Michele Ionno, our Recover Lead, is a Doctor of Physical Therapist and not a Psychologist nor a mental health counselor of any kind. The articles written during Recover Week may at times reference mental health or mental skills training. When this occurs, it is only Dr. Ionno, DPT, bringing these important topics to your attention. The information should be taken only as entertainment and his opinion but if interested, we are happy to connect you to one of our colleagues in the Psychology profession to explore these topics further. In fact, we recommend each of you include a Psychologist on your Performance & Wellness Team. Do you want to learn more information on the topics we’ve introduced here? Are you ready to seek the help or services of a mental health clinician? If so, you could start at the American Psychological Association, National Register of Health Service Psychologists, or the Association for Applied Sports Psychology. If you do not find what you are looking for, reach out to us and we will happily help you find a licensed provider in your area.
How we define stress.
Recovery is centered entirely on your management of stress. We often think of stress as being a negative thing, but that is only half of the view. Actually, stress is used to describe the use of energy. But what does that actually mean?
Stress is derived from the Latin word strictus which is translated to mean “drawn tight.”
Think about the rope you use for tug-of-war and how you “draw it tight,” when the game begins. Tug-of-war between kindergarteners “stresses” the rope different than a game between NFL players.
The rope is your body and mind. The game is a physical, mental activity, or sometimes both.
Today, I want to reframe how you consider stress and begin to look at it as a mental and physical tool. We need to use stress to:
Challenge your physical capacity and build muscle.
Train mental reactions under controlled conditions to prepare for future ones.
Learn to recognize when the load is too much and you physically have to remove it so you don’t get hurt.
Recognize when we can control how we mentally respond to the situations around us.
In the FMR system, we are going to teach you how to disarm the word stress so it stops creating an emotional response. We want you to think about it as a neutral word. We want to empower you to act. Think of stress as gasoline. You use your car. It uses gas. You don’t stay awake at night upset about how your car uses gas. You simply add more when you run out. So let’s put stress in the framework of filling the tank instead.
There are four primary sources of stress
Good physical stress
Bad physical stress
Good mental stress
Bad mental stress
Your relationship with good physical stress
Good physical stress is necessary for positive change. If you want to lose weight, you need to stress your body so it burns more calories than you consume. For this to work, you have to know how stress can be your ally, rather than just your enemy. Physiologically, stress is just your body’s energy source being “drawn tight”. If you don’t fill up the tank by getting enough sleep, proper nutrition, and proper movement when exercising, your attempt to lose weight will turn into bad physical stress.
Your relationship with bad physical stress
Bad physical stress is often a part of positive change. Some of you might be familiar with the book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. Mister McDougall describes the way tribal people are still connected to running the way children run when they are under the age of 5.
The problem is that while we might all be born to run, few of us live to run. So the jog you go on after work may be putting some bad stress on muscles and joints since you just spent the last 8 to 12 hours sitting. However, you can manage this stress by the physical and mental preparation you take to be able to perform the run.
Now apply that same concept to breaching doors, physical altercations, carrying a person away from danger, or running after someone. These things are typical in the life of a tactical athlete, but without proper training, they can potentially break down your body and send you to early retirement or create other problems along the way.
Your relationship with good mental stress
Good mental stress is most often manifested through learning. Whether you are pursuing a promotion or a hobby, you need to study hard, read more, learn the new rules and skills of the job or hobby. This doesn’t happen without dedicated time and focus, which stresses your mind.
Your brain is something that can be “turned off and on” and learning how to control this process is important for having a healthy relationship with mental stress. Similar to training the body to improve physical performance, challenging yourself to think faster, calm down, or learn something new, can train your mind to respond better.
Your relationship with bad mental stress
Bad mental stress can be one of the most difficult versions of stress to deal with as a tactical athlete because of the unique demands of the jobs. Each of you have to learn how to deal with risk, whether you are deployed, saving someone’s life, or enforcing the law. When you train yourself to run towards danger, it’s a challenge to later process all those feelings and actions. However, it is important to do so because otherwise emotional reactions and the processing of the experiences can result in the temptation to put up walls or develop unhealthy coping mechanisms. These unhealthy habits can prevent you from living your best life when you are not protecting and serving the community. The person you are when you take off your uniform can become burdened by what you experience while wearing the uniform. You need to be able to process that information and learn from it rather than hide it away.
Take-Home Message
Stress is a tool. Respect it. Learn to control it. Use it to your advantage.
Stress is required for physical and mental growth. Whether physical or mental, your ability to command it will neutralize it.
Live to thrive another day! Good physical stress is the stuff that exercise is made of so don’t be afraid to challenge yourself. Start small and build yourself up until you are in-tune with your physical limits.
Feeling “normal” does not mean optimal. Bad physical stress is where good intentions get lost. We can overload (too fast too soon, more weight than we can handle, activity beyond our skill set, etc) can increase the risk of injury. We have to understand how our routines and job demands load our bodies and when the stress is higher than what we are able to handle.
Hardware is worthless without updated software. Good mental stress is how we improve the software (mind) that controls our hardware (body). Our physical hardware and skills change frequently so you need to constantly be reflecting and challenging yourself mentally. This maintains an accurate connection between what you think you can do and what you actually can do.
Don’t let stress become a computer virus. Bad mental stress is the malware and virus infection to your mind’s software. Despite the computer analogy, you are not a robot. It’s okay that you get scared and mad. It’s not okay to expect yourself to “just deal with it.” The same way that a computer virus can lock-down the use of the operating system, traumatic or bad stress left to fester in your mind will infect your ability to think clearly at work and home.
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