The Politics of Stress
The coaching and therapy world is reprehensible for the way it glosses over the politics of stress.
How can we in good faith say, "here's how to feel better" when the obstacles to feeling better are partly a result of centuries of systemic injustice? How can I possibly ask someone to "reframe their fear" when they are CURRENTLY at high risk of getting injured by police just for walking down the street? Even I, a person of significant privilege, still have laws (cultural and legal) on my body dictating how I'm allowed to earn a living, feel pleasure, and experience safety.
A powerful story of our agency always exists, but finding it is no joke--and requires eyes that are open and ready to see real pain and real danger.
The politics even extend to our understanding of medicine, and thus our well-being. The standard of Body Mass Index (BMI) was invented for population (not individual) statistics and repurposed to reinforce a strictly European body ideal (read: it's racist from soup to nuts). The result is shame, increased stress, and worse health care outcomes for nonwhite people.
Pharmaceuticals are fucked, too. From The Guardian in 2015: "Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of US women, and it affects men and women differently at every level, including symptoms, risk factors and outcomes. But only one third of cardiovascular clinical trial subjects are female and only 31% of cardiovascular clinical trials that include women report results by sex, according to the report."
A similar problem afflicts studies of anxiety and depression--women's endocrine systems are wildly different from men, yet it's unaccounted for in over two thirds of studies.
Yeah, so, your drugs were made for men, and your weight might be just fine, despite what every doctor you'll see would say.
....Anyway.
With stress, we observe our vagus nerve accumulating stress with every stressor we encounter.
So to manage our stress effectively, we have to offer our vagus nerve a release every single day. It's straightforward to do (exercise! breathwork! laughter! physical affection! creative expression!) but that shit takes TIME. Especially because the more stress someone experiences, the more intensive the release has to be. If we allow it to accumulate, the physiological impact is indistinguishable from trauma.
Chronic stress without release = trauma.
"Chronic diseases such as diabetes or heart conditions are mislabeled “lifestyle” diseases, when behaviors are not the central problem. Difficult life circumstances cause disease. In other words, the predominant reason black women get sick is not because they eat the wrong things but because their lives are often stressful." - The Scientific American
We simply can't talk about stress without talking about how someone who experiences e.g. daily microaggressions is going to have to spend significantly more time regulating their nervous system, which is time they can't devote to their careers, families, hobbies, pleasure, or political action. Behold: the politics sneaks tendrils into our bodies, our schedules, our entire lives.
The thing that unites all of us is the ability to set goals that are worth the endurance of injustice.
I'm here to guide on that, and learn how to better support people with all sorts of intersectional angles presenting obstacles along the way. I hope I never stop learning, because our culture will never stop changing and the technology of our knowledge will never stop evolving.
And you? You deserve to feel good, and also it is real that you aren't physically safe a lot of the time. Get you a coach who can acknowledge both.
Feel free to forward to someone who could use the resource; it's free, as always.