Changing Your Life with PTSD Part 3: Understand Your Limitations

Everyone deals with stress, but there’s a reason it’s called post-traumatic stress disorder: people with PTSD do not handle stress as well as some others do. Personally I believe PTSD is more of a disability than a disorder, and I would gladly thumb-wrestle anyone over whether there is such a thing as normal, but the fact remains that people with PTSD have severe limitations, and chief among them is a very, very, very narrow band of flexibility with which to bear stress. Pull it too hard and it stops bouncing back; it loses all elasticity and we go bye-bye.

Understanding what stress does to your body is crucial. You must be able to recognize when you are facing too much of it, and having a support system is also crucial. There are at least fifty (yes, I said fifty!) common signs of stress that anyone with PTSD is already familiar with on a sub-cellular level, and though it sounds simple, PTSD is a deep anxiety reaction to stress where those common symptoms can occur so fast, one on top of another, that they can seem to occur simultaneously. It takes a serious act of will, even now, for me to recognize sometimes when I’m stressed out, and that’s why having someone around to help me recognize those signs is such a big help. Someone who can notice, in case you don’t, when you are:

• gritting your teeth
• clenching your jaw
• stuttering or stammering
• sighing a lot or having difficulty breathing
• fidgeting, shaking your legs or hands, or pacing
• Scratching from itching or rash
• Acting hostile
• Breaking out in sudden bursts of irrational anger

It’s even more important to reduce your exposure to stress before you get overly stressed, and that means accepting that you are not a super woman or super man, that you cannot multitask when it comes to stressful work and family conditions, and that you need rest periods after you face situations that cause you stress. These include events where you have to speak in public, meetings where you have to socialize with a lot of people, events where you have to mingle among or traverse large crowds, and any time when you are called to perform at a high level, such as an examination, doctor’s appointment, or interview. People with PTSD need longer periods of time to rebuild their cortisol and adrenal levels and feel normal again.

Stress simply makes the PTSD brain shut down faster than one without. This is a fact and you don’t have to apologize for it. But you do have to plan for it.