The Five Progressive Stages of Stress

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by Dr. Bob Kamath

Here is a glimpse of the stages of stress or emotional health that people experience. We will study these stages in greater detail as we go along. At any given time, everyone in the world is in one of the following five stages of stress (see picture 12).

Stage One: Stage of robust health

The person in this stage is in good emotional and physical health. He has no maladies. He enjoys life to the fullest. He is a wise person who always does the right thing. He is a highly aware person. He is good at getting rid of painful emotions from his mind and solving his life-problems. He has found balance in everything he does in life. His balloon is always shrunk. His soda bottle does not have many buried emotions. He does not abuse alcohol, drugs or indulge in other pleasurable things to cope with his everyday stress. Let me tell you, anymore it is harder and harder to find such people!

Stage Two: Stage of distress

In this stage, an emotionally well-adjusted person is temporarily upset due to a particular event or problem. He is now called a stressed person. He has many stress symptoms. However, he is fully aware of why he is upset. If you ask him, he will readily tell you something like "I am upset because I lost my job," or "My mother died," or some such thing. He does not have any hang-ups about expressing emotions. His balloon is full of emotions, but his soda bottle does not have any painful emotions related to the current upsetting event. He can calm himself down relatively quickly by ridding his mind of painful emotions and solving the problem. If his current life situation is a little too overwhelming, he might benefit from one or two visits with a trained counselor. For example, a middle-aged man is unable to grieve over his mother’s death because he has harbored some anger towards her. Once he talks out his anger, he grieves over the loss and can go back to being his normal self. It is best to avoid medication treatment at this stage.

Stage Three: Stage of low stress tolerance

In this stage, the person is said to be stressed-out. His soda bottle is saturated, and he can no longer cope by burying his emotions. His balloon is inflated to varying degrees. He is unable to calm himself down. He is irritable, impatient, snappy and crabby. He is not aware of why he has these symptoms. His total focus is on his symptoms. If he sees a doctor, he will be diagnosed as having one or more minor stress disorders. At this stage, he may be helped by therapy alone in the hands of a very competent therapist if his stress symptoms are not too severe. However, most people seeking medical help at this stage end up taking one or more psychotropic medications. Most people at this stage respond well to medications. However, sooner or later they reach the breaking point and come down with a major stress disorder, unless they learn to shrink their balloon.

Stage Four: Stage of stress disorder

The balloon has finally reached its breaking point either due to gradual inflating of the balloon or double whammy. Because of a precipitating event, it has popped. Chemical changes in the brain have resulted in a chemical imbalance, and the diverse stress symptoms have crystallized into a relatively well-defined stress disorder, such as major depression or panic disorder. At this critical moment, the patient continually feels, "I just can’t take it any more!" Counseling at this stage is generally useless, as the patient’s suffering is so great that he has no awareness of his blocked off painful emotions. All he is looking for is quick relief from his numerous symptoms. Such patients need one or more drugs to control their symptoms. Even after they are treated with drugs, many of them just go back to the low stress tolerance stage (stage three). This explains why 30-50% of patients do not become completely symptom-free even with aggressive medication treatment.

Picture 12: Five stages of stress: from robust health to despair.

Stage Five: Stage of despair

At this stage, the person has been through many successive breaking points resulting in multiple stress disorders: depression, panic disorder, psychotic disorder, high blood pressure, Fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, etc. He has probably been traumatized by the treatment process as well, and so he does not trust either therapists or doctors. He is fearful of drugs, or he is on multiple drugs for his multiple stress disorders. He has no clue, no trust, no hope and no desire even to try to get help. He has frequent suicidal thoughts. He considers himself totally and permanently disabled. He is constantly trying to get on some type of disability program. None of his healers seems to have a clue as to how he reached this stage of devastation.

Reproducted from the book "Is Your Balloon About To Pop?: Owner's Manual for the Stressed Mind," with the permission of author Dr.Bob Kamath.