plan, and anxiety brings you the focus and energy you need.
- You work with your anxiety by intentionally marshalling your energy to help you focus on what needs to be done (list-making, for instance, is a specific anxiety-supporting skill).
- The internal questions for anxiety are: What brought this feeling forward? What truly needs to be done?
Panic
- Panic gives you the energy and instincts you need when you feel threatened or endangered. It’s a fast-moving, fast-thinking emotion that relies on your instinctual survival skills.
- You have four main choices during emergencies: Fight, flee, freeze, or flock to safety. Listen to your body – don’t think, just act. Your instinctual body is a survival expert, and it will keep you safe.
- The internal questions for panic are: What is currently a threat? Please help me fight, flee, freeze, or flock to safety.
Anger
Stress in itself is not the problem; stress is a necessary and even sacred part of life. Without it, you would be untested, undifferentiated, unchallenged, and insufficiently resourced.
Even the word “stress” tells us this in an alternate definition, which is to underscore, accentuate, or emphasize something. When you feel stressed-out, you are in many ways slowing yourself down to notice, emphasize, and underscore (perhaps unconsciously) things that are deeply important to you. You don’t stress over things you don’t care about.
Stressors always uncover important issues; if you try to avoid stress or repress your stress responses, you won’t gain the agility you need to engage with the meaningful stressors of life in all their power and unpredictability. (McLaren, 2023, p. 380)
In part 2: Why stress is good for you
