Cox News Service

Stress is not all bad. It's the reason we respond to alarm clocks, earn our paychecks and slam on our brakes in time to stop short of that jerk ahead who's waiting at a green light. Short bursts of stress actually help our immune systems.

That is why health professionals talk about stress management, not stress elimination. They search for a stress level that pushes us through life without trampling us.

Those professionals are not stressed by the possibility of unemployment. Stress plays a role in two-thirds of family doctors' visits, says the American Academy of Family Physicians, and in more than half the deaths to Americans younger than 65, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

So in a nutshell, the goal of stress management is to feel enough stress that we're able to get out of bed every morning but not so much that we fall over dead.

The body reacts to stress by swamping us with adrenaline and other hormones that help us escape or overcome physical danger. Our hearts race, our eyes widen, our blood is diverted from the digestive organs and toward our muscles. Our livers unleash sugars and our abdomens release fat cells, both to feed our muscles for quick energy.

All of which is quite useful when we need to flee a tiger or douse a fire on the stovetop, but not very helpful for reacting to a credit card statement with a $1,000 gas fill-up or a boss who changes the day's urgent assignment at 4 p.m. In the 21st century, those emotional stresses are far more common than the physical stresses for which our bodies prepare us.

In emotional stress, the sugars and fats pumped out to muscles that don't need them wind up scarring the walls of our blood vessels. We are distraught to find out there's no one we can choke, as employee assistance counselor Dave Evans puts it.

"I define stress as the justifiable desire that you feel to just choke the life out of someone who so richly deserves it," says Evans, from Kettering Medical Center's pastoral care department in Dayton, Ohio.

He doesn't recommend that. Like all stress counselors, Evans recommends two or three dozen coping skills that are familiar to stressed-out magazine readers and Web surfers. He gives valuable advice about friendships, exercise, spirituality, deep breaths, relaxation, self-expression, setting limits, finding solutions, prioritizing and doing what we enjoy, which is a lot to remember.

But they all seem to come down to focus and control. Focus on what's really important to us, and control what we can without sweating the rest.

Speaking last week at the University of Dayton Wellness Program's weekly brown-bag lecture, Evans quoted the late Dr. Hans Selye, generally regarded the father of modern stress management although the connection between emotions and illness has been made at least since the 18th century.

Stress, said Selye, "is not so much the event but the perception of the event by the person." As evidence, consider how our bodies prepare to flee tigers even when we know the stress is coming from images on a movie screen.

The next step from that truism is that we can control our perceptions of what happens to us, so we should be able to control our stress levels. Yes and no, says Centerville psychologist Dennis O'Grady. Yes, distress is determined by how we react to stressors, but it's also determined by the stressor itself and "how much life has tromped you down."

"There's a lot of pop psychology centered on a control utopia - that we have so much control over our emotions and brains and so forth," O'Grady says. "But the truth is, we don't." Even worse, trying to control what we can't is a huge stressor.

"Perfectionism or unrealistic notions of life can make stressors into distress," Evans says.

So can distractions from the goal of the moment, says Bruce Stapleton, president of Elan Vital in Centerville, Ohio, a program that incorporates stress management with physical fitness. That's why his program emphasizes having clear goals and values.

"There are so many distractions out there that if they are making it too difficult to do or even decide what you need to do, that causes stress," Stapleton says. "If you have a very clear and definitive focus on what it is you're looking for, all those distractions aren't distractions anymore."

Decide what's important, control what you can and go from there. That sounds easier than it is, of course, but maybe focusing on the big picture of serenity is easier than trying to memorize the steps to reach it.

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