The Power of Stress: From Mob Mentality to Resilient Success

Ep 93. Understanding Stress: From Eustress to Distress and Beyond

Stress is an inevitable part of life, but not all stress is created equal. In this episode, we dive deep into the two major types of stress: eustress (positive stress) and distress (negative stress). Learn how your unique response to stress shapes your mindset, actions, and behavior. Whether you thrive in high-pressure situations or feel overwhelmed by life's challenges, understanding stress is key to mastering your emotional well-being and personal growth.

Stress can push you toward achievement and joy, or it can lead to discomfort and despair. In this podcast, we explore how resilience, coping mechanisms, and our environments influence how we respond to stress. Why do some people grow stronger under pressure, while others crumble? How does stress impact group behavior and decision-making, even leading to phenomena like mob mentality?

We'll cover practical strategies to recognize the signs of stress, adapt to its challenges, and turn adversity into opportunity. Learn how to thrive under pressure, cultivate a growth mindset, and become the best version of yourself, no matter the stressors in your life. If you're ready to take control of your stress, boost your resilience, and move through life with intention and awareness, this episode is for you!

Key Topics:

• Understanding eustress vs. distress
• The role of resilience and coping mechanisms
• How stress impacts behavior and groupthink
• Practical tools to thrive under stress and build resilience
• Navigating life’s challenges with intention and awareness

Listen now to transform how you respond to stress and unlock the potential for personal growth.

Take care, be aware, and walk well.

Transcript

Welcome back folks to episode 93 of the Running Man Self Regulation Skills Project Podcast with me, your host Dr. Armando Dominguez, PhD in Health Psychology, licensed professional counselor and an adjunct professor at a local community college. And what we're going to be discussing today is going to be state-owned beliefs. Now there are beliefs that we do pick up.

based on assumption whenever we're grown up and don't have the questions asked while we might do something and that would follow along the lines of maybe a tradition or maybe behaviors that are done in a regular sense but most people go about doing their business but if we're too young to understand why we just kind of follow along without understanding sometimes. But there's a difference between a trait for instance and this is just to add to the understanding and that is something that we carry that is a behavior.

or quality that is consistent over time in the person's behavior, but a state is something that is transient and it can come on as a result of stress, as a result of whatever environmental cues may be going on outside of us. It could be us at a party bouncing around in the bouncy house having a good time with our friends, or we could be running from a wild animal that's trying to chase us, like a bull, and you shouldn't be in that pen, but yet you're still trying to run for the fences.

had that experience and don't want to do that again. Whenever we are in a state, there is also a change in mindset, a consciousness change, one that has to do with more of the immediacy if you in danger of what is going on and how to get away from danger. If we are in pain or suddenly frightened, that will not only color but change how we think of things. It is not long term thinking and planning but more so the immediate sense of alleviating stress to pain.

or three, the potential threat. And if we're under threat, trying to find a way out or find a way to manage whatever it is that's going on. So when we're talking about state, it is very much what's going on inside of our body that changes from our typical trait, how I am most of the time, and what I would often call the traits that are of my personality and my demeanor and my character, so to speak.

armando (02:42.089)
And whenever we're under stress, often we get surprised. Often things change beyond our ability to cope or have answers for, and therefore it'll change what it is that we would call our personality. And sometimes we might even be surprised. There are those that say that they acted out of character if they were doing something and they rewind the tape, so to speak. Well, I don't usually do that. I don't usually think this way. And the term usual is the

the working term here and the thing is when something is out of the usual or the normal, what we may run into are some sub programs that are more reactive programming that are deeper in our psyche such that it's not a conscious thing but it's there not unlike reflexive responses that we have or autonomic responses like our breathing that don't require our conscious thinking. There are aspects of our behavior that may or may not come out depending on the stress of the environment.

