Eustress is good stress

Why Chaos Can Be Calming: Somatic Discharge and the Power of Eustress

That’s kind of weird, isn’t it?

Well, hey there. Welcome back.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on a broader subject and it’s sort of revealed to me a number of pieces and parts that each one is worthy of discussing. So I think that’s what I’d like to discuss today.

The term is somatic discharge, and you can make of that what you will, though we’re going to go through what it actually is.

As you go about your day, you experience various layers and levels and flavors of stress.

I remember in the olden days we used to talk about stress and good stress. And I remember when I was sort of awakened to that, it was brought to my attention that there was such a thing, because I remember doing what I did for a living, there was sometimes some tremendous stress. And then sometimes things were stressful, but I was really digging it. It was fun. It was it was something that I enjoyed, and the more the more of that kind of stress there was, I’m like, “Wow, I’m alive.”

And I’m sure you experience this in your work and your play, right? There are certain things that you do that might drive somebody crazy. I mean, if if you’re into like first-person shooters and things like that, you can get into games that are just absolutely, you know, hypothetically life and death, you know, for your character, where, you know, somebody looking at it would be like, “Oh my god, how do you do this for like 3 hours, you know, versus a couple minutes?”

And there are, of course, various monsters and unicorns that can cause you to enjoy things like that more than the average person does.

We also talked about dopamine and chasing, we also talked about norepinephrine and how those are rewards for us chasing certain things. And if you want a recap of that, feel free to go ahead and listen to the previous episodes that talk about that.

From Survival to the Iron Chef Kitchen Challenge

So let’s rewind as to why I am even talking about this.

When I was married, I didn’t cook much or at all. I did the standard manly grilling, but quite frankly, I wasn’t really allowed to do any cooking. That was something that my wife at the time did and took lots of pride in and and said that was her domain, and that was the end of it.

So, when I was divorced and ended up raising my two kids by myself, I had to learn to cook. I had to learn to cook a lot. Now, I could have just defaulted to doing a lot of eating out and fast food and making the most rudimentary of dinners, but, well, you know me. So, I had to immerse myself into cooking. I had to figure out lots of things, and I had been somebody who loved watching Iron Chef all the time. I knew some pretty amazing things could happen in literally an hour.

And I got to the point where I would ask my kids to challenge me. I’d say, “Well, what do you want tonight? What do you want? Just something you really want, I’ll go out, I’ll buy all the groceries, I’ll figure out how to make it, and we’ll do that.” And, you know, I went from being terrified of killing them by cooking the meat wrong to then moving up the ranks of, you know, hamburger to steak to chicken to fish to other things and and and being quite confident about a lot of it.

So the point there is that I learned to cook, and I learned to cook in lots of fun ways.

Recently, I’ve become aware of something that I do quite often. And that is, if it’s near the end of the day, and I’m going to be cooking dinner for myself—and granted, it’s far more elaborate and time-consuming than it should be for one person—I might go ahead and play a game. And I will make sure to set a timer for it. I will say, “I’m going to time travel for an hour, I’m going to immerse myself into this game, and then I’m going to cook.”

And I will do that. I will lose myself in it. And if the timer goes off and the game’s not over, then then we’re done. And I will go from this relaxing state to going to my kitchen and just absolutely manically losing it, in in as if I’m on Iron Chef. I will cook as quickly and rapidly—and it’s not carelessly, but it’s just at literally like the maximum safe speed that I can operate and making all these moving parts happen.

And then once the last cover goes on, once everything’s done, and now we enter the waiting game, I’m done. And I’m fully relaxed. And I feel great. I feel good at what I’ve done, and then I, you know, go off and just hang out and wait for it to to finish.

That’s kind of weird, isn’t it? It’s kind of weird to go into this maximum stressful state that’s not stressful, and then immediately come down from it?

Line Cooks vs. Flow State: Understanding Somatic Discharge

Well, once I realized I kept doing this, I needed to do research on this. And that’s part of this much greater research that I’ve been doing on something bigger than that.

So to truly understand this, let’s talk about someone who cooks professionally. They’re a line cook or what have you, and they’re doing the same hour or hours that I did, right? Like they’re just cooking at maximum speed because they have to, and so forth, and they’re frying up stuff and mixing and and, you know, “Behind you!” and all that other stuff, right?

When they’re done cooking and they come home, they’re really wound up. They’re really stressed. And they need something to relieve that stress, because they have all this pent-up stressful energy. But I have the opposite.

That’s weird.

Well, thus the term somatic discharge.

If you want to think of it in terms of a very simple conversational terms where we use the word energy a lot to mean a whole bunch of biochemical things, that person has all this energy and all this this stress and tightness all bound up that hasn’t really been released. They’ve been in almost a flight or fight-or-flight state. I have been, however, in a state of releasing that, even though it kind of looks the same.

