When we first meet Eeyore, he is standing with his front feet well apart and his head on one side. Those of us who have been there recognize this stance, even though the painful truth is kept from the children. Eeyore has a bad back.
Stress related illness. Bad backs, bad stomachs, bad hearts, too fat, too thin, twitches, twinges, pains in the head, and tails that come off. All from too much stress and bean burritos.
There is, of course, another possibility. It may be that “stress related illness” is just a term that doctors have made up to cover the fact that they don’t know what the hell is wrong with you, nor how to make it feel better. Poohs and Piglets and Rabbits have nice, regular health problems. The kind they cover in Med School 101 with an easy diagnosis and a reliable cure. Eeyores get symptoms that are only covered in the footnotes or appendices of the medical texts, or not at all. So when we go to the doctor, he pokes around for a couple of minutes, “Hmm’s” for a while, and finally announces that we have a stress related illness and that will be $90. I’ve tried this with headaches, backaches, stomachaches, and a neck that makes popping noises. It’s always the same. “Stress related illness, that will be $90.”
After a while you finally get used to having a headache all the time. Sometimes it’s a little better and sometimes a little worse, but it’s always there. But it’s like street noise, after a while you just get used to it and don’t notice it so much.
Bad backs are harder to ignore. They grab you and get your attention. I was raised in the 50’s and 60’s (no not the 1850’s) when science and technology was going to solve all our problems. So it was a major blow to me when I learned that something that seemed as simple as a bad back had no effective cure. No wonder drug. No real cures, but plenty of advice. And it seems like the less medical training a person has the more sure he or she is that they can cure my bad back.
Of course, there are always strange cures for things in folk medicine and old wives tales. Putting onions around your neck to cure pneumonia, things like that. But back cures are all pretty weird. You cannot tell which cures came from doctors and which from the butcher just by looking at them. They all seemed to be either common sense or nonsense. But even more remarkable is that for every advice to do something, there is someone else who is equally adamant that action should be avoided at all costs. So it was swim and don’t swim, walk and don’t walk, jog and don’t jog. Do sit ups and the last thing in the world you should do is sit-ups. Heat — no, not heat cold. Braces — no, avoid the braces. Therapy — no, that is a waste of time and money. Take aspirin and avoid aspirin. The only advice that was not contra-indicated by some other person or book was my boss’ advice to drink a half a bottle of vodka. But Mormons are not allowed to drink vodka, even for a bad back, so I don’t know if that works or not.
I did finally get over it. Not entirely, of course. It still bothers me at times, sometimes a lot. Eeyore could probably tell that I have a bad back, but Pooh and Piglet wouldn’t notice. So I will add my bits of advice for dealing with a bad back, and stress in general, to the immense pile of contradictory advice.
For me, the most important step was the recognition that this was a problem that no one else was going to fix for me. I had finally found a doctor, with a bad back himself, who seemed to be helping. I had a bit of a relapse and went back to him, expecting him to fix me up. “You still have a bad back”, he said, “that will be $90”. I was really depressed. But as I hobbled back from my car to my office after the disappointment, I finally realized that I was going to have to do it on my own. No one else could fix me. At least not for the amount of money I had.
I stopped reading books about bad backs, stopped spending $90 a week for doctors and therapists, stopped listening to Aunt Whatever-it-is-I-can-fix-it, and started to deal with the problem myself. Looking back, I’m not even sure what I did that was that different. I did some gentle exercises, but I had done those before, I walked and finally started to jog again, and I tried to relax a bit. But most of all, I went on with my life the best I could and tried not to think about it, not to talk about it, not to let it dominate my life.
I wish I could say that the headaches and bad back were the only stress related illnesses that have bothered me. But I have pretty well run the gamut (except of course, the too thin bit). I have been less successful in dealing with the stress itself than the various symptoms. But that never stops anyone from giving advice.
Getting off in a corner somewhere and avoiding domination hierarchies helps me a lot. I am convinced that being vice president would have shortened my life considerably. Being a vice president is like being a quarterback in the NFL. You have to be able to take the constant pounding. Three hundred pound linemen with names like “Bubba” try to separate parts of your body and spread them around on the artificial turf. If your knees aren’t up to it, you need to find something else to do with your life.
I once saw a man in a wheelchair riding a motorcycle. His wheelchair sat on a kind of platform on a sidecar and there was some sort of improbable linkage from handle bars mounted in front of the wheelchair to the motorcycle. I couldn’t tell how he controlled the gas. My first reaction was admiration. “Isn’t it wonderful that he has overcome his limitations and is still able to ride his motorcycle”, was my first thought.
But being a pessimist with Eeyore’s inclination to ponder things, I thought some more. “Hmm”, I thought to myself, “it is very likely that this guy was crippled in the first place in a motorcycle accident. Motorcycles are deadly. Every single kid I knew in high school with a motorcycle ended up in the hospital sooner or later. Nobody’s chances on a motorcycle are very good. And however clever that setup is, his control of that motorcycle is probably somewhat limited. This guy is crazy, he doesn’t know when to quit.”
And then I thought of one of my favorite scenes in Monty Pythons Search for the Holy Grail. You know the one. The Black Knight challenges the White Knight at the bridge. After a fierce but brief battle the Black Knight’s arm is cut off. But still he challenges and will not give up. He goes on to loose the other arm and both legs until finally just the stump is left trying to fight with the White Knight. And what are they fighting over. “Truth, justice, and the America way?”. Hardly. They are fighting for domination.
