Rethinking Stress – Mental‑Health Philosophy and How We Experience, Understand, and Manage Stress

Written by Lance Allan Kair, Licensed Professional Counselor

Lance Kair is a licensed professional counselor, founder of Agency Matters Mental Health, and published philosopher integrating trauma-informed care with existential and postmodern insights. He brings depth, compassion, and decades of lived experience to the evolving landscape of mental health.

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Are you or someone you know struggling with stress? Do you want a tip or a practice to help cope with stress? Take breaks often, breathe, exercise when you can, eat good foods, and take time to gain perspective. I think that is the totality of the protocols for healthy stress management. There are literally thousands of people, authors, and content makers with practical things that you can do around those core elements. Stress is taken to be a ubiquitous feature in our lives, and the best we can do is learn how to cope with it. But is that true?

What about experiencing no stress? Must you experience stress, the kind you don’t want? Wait, is there a good kind of stress? Are we even allowed to suggest that stress is not a necessary feature of life? Most people would say no, stress is a necessary and inevitable feature of human life.

Ok, I say, then what is the problem?

What is stress really? The legacy of Hans Selye’s stress theory

In the mid-20th century, a man named Hans Selye came up with the notion of stress. Before then, people did not experience stress, or if they did, they did not know it, but rather dealt with it in whatever form they decided, under whatever name they called it. They were probably under more stress than we have currently in the 21st century, as many learned people have said.

In any case, his idea was that stress was largely physical and biological, that there was good stress and bad stress. The good stress, according to Selye, was stress that motivates us to accomplish desirable things, like studying and working hard, or planning for a party, things like that. Bad stress is the kind of stress we typically think of when we think of stress. Nowadays, we don’t typically mean that we are having a good time or that we feel really motivated when we say we are stressed.

Stress and mental health

So, what does this have to do with mental health?

I believe that if a person can understand themselves, then no mental issue exists, and if there is a mental issue, then the person will know how to handle it. This is nothing less than to say that, for example, if I am effectively coping with stress, then there is no reason to call it a problem, and if I am calling it a problem, then it has something to do with not effectively coping.

I say that this is just like mental health, in fact, it is mental health.

So much of what we experience is settled in the words we use and the way we use words to talk to others as well as to ourselves. But it is not entirely cognitive, though. Rather, words are a part of the application of action in accordance with things, and what we are (being) is action. Beyond the mere use of language, whether we are simply thinking, sitting doing nothing, blowing bubbles, crying, sleeping, or taking a nice stroll, our words are always a part of the accordance that is our action.

This is also the reason why mental issues are a part of mental health, rather than just a counterpart (a structural semantic counterpart, for you big thinkers). In other words, mental health is not simply the absence of mental issues, but mental issues are legitimate things that arise in the context of mental health. If I think there is a problem, it is probably because there is a problem somewhere, but this in itself is not a problem.

Kind of weird, but nevertheless true. Every argument against this confirms its veracity.

Innate intelligence and agency in coping with stress

All people, regardless of education level, have an innate intelligence that they apply to their own situation so their mental issues can be handled in a way that affirms their life and sense of self. I call this agency.

These two notions are not lost on practitioners of mental health. I would even say that it is the standard of mental health, the client is the expert of their own experience, and the goal of treatment is improved quality of life.

When we begin to engage with our mental health using our innate intelligence, we might at some point ask ourselves, do I need to commiserate about my stressful life in order to have a good, mentally healthy life? Must I learn and apply stress management skills to be mentally healthy?

But also, when I am complaining about how stressed out I am, or thinking that I am so stressed, what am I really talking or thinking about? And then, am I actually stressed out in the sense that it is a mental health problem? Perhaps, but let’s see.

The real stress is always there.

As a therapist, if there is anything that I can do to help someone struggling with stress, I must draw upon their own intelligence. Again, this is not mere lip service, as though I am just going to tell them what to do (because I am so smart), but neither is it strictly education, although it might involve education.

