Under the spell of secret stress

How background stress is insidiously taking control of my life

Hello, I’m Philippine and to be honest, I feel like a beginner at life – I am forever trying to make sense of it. You can find my attempts at this, plus reflections, musings and experiences right here, in my newsletter. Subscribing is free! For everyone who feels like a beginner at life, and wants to connect in some way.

The last few months I’ve had to deal with a lot of background stress, the kind you often don’t even realise you have. And although it does come to the surface of consciousness every now and again, it often hangs out in my subconscious, influencing and limiting me without being aware of it – I know it’s got me under its spell when I’m constantly wondering why I can’t get myself to do anything, why living feels like trying to make my way through a kind of thick treacle.

This type of stress, I find, is much more insidious than the more acute kind.¹ Acute stress is obvious, meaning that you can react in the most helpful way, and it often dissipates relatively quickly. In contrast, background stress is often caused by something long term, such as a deadline that’s weeks or months away, or a situation of some kind that can’t easily be changed. All you may notice when it comes to background stress, however, are the occasional moments of acute stress relating to the same thing, when in fact there is also a constant low key – and sometimes not at all that low key – background stress underlying these moments of acute stress.

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Okay, laying it out like this is a little helpful, but truly I just wish that I had a simple solution for this kind of background stress – I don’t. I can’t do much to change the situation, and changing my thoughts I find pretty impossible to begin with, but attempting to change unconscious ones – goodness. Therefore, all I’m doing here is sharing my experience with and thoughts on it, in the hope that it will somehow bring me closer to some kind of solution, or otherwise simply closer to you, reader and other humans out there experiencing something similar.

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I think I might be extra prone to background stress or it might influence me more because I’m autistic. When things are uncertain or unclear they’re highly likely to cause me stress. A simple example is the phone call. If I know that someone, let’s say the GP, is going to ring me at some point that day, my whole day is taken up by this. First there’s the stress and anxiety of waiting (preparation will probably already have been done on a previous day), and then there’s the recovery, not just from the phone call itself, but from all of that waiting stress too.

In a more long term situation – like sorting out help from the municipalities now that I’ve been diagnosed autistic (which is what has been causing my background stress the last few months) – the stress may be more low key and less obvious, but at its core very similar to that of the phone call. It takes up a lot of conscious and unconscious headspace and energy. And as a result, it logically limits how much headspace and energy I’ve got left for other things during that time. Additionally, my autistic, detail-oriented brain likes and needs to think everything through thoroughly, meaning that things take up even larger amounts of my resources.

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This is making me wonder what kind of role this type of stress has played in the build up towards my burnout. Most of that time I was studying and before that I was in school. Hence, there was almost never a moment without a lurking deadline, which caused not only acute and conscious stress, but also a constant stream of background stress.

The brief moments of acute stress – the day of or before a presentation, exam or deadline – weren’t always pleasant and I’m sure I didn’t deal with them in the best way, but they were short lived, and if I tried I’m sure I could relatively easily learn to respond to them in a more helpful way.

It’s the big muddy puddle of underlying background stress that was there all the time, and that became so normal I didn’t even realise that there was another way. I suppose that it’s already a step forward, then, that I now know that there is in fact an alternative – or at least I hope there is. But what it is or how to achieve it, I haven’t got a clue. All I’ve got is avoiding everything that causes background stress altogether. This, however, is not only impossible, it also isn’t what I ultimately want, because I believe that that would mean missing out on so much of life that I do want to experience. And so, I’ll have to find a different approach…

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Given the fact that background stress is a more long term thing itself, the way to deal with it may be more of a long game too. Just like with most things related to health and wellbeing: you have to keep exercising to stay fit, continue to eat healthily to maintain a certain level of health, regularly talk to people to feel connected, and so on. And perhaps, similarly, with background stress, you need to continuously live a life that supports you in dealing with it.

This probably entails things like acknowledging and making room for my feelings, giving myself compassion, doing things that bring me joy, exercise, sleep enough, and all of those things that I know are good for stress and my wellbeing in general. Unfortunately, though, these things won’t get rid of the background stress. Yet hopefully the effect of it will be somewhat diminished, and the good news is that all of these things are likely to benefit the whole of my wellbeing.

I haven’t researched this, these are just my own thoughts, and what I think I might find if I did look into it more, but to be honest, I find it rather frustrating. I just want that magical solution – yet I guess that that is not how life works, huh.

Ironically, that may be the biggest lesson, that this is not something to fix or solve. Instead it might be something to merely be aware of and let be, something to say yes to, welcome and accept as a part of life. This won’t make it go away, in fact it aims to do the opposite, but that will, I suspect, make it just a little lighter to carry.

Allowing things, feelings, sensations and thoughts to just be – it’s actually something I’ve been trying to do already. So all I’ve got to do is apply it to background stress too. Nevertheless, it seems like the simplicity of this approach stands in sharp contrast to how hard it is to actually do. And so I need to continuously remind myself of this and truly try to welcome whatever is coming my way. Not in a defeated kind of way, but in an open way, making room for what comes, which in turn leaves space for me to act intentionally. This may seem paradoxical, but is perhaps more like a dance of life, where you both follow and lead at the same time.

What is your experience of background stress, and how do you deal with it?

In this post you can find out a little bit more about me and my journey.

1. These are my own terms. Whether such terms exist more officially too, and if so whether they mean the same thing, I wouldn’t know. I came up with them here simply to clarify things for myself and, hopefully, for you.