“If it’s not fixable, then there’s no help in worrying.”
When it comes to managing stress, we need to be able to feel a real sense of control when we can, but also know what’s beyond our influence to change. A natural response to the uncertainty of life is to attempt to exert more control in order to make your world more predictable, and therefore “safer.” When things feel like they’re slipping from our fingers, the instinct is to grip tighter. But trying to exert our will over situations that are beyond our influence only makes stress constant, and therefore toxic.
An interesting study on baboons illustrates this perfectly, and holds lessons for humans as well — we’re a lot like baboons in clothes. We are both highly social creatures, and social stratifications affect our health. Baboons are hierarchical primates, where dominant males control everything from interactions between subordinates to general resources. Due to their status and capacity to control their environment, male and female baboons who are dominant benefit: their health is better overall, and they tend to have less cardiovascular disease.
When the hierarchy becomes unstable for males, however, things change. Baboon social hierarchies can get disrupted by deaths, extreme weather or other environmental changes, conflicts with other groups, and conflict within the group. When former alpha males are no longer living in the same stable, predictable environment as before — for example, when they’re moved to a new enclosure and they find themselves in new social groups, needing to assert themselves — their physiological advantage evaporates along with their position of power. They develop more cardiovascular disease than subordinates. But the problem is not just that they no longer have the control they once did. It’s that they continue to try to control things. They are hardwired to do it, but it’s like they’re throwing themselves against a brick wall. And they pay the price: higher stress hormones and more illness.
Control is great when you have it, but if you’re striving for it and can’t achieve it, you suffer. Control is a double-edged sword: it can work as a tactic when you have a stable, predictable environment, but not when you don’t. And “predictable” can be swept away at any moment. We have a predictable environment — until suddenly, for any number of reasons, we don’t.
One of the biggest unpredictable disruptions we can experience in our modern lives is illness. If you’ve ever had to care for a loved one with a serious illness, you have probably felt helpless about their condition. I’ve studied caregivers extensively over the course of my career. I’m particularly interested in understanding the experience of caregivers in my stress studies because there are a lot of factors they can’t control about their lives. For our stress health studies, we enroll family caregivers (versus paid caregivers), because this type of uncontrollable and unrelenting stress adds up over years and can start to affect health. My colleague Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and her late husband Ron Glaser conducted classic studies here, showing for example that caregivers have wounds that repair and heal more slowly, taking nine extra days for complete healing.
Caregivers of family members with mental illness have a particularly tough path: They experience conditions that alarm the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions, like feeling overwhelmed, burdened, and trapped. Their finances are affected by costs of care and by lost productivity and income. They have higher rates of depression, anxiety, and healthcare usage. So on top of that, to survive, they need to focus on the little they can control, to maximize their stress resilience.
The question “What can I control?” is an urgent one for caregivers. You want to advocate for your loved one. You want to get them the support and interventions they need in order to thrive. At the same time, you can’t change medical conditions or genetic disorders. And you can’t predict their trajectory. With any diagnosis, a lot about the future (both theirs and yours) becomes uncertain. The challenge for caregivers in this situation becomes learning how to support without trying to control; figuring out where to pour their love and energy into research or action that will help without spinning their wheels or trying to move a mountain that will never be moved.
What we have to learn to do in these types of life situations is separate the circumstances of our lives into two buckets: what we can control and what we can’t. For a long time, I kept a quote from the Dalai Lama pinned to my refrigerator door:
If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry.
If it’s not fixable, then there is no help in worrying.
Something that can help you immediately is to become more aware of where your mental energy is going. You have limited bandwidth: attention is a precious limited resource. Notice when you’re spending a lot of time anticipating something that hasn’t happened, or ruminating about something that already has. When something is sucking up your mental bandwidth, ask yourself: Is this something that’s in my control? If we focus on the things we can control, and accept everything else, what would our days be like?
As we get older we feel more positive, and our social relationships are more positive. It’s not about age though. It’s about the perception of time: The less time we perceive we have left in life, the more we switch our goals toward more emotionally meaningful ones, including helping others. In other words, when we think we have less time to live, we spend our time on what’s truly meaningful to us. This can be called spiritual urgency and is a gift we can put in our go bag. Having spiritual urgency can give you a sense of freedom: Jump toward the more meaningful goals now. Live now as if it is your last year.
This is an excerpt from STRESS PRESCRIPTION by, Dr. Elissa Epel published by Penguin Life, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Elissa Epel.