All that is required for a person to cope with stress is to apply their intelligence. But the caveat is that the application must be effective. If what one is doing to cope with their stress is not effective, then it is due to one or both of two things, the information they are using is not correct, or the way they are understanding their intelligence is not correct. One or both things happen because of the way a person is oriented upon their own experience.

Assessing the reality of stress

What could it mean to have an innate intelligence and yet not be understanding it correctly? It means that intelligence is an activity, the action that is your Self, the thing that is you doing stuff in the universe. Most often, we are taught to think of intelligence as a subject-thing, a basically dead lump of matter that we think about, a topic of status and ratings, of comparative measure and such. Psychology proposes to study these subject-things and then report back to society what human beings are from the standpoint of what their psyche appears to be doing. Well, we have a right to ask, what is a psyche?

We can start to understand what is going on in mental health when we notice that psychology’s whole project, internal and external, is based on the assumption that the inside of a person can be accessed from the outside. From this orientation, it proposes to analyze expressions of an otherwise basically inaccessible element of a person. The aspect that is being addressed is not a person’s mind, but a proposed empirical structure of a mind that we usually know as a psyche. The idea is that a psyche is exhibiting a problem in the way it is operating, and so the person is defective.

If you’ve never thought about it, this is why you often see public-facing psychiatric services and treatment under the name “behavioral health” as opposed to mental health. While common knowledge often views these as the same thing, they are not. From a mental health standpoint, it is more accurate to say that what is “there but inaccessible,” the thing that is treated through its behaviors, is it yourself? your soul? who can be sure?, is itself not being understood correctly by psychology. This is to say, mental health is not just about correcting expressions or behaviors that indicate something is wrong with a person.

In truth, mental health is about how the problem is expressing what is correct about a person. The correct expression is the indication that psychology is playing a role in life and expressing purpose. Dysfunction and maladaptation are expressions of the psychological mistake in understanding. For example, the idea that psychology is treating a diseased element of society, not a person who is struggling with their life, is a mistake in how knowledge is understood to be functioning. It is less a dysfunction, though it could be a maladaptation, but one that asserts that it is correct through its dysfunctional action.

What a mind-melt!

Nonetheless, when we begin to understand the difference between mental health, psychology, and the reasons behind a behavioral ideal, we are able to begin to understand what stress might actually be. And, indeed, when we say that we are so stressed, we mean something is really bad. The purpose of psychology is to control you. While that does seem like a bad recipe for mental health, it is nonetheless a good recipe for social well-being. It serves a good purpose.

I promote this thing called Mental Health Philosophy. It is less a philosophy of mental health than it is the accounting for what mental health is. I imagine that when we know what is actually happening, we know what a thing is. And when we know these things, we will automatically, by virtue of our innate intelligence, know what to do to benefit our mental health in the face of a problem. In this sense, every mental health intervention, every tip, trick, skill, or application for a solution, is a proposal that addresses one of those two aspects, the information gained from the assessment is incorrect, or the manner of assessment is not effective.

You can check it out yourself. I am not offering a “new” philosophy or idea of mental health, I am describing what is actually occurring. All it takes is an opening up to possibility rather than closing down to a probable identity. If that does not seem possible, then we know where to begin.

Think about every notion you have about what stress is and how to deal with it. As far as mental health is concerned, stress has to do with knowing what it actually is, what is happening, and doing something that accords with that assessment. What else is there? In mental health, we call this tending to one’s Self, among a few other notions. When we accept the situation of what is happening, we necessarily know what it is and what to do, because there is nothing else that is happening, by definition!

Beyond the body: Physical vs. psychological stress

When taken overall, we find (again from a mental health standpoint) that stress is not a physiological correlate. Indeed, there are physically defined, empirical correlates that we can associate with stress, but the mental health issue does not depend on the physical state. To be physically stressed does not mean that one’s mental health is affected poorly, even while having poor mental health can and does affect the physical body in a stressful manner that is not good for the body.

For example, raised blood pressure, while associated with physical stress, is not necessarily a problem for mental health, since riding a motorcycle or skydiving is also associated with physical stress and perhaps, at times, raised blood pressure (the hairpin turn, that elk jumping out into the road), but nonetheless is more associated with a sense of mental well-being, which is a component of mental health. Conversely, having a stressful day at work might not mean that a person is having physically unhealthy body responses, they might just be reporting an interpretation of the day that was not physically stressful, but their attitude or interpretation of their day could be affecting their physical health. Similarly, emotional stress could be appropriate to various situations, such as graduating high school or wanting to impress an in-law at dinner.

What do you mean when you say that you are stressed?

The answer to this question tells you what you need to do for it, and this involves your innate intelligence. Innate intelligence here does not mean IQ, the ability to problem-solve, nor some inaccessible aspect that psychology specializes in, or something one was born with genetically because their parents both have doctorate degrees.

This is a bit of a quandary for psychology because what if, say, the way I apply my innate intelligence to manage my stress is to get into fistfights with someone or drive really fast on curvy mountain roads? One could say that it works until it doesn’t, like, until I get put in jail or get into a car accident. What, then, does that innate intelligence say about what is correct?

It depends on how you justify your experience. If a person is perfectly okay with getting arrested or maybe has plenty of money to buy cars and pay medical bills, then I would submit that there is no problem, that the person is handling their stress intelligently. It is not for me or anyone else to say, even as we might make suggestions, since there is no mandate that encompasses a person to a total human psychology. The problem of stress comes when a person thinks there is a problem, not when there is a supposed physiological correlate. It could be good or bad, no one else can say. Neither is there a universal human threshold or standard that all humans answer to called “stress.”

Whether riding a mountain bike, sitting on a couch, jumping into a pool, or swimming in the ocean, human bodies are made to cope with stress. To deal with physical stress outside or beyond the body’s regular tolerances, we create physical accommodations, from spacesuits to high blood pressure medications. We make medication to address mental things as well, but again, the question is, what is happening?

Stress is a state of mental or emotional strain or tension that arises when the demands placed on an individual exceed their perceived ability to cope. Perceived is the operative word there, it is not simply emotional strain. What is happening that a person would perceive that they cannot cope? Is it that they have high blood pressure and a high heart rate, or is it that their girlfriend is emotionally abusive? Is it really that they are emotionally abusive, or is it simply that they stress me out? What if they are emotionally abusive and I am not stressed out, should I be stressed out? What if I only think they are emotionally abusive, must I be stressed out and have high blood pressure?

It depends entirely on the situation. The stress that occurs in the realm of mental health is of a different order than physical stress because there is no reliable physical correlate that equates to any reported mental state. It is generally a random occurrence that is overcome by a sort of perceptive or sampling psychological bias. There are only probable mental correlations to physical states. It is less the physical matter that creates mental health than that mental health is the mattering of physical states. Similarly, what psychology might suggest to use for what is happening, data about what people tend to do and how it categorizes human experience based on the analysis of human behavioral expression, does not tell us what is actually happening beyond that there is a suggestion being made.

You’re in charge of stress

What this means is that you are in charge.

This is not an ethical accusation about what you are supposed to do or how messed up you are if you are stressed and can’t handle it, it is a true description of what is happening.

Sometimes we need help figuring out just how that can come to pass, how we can find agency. With every therapeutic modality, whether it be spiritual, cognitive, emotional, somatic, or what have you, therapy is the activity of helping a person come to themselves through their innate intelligence.

Mental health philosophy, you are mattering!

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Read more from Lance Allan Kair

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Lance Allan Kair, Licensed Professional Counselor

Lance Kair is licensed professional counselor and founder of Agency Matters Mental Health, he blends trauma-informed therapy with deep philosophical insight drawn from thinkers like Zizek Badiou, and Kierkegaard. Formerly immersed in 1990s psychedelic and rave culture, his lived experience with addiction, grief, and harm reduction drives his radically compassionate care. He's the author of multiple philosophical works, including The Moment of Decisive Significance, and is a leading voice in the emerging field of Mental Health Philosophy.