And often it might look like something that is out of our idea of who it is that we are. And I've even heard it both clinically and outside of the clinic out and about in regular life where people say, that's not me. That wasn't me. I don't know who did that. Or it seemed like I was someone else or they still have the recollection, but the description is like they were in the back seat and someone else was driving.

One of the influencers that I listen to often enough is a George Bruno. He talks about the gorilla in young males lives and how it becomes less and less influential as we age and that having to do in many cases with our libido or sex drive and our desire to be in a sense of interaction with our world in which we might try novelty and take risks and we take less of those risks as we get older.

our brain comes online around age 26 is whenever men and women both get completely matured. And this of course varies a little bit person to person to where we're completely myelinated and we're less apt to have a biophysiological reason for thought error or thought process. And we're able to use more of our reasoning, more of our frontal lobe and our IQ.

armando (05:01.07)
whenever we needed to make better decisions and we do make better decisions over time. the important thing is that the gorilla at first is in the driver's seat. The more important thing is as we age, they move from the driver's seat to the passenger seat, they're still kind of directing how we drive and there's influence there, but when they're in the back seat, we can keep them there. And they influence less how we drive our lives, but also we're apt to realize that it's still there in case we need it such as a surprise.

or survival orientation situation. To make more sense of what it is that we're going to be discussing as far as state-born beliefs and the difference between trait and state, we're going to discuss what it is, a trait that would be like, you know, somebody being more agreeable or somebody being less agreeable, more anxious generally, and we can kind of identify those things and those are things that we see on the regular. But a state, once again, is a transient thing based on the level of stress in our environment.

or what we perceive in our environment that may be stressful, but it's not always a negative stress. So what I want to do to give us some context is talk about the continuum of stress. Often we talk about this dipole of we have eustress, this is all the good stress and the fun stress, versus distress on the farthest end. And this dipole quality, I don't want to say bipolar, because we're not talking about bipolar disorder, mental illness, but rather the two poles of extreme of the euphoric.

and the dysphoric, but we also have that space between that we traverse that is just stress. Now, do we have average stress? Yes, every day we have average stress. I have to take out the trash, go to work, get dressed, and all those things that are necessary cues to get going, to go to work, to pick up the kids, and go and buy dinner and groceries. And those are our everyday behaviors that are a measure of stress, a measure of environmental irritability.

that gets us irritation rather than gets us to the point of irritability that finally says, okay, now I've got to do this. And irritability does not mean an extreme of getting upset, but rather just knowing that it's still in my mind and we're getting it off the plate, so to speak. So while we're moving through this continuum of stress, generally staying in the middle, we don't often have too much of the euphoric eustress, nor do we have too much of the dysphoric distress. And if you're in the euphoric state, we have to understand that's

armando (07:27.618)
where the pleasure principle or the Hidali principle plays out. And whenever it plays out there, often we enjoy that and we really want and wish for it not to end because it's so fun. That's where all the good, the enjoyment, the fun and the blissful and the, my God, I wish it could last forever, but then it goes so fast and fleeting. And we even have a difference in our state that makes us relate to time and how it elapses to where it seems like it's contracting. We have less time to do and enjoy.

And that's our natural tendency to want to absorb and keep as much of the pleasure as possible for as long as possible. And that's natural and that's human. When we go to the furthest end into this dysphoric state, now we're talking about pain, whether it be mental, emotional, whether it be physical because of injury or terror, because I feel like I'm being preyed upon, I need to run and I can't, or maybe I'm in a situation where I have to protect my life or the life of another, or maybe I'm careening off of a

icy street into a spin and i'm gonna wreck into a side rail or something like this and that state in that moment is very dysphoric we have really scared frightened feelings often pain if there is pain or maybe impending pain expected predicted because we see is going towards that guardrail and there's going to be a crash this sort of thing and we within moments have that incredible fear of course we have the adrenaline drop

and that makes us more apt to be more survivable, but also make us hyper-focused to the things that are going wrong. And it is a teaching modality in that sense, in that we'll remember what's going wrong so as to not repeat it. But also, when we're realizing that, we also have a relation to time there as well, to where we have a dilation of time. This is where our time feels like it's going on forever. There are often people that are in peak states that are more positive.

that feel like time has fallen away and they're just doing it. It's almost like a sense of forever, like we have a gap in time elapsing. It somehow stands still, but yet I'm dynamic within it, and I expect that. And we'll talk about that as a separate state or a flow state. But in the dysphoric state, we can also have that time dilation where things slow down, and maybe we can see things unfolding, and that may be a survival mechanism.

armando (09:52.068)
that if we see the car crumpling and we can have read accounts and heard people talk about wherever they saw the cars, hood crumpling and they started to dub thinking, I need to do this or I'll break my neck or I need to hide like this. So that way I can survive the rollover and things of this nature to minimize injury and mitigate any stressor on the body as a result of being inside of a vehicle. They can't control a tumble in for instance, but these are some really important points.

Now the in-between space, this is what we call stress. And me as a health psychologist, this is my field. The primary thrust of what it is that I do as looking at those things that are not stressors only, but also those things that are health change behavior. What do I want to do that become more, our change goals that we want to get to, whether it be either losing weight, getting more fit or being more able to

alleviate stress when stress comes on managing anxiety and self-regulating emotion these sorts of things and the self-regulation skills is really the largest thrust of this podcast project but the point once again has to do with how I relate to this in the stress mode in the middle between the dipoles of dysphoria and euphoria has to do with where our regular life kind of lay and there are some higher stress events and there's some lower stress events

And self-regulatory skills make the biggest difference in how balanced or how much equanimity in my life I have relative to the two poles of life and whether or not whenever I have euphoria, I can enjoy it versus feeling like the shoe is going to drop because dysphoria is too close to me because I'm closer to that than I am the middle or to the euphoric end of things. having explained this, we realize that stress isn't just the bad and the good, but we have also the

the gray space in the middle, that's perfectly not one or the other than we have closer to euphoric and more fun and closer to dysphoric and not so fun and uncomfortable and the variance of stress in all its flavors and in continuum colors that we can experience. So now that we've explained this, we have a pretty good solid foundation as to what stress is as a continuum. Now, what I want to point out is that their beliefs not only are relation to time,

armando (12:19.438)
and how it elapses the comfort of it whenever we have a peak state, a flow state. And Mikhail Shishentmihi did lots of research and wrote a few books on the flow state that eventually got accepted into psychology and many practitioners out in clinics and even sports psychologists and coaches use this idea as a point to work towards to get to that state of comfort and enjoyment.

when one does things versus worrying about the outcome in the future end and by expectation, experience and prediction getting stuck in the thought process versus just doing what you want to do in flow so to speak. So, she sent me how I talked about peak states and we can have that whenever we're just doing things where we're in that self, so state that I am just being and I'm experiencing as I go.

And I'm not worrying about the time, not more about getting there, not worried about having left late. I'm just doing wherever I become integrated with my action. Very important things. Now that is a state born belief that I can do that. And I've experienced it before. And there are times that we're more open to re-experiencing if we had the experience in the flesh place. Sometimes it takes us by surprise. I mentioned it in one of the prior podcasts, and this is just my personal experience.

I've had several, but this one is probably the most poignant because it put me on the path of perceptual psychology at the time and seeking, what happened to me? And I was getting out of my car and at the time I was driving Moby, my big white 1972 Ford Ranchero, and it was a white boat. So my boss at the time called it the tuna boat and I decided to call it Moby instead. It was ugly as sin, but got me where I had to go when I was an undergraduate. But

I had gotten out of the car and I was going to my next class and I had a little bit of time but when I got out, I had parked in front of an oak tree, a live oak tree and at that moment when I turned on the sidewalk to walk under the oak tree, an oak leaf fell and an acorn fell and they were both falling at the same speed in slow motion. Everything just stopped. It was just a fleeting moment but it felt like time had stopped and I was just there observing the fall very slowly.

armando (14:42.384)
It happened within fractions of a moment looking back. But while I was in it, it seemed like it continued on longer than a few moments. But it was beautiful. It was an amazing state of what some would call Zen, or being one with the universe, or being one at that moment. I would love to have that on a very regular basis because it was blissful, it was awesome. And this was one of those flow states that happened by complete surprise. And didn't expect it, I didn't prompt it.

nor did I prime it by anything I did intentionally. I may have, looking back inadvertently, but not on purpose, but yet it happened and it was a beautiful thing. Now, that was a state-born belief that I developed after the fact that it could happen again. And I've had states after that fact come up again since then. So, very cool. Now, the next thing I want to talk about are the behaviors that come up as a result of state-born belief.

Often we will see things and believe things to be as a result of being in a dysphoric state as being dangerous or more dangerous and somebody walks up and moves or removes the thing that is frightening us that may have taken us by surprise and then we feel kind of dumb or foolish or stupid. I'm not saying that those are the things that you are, but rather those are the things that we may realize and judge ourselves as because like, did I see that? But often how we perceive will shape what we believe.

And then we behave as a result of that belief because it's so intense and as a result of the intensity of the emotions more so. We tend to become attached or more apt to believe because of the intensity of the feel of the belief, so to speak. So we'll put that on the back burner for a moment. The next thing I want to point out is that often this doesn't happen just to us as an individual. When we're out in public, often people will discuss about

how anxious they are when they go to the grocery store such that they will wait till the evening or the overnight to do the grocery shopping because there are fewer people. If you have a trait of high anxiety or generalized anxiety, and I'm not talking about those diagnosed, but just generally speaking, and this happens to folks that have had a PTSD diagnosis, even people that have had trauma but are undiagnosed with PTSD but have post-traumatic stress reactivity, yet

armando (17:07.127)
This anxiety keeps them from going out in public because it's too overwhelming, too much information. Their self-regulatory skills aren't at a level that they can manage that state of anxiety to where they can be functional. And they lose a lot of living and often there's a lot of isolation because it even happens at home just by thinking about it. An anxiety attack can be brought on by thought alone, not just thought, but thought coupled with that stress-borne belief.

and therefore we have the behavior, the reactivity in the behavior. I will tell you physiologically before we do something, we can act out a behavior, something that someone else can see and measure. For instance, I pick my nose once it's measurable, therefore it's now called a behavior. But the antecedent of that, which is our physiological response, heart rate increase, our breathing changing, our body temperature changing, our peripheral visual capacity shutting down and us moving more towards having a hyper...

focused towards the front which would be tunnel vision. And also we have differences in chemistry as well but blood flow leaving the front part of the brain. Muscles getting stronger and more filled with blood as well as a default because we have to be stronger and faster. Our inability to hear well because we lose ability to hear with great clarity and often we're unable to speak well. We have the dry mouth and throat and we have a more gross sounding voice because we lose fine motor skill in our vocal cords as well.

All this happens suddenly, not in any order of importance, but as a result of reaction to an overwhelming stress. whenever we have groups of people, sometimes as an individual moving towards a group, that can be overwhelming. But what about we have a group and we're part of the group and the group becomes rowdy? If we're part of it and we feel safe, we're probably less apt to have that anxiety response. Now, if people start acting in a way that is no longer

as an orderly protester, for instance, that is protesting for a reason and within guidelines and confines that would be laws and regulations that would only allow us to congregate. We have permission and not to be doing anything violent, but yet amongst those, there are those that are a little more predatory and we call those people rioters. These are the people that are the predatory that use the group to give themselves this.

armando (19:30.18)
camouflage of anonymity and looking like the wolf and sheep's clothing, so to speak, to be able to do damage to other people or give them some permission and hide in the crowd. What is really funny is that during these crowded events, if somebody is protesting for a principle that they believe in, and then there are rioters, often the protesters will get mad and try to apprehend the people that are acting outside of the image that they want for the principle they're trying to uphold. They will...

