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Stress has been presented to us as a negative (and damaging) reaction to uncontrollable external forces.

But the word "stress" is a weasel word that hides the emotional nature of our stress response.

The emotions that make up our stress response exist for vital reasons, and we can learn how to work with them.

This post is Part 1 of a series.

In my book, The Language of Emotions, I focus on stress as a weasel word (a word we use to mask awareness) that hides emotions.

My work with emotions helps people unmask weasel words and identify the subtle emotional aspects of traits we generally don't see as emotions. For instance, motivation is an aspect of anxiety, while behavioral self-correction is an aspect of shame, and our capacity for fairness is an aspect of envy.

All of our emotions exist in many subtle levels of intensity that we've mostly learned to describe with weasel words.

Stress Is Our Most Overused Weasel Word for Emotions

What are you feeling when you're stressed? Are you angry or ashamed? Are you anxious or confused? Are you feeling panicky or embarrassed? What are you feeling?

"Stressed" is not a helpful answer to these questions because the way we've been taught to view stress leaves us with very few options except to calm ourselves down somehow. When we misidentify our emotions as stress, we disconnect ourselves from what's actually happening.

From The Language of Emotions:

The word "stress" doesn’t even come from the world of emotions; it comes from the world of physics and engineering, where it’s defined as a pressure, pull, or force exerted on one thing by another, or the internal resistance of a thing to the external forces applied to it. Interestingly, this word that refers to things—to inanimate objects—has found its way into our emotional vocabulary. And our emotional definition of stress nearly equals the definition given to us by engineers; it has helped us view ourselves as objects being acted upon by forces instead of living, agile, and resourceful organisms. The word stress has become a universal catchall for emotions for people who don’t have a functional emotional vocabulary. Now if we’re sad, furious, frightened, exhilarated, exhausted, despondent, ashamed, mournful, panicky, or even suicidally depressed, we can use the word stress to describe our condition. This is........

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