And if you’re doing something that you really enjoy, and you feel like other people might think it’s stressful, but when you’re done doing it, you’re like, “Oh, that was nice,” then you too have experienced the beauty of somatic discharge. You have discharged all this somatic energy.

Do you see the difference? It’s a big difference. It’s like literally the opposite, right?

The odd thing for me is that I just turn it on and off, and I predict when I’m going to do it. I say, “I’m going to I’m going to do this thing, and then I’m going to release all this energy, and then, wow, that was nice.” And the way that our minds work is that we probably work in routines like this into our daily or weekly activities, and we don’t really think of it that way.

I mean, sure, we say we have stress relievers. We’re going to go do this, we’re going to go, you know, we’re going to go do this, you know, we’re going to go to the archery range, or we’re going to go bowling, or we’re going to do something. But we need to keep in mind that this is completely different than somebody who’s sitting there shaking their leg violently at a cafe. They have all this stress and they’re just bouncing and bouncing with this stress. They’re not going, “Oh my god, I’m so happy at what I’m doing right now.” They’re not in that flow state.

Eustress and the Parasympathetic Nervous System

But me doing my Iron Chef cooking, or you doing that thing that is enjoyable, but people would see as stressful, is a completely different thing. In fact, there’s a term for it: it’s called eustress, or eustress. And that’s the official term by an endocrinologist about what healthy stress is.

What we’re really talking about here is comparing the parasympathetic nervous system to the sympathetic nervous system. And you can look back on the episode I did on, actually, the wonders of the parasympathetic nervous system about how walking after eating does all this amazing stuff, as it activates the parasympathetic. The parasympathetic is basically the rest-and-digest. It’s the physiological recovery, the calm, the restoring of your baseline and your energy, and you’re like, “Okay, I needed to get grounded.” That’s you’re feeling parasympathetic nervous system in action. The fight-or-flight is the sympathetic one. That’s the using and mobilizing your energy and your resources for immediate action to combat stress and to get through something. It’s the thing that people sometimes call, you know, “Oh my god, I’m having a panic attack,” that sort of thing.

So now that you know there’s a difference between the parasympathetic and the sympathetic, now you know that there’s a difference between good stress and bad stress, and you even know there’s a name for it: eustress. Perhaps it’s a good idea to take a moment out and think, “Well, am I doing this? What what do I have in my life where I’m activating the parasympathetic nervous system, but other people might see it as stressful?”

And I keep saying other people because outsiders can’t feel what you can feel. But they can see what you’re doing, and if you’re doing something that seems kind of manic or crazy, and you have this weird look on your face, this big smile, they can point out that, “You you enjoy that, don’t you? You enjoy this stress.” And I’m sure someone in your life has probably pointed out something you’re doing that’s like that. And if they haven’t, too bad, because they should. If if someone’s close to you, they should be able to detect when you’re in in this sort of flow state of craziness doing something.

It also doesn’t—I want to be clear—it doesn’t have to do with fast action. You can do something that’s, you know, stress-relieving or really, you know, intense, but you’re moving slowly. I mean, if you’re working on like models under a microscope or under a, you know, under a magnifier or something, you’re painting your miniatures, or you’re or you’re doing something else like that, or you’re, you know, you’re doing rock climbing, or you’re outside working on an old engine of a car or something like that, you might not be bouncing around and things, but you have some intense moments.

Balancing Good Stress Across Job, Career, and Calling

So, please, please make sure that you’re getting just as much parasympathetic nervous system action as you are sympathetic nervous system action. Please, please don’t rob yourself of these seemingly stressful moments that aren’t stressful.

Your chosen field may have a core to it that has to do with this very seemingly stressful piece to it. Having said that, that may be what’s keeping you in a place that is stressful. And if you’re in a place where 10% of it is the good stress and 90% is the bad stress, it might not be worth it.

And as I’ve said with job, career, and calling, what you’re doing might be disconnected. You may have a job that’s, you know, “Do-do-do-do-do, I do my job, it’s fine, it’s it’s good, it’s all good, I get my paycheck.” And then that paycheck allows you to go ahead and generate this massive amount of eustress that that you do because you have this crazy hobby that you just really enjoy and it really makes you feel alive. So, that’s my advice at the end of our Act 3.

I hope this all made sense. I think I’ve referenced at least four other podcast episodes, you should definitely listen to them. And I’ll have some more episodes coming out related to the subject as I build to the the final umbrella of what we’re talking about here. And take care.

Thank you for listening as always. Go to markbradford.org to see all my author-related things. Go to Alchemy for Life to see coaching, speaking, writing, and this podcast.

Alchemy for Life theme by Mark Bradford and Alchemy for Life. All background music is by Audionautix and Jason Shaw.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS