INFERIOR PSYCHOLOGICAL REACTIONS TO ESCAPE STRESS: SUCCESS
Each of us is a conglomerate of living matter. By the process of evolution there has been built into us a whole series of psychological reactions which help us survive. The way in which we become aggressive, when we are faced with someone who is acting aggressively towards us, is a simple example of this kind of reaction. Our response to success is a lesser known reaction of the same category.
It is easy to see how the aggressive response could be a life-saving mechanism in primitive society. The same applies to success. The successful hunter came to survive. So also those who first successfully planted the seeds of grasses and commenced agrarian life. Those who were successful with their children had more to continue the race. So the need to strive for success is within us, not only in specific life-saving areas, but in life itself. This is a biological reality. In a way it is out of step with the Christian ethic of being meek and humble, which looks forward to a more enlightened society than that of the present day.
How does all this come into our discussion of stress? If we have an innate need to be successful, and we fail to attain success, we feel the situation as a problem. Messages about it crowd into our brain and predispose us to stress. The failure to attain success may be in any area of life at all —in marriage, in the job, in our children, in our friendships. The way in which failure to attain success can produce stress is obvious enough. But there is another side to the picture.
There is the simple line of unconscious reasoning. ‘If failure to attain success produces stress, we can counteract the stress that we have by making efforts to attain success.’ Within limits this works well enough. We can make an effort in the marriage to get through a difficult period. We can work to get the children going better by spending more time with them. We can make an effort to get on better with the people at work. However, it is not uncommon for these principles to be pushed too far. In marriage, if we seek success by analyzing every little matter between us, we simply create more stress. If seeking success with our children, we preach to them so much about the importance of their exams, and all the dangers of this and that, that we drive them from us, and our own stress is increased. At work, in striving hard for promotion we may find ourselves in a job which is beyond our capacity.
In the superficial values of our society, a university degree is often valued as a badge of success. ‘My husband has a degree, so have most of his friends and many of their wives. I feel out of it. Out of it all the time. So I have started a course with adult education. Do the exams next month. Terrified I shall fail.’ If she would only aim to improve her educational standard for the love of it, and not in this competitive fashion, she would be doing something to reduce her level of stress.
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