Jeremy's Story: Learning to Manage Stress

Stress management covers the methods people use either to bring stress down or to build up their ability to handle whatever comes next, which is really what resilience means. Stress shows up in the body and in the mood, and the effects aren't always bad. A threat can trigger it. So can watching the news, dealing with poor health, or passing through a big life change like losing someone close to you.

Not every form of stress is a problem. Some of it nudges a person to lean into the world, and that can bring a kind of charged alertness, a willingness to hear ideas you'd normally brush off. The kind I want to talk about here, though, is the other kind: the sort that curdles into irritation and low mood. When people ask what the symptoms of anxiety and stress look like, I'd say they're often some mix of those two feelings tangled up with fear.

My neighbor Jeremy had two years of college behind him when his trouble started. He was the person others came to. Someone had a problem, Jeremy had time for it, and he usually had a suggestion too, whatever the circumstances. If a low mood came over him, he'd try to catch himself and settle back down rather than lash out at himself or anyone else. A lot of his friends looked up to him. He kept giving and giving, right up until he noticed that always being on call was quietly draining him dry.

The change in him was hard to miss. He pulled back from friends and from family. His head stayed full of other people's problems and the fixes he could offer, because he never wanted to fall short of the version of himself he thought everyone needed.

The strange part is that his motives looked good from the outside. Yet Jeremy started dodging the people he loved precisely so they couldn't hand him one more thing to carry. His worst stretches came when everything piled up at once: fraternity events on top of classes, a job, and the endless supply of crises among his friends and relatives. There was always something going wrong for somebody.

He grew more stressed and told no one. Keeping up the image of the guy who had it together, the one who solves things, mattered to him more than admitting he was struggling. He got touchy. He started staying inside, skipping anything social, and his sense of his own worth slid along with it. The nights out stopped. The fun stopped. I watched his cheerfulness thin out and fade. All that effort poured into other people, and none of it turned inward, until he came apart. Being useful to everyone but himself was the thing that broke him.

So, those symptoms of anxiety and stress? For Jeremy they looked like overwork on behalf of everyone else and total neglect of his own needs. If you're still wondering what the symptoms are for you specifically, that's fair, because they shift from one person to the next. The useful question is whether anything in Jeremy's story rings a bell, any pattern you recognize.

His family saw the withdrawal and the thin skin, and they brought in a therapist. Looking back, that call was one of the smartest things they did, because once someone stepped in, Jeremy started to come back to himself fairly quickly.

He figured out he had to make room for things that actually gave him pleasure. Music was a longtime love of his, and as a music minor he always had his iPod on him, so headphones on became part of the routine. He worked on his breathing. He carved out quiet stretches of time alone where the only job was to relax and recharge. He also started texting and calling friends again, enough to reassure them he was alright and to rebuild a circle he felt safe leaning on. Coming back to those few simple things, over and over, is how Jeremy climbed out of a rough patch and got his footing back.