try to house them, but then if there are too many and people get dangerous, at some point they run and the rioters get away with what they're doing and often we catch them now. But that is one of the dynamics that often isn't spoken of. But we have a group belief, a group think quality that influences us and we may be more apt to go along. But we also have the mob mentality where it is more chaotic, where it is truly entropy amongst people and there is no

Guideline and this is where we see riots and people moving together in bands or even acting individually and taking advantage of situations like that now there's some disadvantages to being one against a group or a crowd and I'd say against because it seems like if I'm moving in towards a group if there's no acceptance It's almost like we're going against them counter them or even against the grain and often we will get Unknowing looks because you may not look the part. So if you dress like them social camouflage

or act like them, once again, a type of social camouflage, and you start facing in the same direction as they are, you are less apt to be considered a threat. Now, whenever we're looking at writing, that's a whole different story. And anyone and everything in the crowd at that point, if you're the one and you feel threatened, anyone in the crowd becomes a viable target. So there is definitely a belief quality that goes with state of stress. And often, whenever we're looking at individual

differences that we're looking at the sex difference of male to female and this may get some Disagreement and that's okay not a problem with that But whenever we're looking at the differences in communication and action behaviors We understand that that males tend to be more dopamine driven they tend to fire and wire along the lines of not only Activity and reactivity that would be more challenging and novel but also risk-taking not that women don't

armando (21:54.558)
But the younger we are, we tend to be that. And the older we get, we still tend to have some of that. And with females in particular, we're looking at the difference with bonding behavior where oxytocin is the primary chemical. Therefore, they're necessary focus on relationship because of most numbers and relationships. And because the difference in sexual dimorphism for men or larger women or smaller in comparison to each other since caveman times isn't the anthropological perspective.

paleo perspective, then we understand why we value different things and why we played the roles that we did. And the actual point of this is that whenever there is stress between men and women, and I put them on opposing polls in this case, often under stress, women will opt to protect the relationship even with an enemy because they still value the numbers. They still value the potential for using somebody as

support for whatever reason in the future and being able to kind of gloss over things and women are more apt to smile when they don't like you than men. tend to be a bit different in comparison. Once again this is an anthropelial perspective and on top of that whenever men are under stress they will do things that would seem to be betrayals of the relationship that would seem like a damn the torpedoes perspective. In opposition

it would seem that we would be in betrayal of each other's nature, so to speak, and our goals. But in fact, they're complementary of each other whenever they're working together. So something to keep in mind when we're looking at state-born beliefs versus trait-born beliefs, because it goes not only from individual, but also to interpersonal, which I just want to mention right now, as well as group dynamics, whether it group think, and also being part of a group, and also whenever there is

a mob state that's going on as a mass and the fact that often, not unlike in the wildings in New York and the Kitty Genovese caves that don't end up in her getting murdered in the 1960s, pointed out that in the group, people tend to not want to be involved and not want to be responsible, but yet in the group, people also find anonymity and are willing to do what rioters do and that would be harm people and things and

armando (24:16.114)
get away with things that otherwise they would not do. it is in situations like these that cowards act as lions, whereas lions act as lions always. That's going to bring our discussion today to a close on this early Sunday morning in West Texas. It's rather frigid at 25 degrees and about 4.44 degrees Celsius to all those other folks out in the world that use centigrade.

And what I would like to tell you is I appreciate your time and thank you for listening and please share this podcast with people on YouTube like subscribe and share please hit the notification bell so you know when the new ones are coming out and also you can find this podcast on all platforms that'd be iTunes, Amazon, music and quite a few Spotify as well quite a few others and what I'd like to also say is that I've enjoyed the process so far and continue to do that and I hope to bring you more good material

and good value and new information about self-regulatory skills and how to improve self and life. And as always, take care and walk well.