Wellness in Ministry: Part One - Introduction to Stress

This is the first post in a series of eight taken from a presentation on Clergy Wellness that was cancelled in 2021 due to Covid-19 lockdowns. Maybe I'll get to present it live one day, but in the meantime I decided to post some sections of it online. The series as a whole is called Wellness in Ministry and naturally some aspects are specific to vocational ministry. However, much of the content is applicable to anyone concerned to sustain their wellbeing physically, mentally socially and spiritually.

My friend Rosie is a Plunket (paediatric) nurse – retired now. Part of the New Zealand Plunket system when I was a young mum was that the nurses made home visits for some months after a birth; after that mothers would attend the Plunket Well Child clinic for the baby to be checked and support offered. 
Many years ago on one of my clinic visits, she and I were talking about her work with other young mums and how she was always on the lookout for postnatal depression, or what we called "baby blues". She told me she asked a definitive question to help reveal the woman’s emotional status. Are you enjoying your baby? If a mum responded enthusiastically, oh yes I love him so much, even though he does wake so much at night, she was reassured. But if there was hesitancy, or even perhaps a No, she knew this mother was fragile and she needed to go deeper into the mental health side of things.

A question for clergy and lay leaders: What if I asked if you are enjoying your ministry? Keep the question in the back of your mind as this series looks at wellbeing for you and your colleagues in ministry today. And if the answer bothers you, talk with your supervisor about it next time you meet. And talk to God about it.  The premise of this series  is that God's purposes for the world require us all to play our part in his mission. That means we are to care well enough for ourselves and each other, that we can do what God asks of us.

There are many metaphors that help us understand wellness; the many roads in this image is perhaps a metaphor of the metaphors!  As students of the Bible, we are familiar with the interior world where  metaphors can unlock new levels of understanding and insight. I want to share with you two metaphors that my doctor husband uses to speak about wellness. The first focuses on stresses, the second on resources. Both remind us that human beings  are created with a complex interrelationship of physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of being, that we have a history and a family and a workplace, and a network of relationships. 

Disease or distress arises from a combination of vulnerability and stress. Your immune system is remarkably resistant and can handle a wide assortment of assaults, but there is a limit to how much it can tolerate at one time. My doctor husband often asks his patients to picture their wellbeing as a dam. If you imagine the lake behind the dam filling up with immune burdens as it would with water, you realise it will eventually overflow. When it reaches the "immune threshold", the lip of the dam, you develop symptoms in your body or mind. Everybody has his or her own level of vulnerability or proneness to developing a condition such as asthma, acne, diabetes, anxiety, psychotic disorders, heart disease, cancer, food intolerance and so on. The model helps to explain why some people develop symptoms while others do not, even though they have had very similar experiences. So for example, if you are allergic to privet (a tree with a high pollen count), during the privet season, the pressure on your immune system is greatly increased, and you not only have to contend with your normal immune load but also with the seasonal pollen assault. The symptom you exhibit may be sneezing, but it also may be irritability, brain fog or anxiety. I dread the pollen season in November!

The word "stress" for an organism's response to stimuli was first coined by Hans Selye, a doctor in Vienna early last century. He discovered that patients with a variety of ailments manifested many similar symptoms, which he attributed to their bodies' efforts to respond to the stressors. He noticed that this collection of symptoms, that he called "stress syndrome" show the body is exhausted and can lead to infection, illness, disease and death. Physiologists remind us that stress is principally a physical phenomenon, when our body floods with hormones that kept our ancestors safe from wild animals or natural disasters. Today we no longer face tigers on a daily basis but our body still knows how to mobilise us for a rapid response – fight or flight, or some add freeze. Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline surge into our bloodstream providing energy and alertness to face the challenge, and because we humans no longer expend that energy in the ways of the Stone Age, our bodies process it in ways that may not be good for our health. We need to  find ways to normalise those hormones, and to slow down our body's response; this series will make some suggestions for that.

Selye pointed out that the human perception of, and response to, stress is highly individualised; a job or sport that one person finds anxiety-provoking or exhausting might be quite appealing and enjoyable to someone else. Looking at our responses to specific stressors can help us understand our own particular physical, emotional, and mental resources and limits. Selye’s theory has helped us to recognize the compounding influence of anxiety, loneliness, insecurity and other psychological and emotional factors on overall wellbeing. 

The dam picture reminds us that when the water reaches the height of our uniquely-constructed dam wall, we become unwell – sometimes quite suddenly. The overflow can manifest as fatigue, irritability, difficulty concentrating, and difficulty sleeping, even hair loss. But what raises the water level most may not have been the last stressor. So a woman may become asthmatic during pregnancy; she has a genetic sensitivity to pollen but normally her body can cope with it. The added stress of carrying a baby leads to symptoms showing up. Or a man who was coping with a very unsettled work situation may collapse when his grandmother dies. She had lived a full life, but the grief he experiences tips the dam level over the top for him, and he has a breakdown. This metaphor suggests that wellness may be restored by addressing something earlier, not just the last thing to happen. 

Lynne Baab in her book Nurturing Hope, about pastoral care, looks back over decades of writing and teaching about stress and notes that the sources of stress have changed over that time. While illness, money problems, broken relationships, and death of a spouse still rate highly, there are new causes, such as “political polarization, the tyranny of smart phones, peer pressure on social media, and the rising cost of housing and education”. Even daily occurrences like losing things, rising prices and concerns about your kids’ safety can accumulate enough to affect wellbeing. Understanding the sources of stress that people face today is not only a key skill for pastoral carers, but it is also relevant for our own wellbeing. We need to see how these stress events can lead not only to lack of energy but also to poor heart health, weight gain or loss, poor sleep, joint problems and digestive issues.

At various times in our lives we will have a unique constellation of stress factors: inherited tendencies, infection, allergy, hormones, rheumatic fever, broken nights, grief, pollution, threatened redundancy, workplace bullying, big mortgage, rebellious teenagers, addiction, carrying too much weight and so on. The balance between the stress and our individual  resilience determines our wellness. The negative side of this metaphor is the focus on stresses and symptoms, but the positive aspect is that we can strengthen the dam. Each of us has a unique quality and quantity of resilience – the thick concrete of the dam. Hopefully this series will offer some thoughts to help with that.

Later in the series I'll introduce Dr Ric's second metaphor, one you’ve probably seen before. The illustration of wellness as a living tree is a 'systems' approach to health that takes into account myriad factors like environmental inputs, genetic predisposition, clinical imbalances, and individual attitudes and beliefs filtered through our educational and spiritual experiences. I find it is a helpful strengths-based perspective on overall wellbeing, and since my tag line as a ministry coach is the verse from Proverbs 11 that talks about “a godshapedlife being a flourishing tree”, this metaphor particularly appeals to me. I’ll come back to this. The dam reminds us of our limits, the tree of our potential. 

To consider:

What stressors get in the way of your life being one that is flourishing? Do you recognise any factors that contribute to "tipping you over" the edge of the dam? How do you manage them?

Next time: Physical Wellbeing