Now I am not saying that we should easily give up our life’s work or abandon some worthy cause when the going gets tough. There are times when the only thing that we can do to keep our integrity and humanity intact is fight to the death. But there are other times when honor and human dignity are not really at stake, when the real issues are only money and status. In these cases we need to know when to quit. It is not worth hobbling around for the rest of your life with bad knees to play in one more playoff game. It is not worth a massive coronary to be vice president. The most important thing I have learned about stress is that there are times when you have to get out of the line of fire. Find a nice patch of thistles in a bog somewhere.
My second strategy for dealing with stress comes from the same boss who had the vodka cure for bad backs. However, this cure I was able to try and it works pretty well. Not always and there are dangers and side-effects. But on the whole it is an effective strategy. It’s called “Magooing it”. Of course, Mr. Magoo had the advantage that he could not see all the dangers around him and so went happily on his way. The rest of us just have to put our head down and ignore the chaos around us.
The secret is to find some short term, immediate job that needs to be done, concentrate fully on doing it, and ignore the threats and dangers that seem to be swarming around you. The difference between this and simply sticking your head in the sand is that you are doing something. It may not be the most important thing. You may be straightening the deck chairs on the Titanic. But at least you are doing something. A major cause of stress is the feeling of helplessness. Doing something, almost anything, helps a little.
In some cases, the causes of stress are well beyond our control. Some idiot running your company into the ground, some idiot running the country into the ground, a self destructive son or daughter, the hole in the ozone layer, an assignment at work that is impossible, an unrealistic sales quota, pimples. Of course, you have to be careful not to rationalize, but if you truly can’t do anything about the problems, find some way to ignore them and actually do something about something you can fix, even if it is relatively trivial. Even if Magooing it does nothing more than get you through the storm in one piece so that you are ready to get back to the major battles, it is a useful approach.
Of course, if the problems are things that you can do something about, then Magooing it should be no more than a short term escape to catch your breath. Mr. Magoo lives in a fantasy world. The real world is less kind. The last thing in the world a pessimist is going to recommend is stepping blindly off a building with the hope that some bird will swoop down and save you.
The third thing I have learned is to find the source of your anxiety. You know that something is wrong. There is a danger somewhere, a threat. But you have not really identified the cause. Parts of our anxiety closets are all too well known to us, but other parts are unexplored territory. What the hell is it that we are afraid of anyway? Each of us has very personal dreads. Mine may seem silly to you and yours to me, but our own personal fears are very real to each of us.
I have found it helpful to inventory and categorize my anxiety closet every once in a while. It’s a little like cleaning the garage. I haul all the junk onto the driveway, sweep up a little dust, brush off a few cobwebs, do a little sorting, and then put if all back in time to catch the last Saturday football game and escaped into a large bowl of popcorn. I haven’t really solved any of the problems, haven’t repaired the antique bed or figured out why the old fridge is leaking. But at least I know what’s there.
Every once in a while it’s time to clean out the anxiety closet. Find out what’s there. If things have gotten worse lately, find out what’s new or what has changed. Contrary to many people, I do not believe that identifying the problem automatically entails its solution. Nor do I believe that our problems come from our ancient histories, except in rare and severe cases. We are no longer afraid of falling out of the high chair. This is not to say that we haven’t had many of the same problems since we were very young, but rather that for most of us the real causes of our current problems are in the here and now.
Which brings us to the final issue. And here is where most of us fail. It is facing up to our problems and dealing with them. Nobody else is going to do this for you. Like a bad back, you have to deal with it yourself. This isn’t to say that you can’t ever find help. If you have very serious problems you should find help. But its like the light bulb joke:
“How may therapists does it take to change a light bulb?”
“I don’t know, how many?”
“Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change.”
Not only do we have to want to change, we have to do most of the work ourselves. At best the therapist is like a personal trainer, showing us exercises and giving encouragement, but we still have to do the exercises ourselves.
For pessimists at least, this is a slow and arduous process. No magic book, no weekend in the woods with the guru of the month, no sudden realization is going to make it all better. At best we make progress a few steps at a time.
Sometimes it is best to start with the small things. Eeyore was out in the snow. It was cold. And he kept hoping that someone would remember him there.
“And I said to myself: The others will be sorry if I’m getting myself all cold. They haven’t got Brains, any of them, only grey fluff that’s blown into their heads by mistake, and they don’t Think, but if it goes on snowing for another six weeks or so, one of them will begin to say to himself: ‘Eeyore can’t be so very much too Hot about three o’clock in the morning.’ And then it will Get About. And they’ll be Sorry.”
But although Mr. Hoff forgot to mention it in his discussion of this incident, Eeyore did not simply wallow is his self pity. At least not for long. He built himself a house. He was not coming to complain to Christopher Robin that he did not have a house, but rather that the one he built had vanished.
Building himself a house did not solve Eeyore’s feeling of loneliness. It did not make him self -confident. It did not cure his bad back. But it did get him out of the cold and snow and help keep him warm. It was a start. One less problem he had to worry about. One less stress in his life.
Start small. Don’t go after some terrible monster in your anxiety closet right off the bat. Slaying dragons is not for pessimists. Step on a few ants first. Maybe go after a rat or two. Pay the bills, do the taxes, look under the car to see where the green gunk is coming from. Then tackle something a little bigger. Tell your boss that there is a good chance your group won’t make the schedule, do the market research you pretended that you had done in that report, get out the manual and learn how to really use the spread sheet program, start on those journals you need to read for your re-certification, start the investment program so that you can survive a layoff.
For many of us, the worst monster in our anxiety closets, the worst cause of stress, is that we will be found out. It is that someone will peek around the screen and see the pathetic little man behind the booming voice of the Wizard of Oz. The difference between image and reality will be our next topic.
For all of us will be found out in the end.
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