Most of us are familiar with the concept of being stressed out. The stressed out, experience primarily surrounds the old saying having too much on your plate. This suggests that being stressed out is about having too many demands coming at you from the external universe. Too many means that you do not have enough time or energy to handle the enormity of the workload. Distress however is more about demands coming at you from your internal universe. These internal demands come from forces that reside within us, forces that both strain and consume massive quantities of that vital inner resource called psychological energy.
What is psychological energy?
Psychological energy is described as the actuating force in the mind or the psychological feature that moves an organism to act. This view poses that psychological energy is the presence of unconscious mental functioning that exists and operates on a level between biology and consciousness. This belief goes as far back as Aristotle who posed the theory that the potency of the mind was connected to the action of the body. This idea supports the notion that the body follows the mind. Given this understanding we are able to see that psychological energy plays a critical role surrounding human survival and quality of life. The human mind requires specific measures of psychological energy in order to maintain an emotional and mental equilibrium or balance that is more commonly known as mental health. Should the psychological energy levels dip below the critical level the mind goes into a state of psychological distress. Psychological energy takes form in the human mind in what is known as the 5–Wells of the Soul.
What are the 5-Wells of the Soul?
The 5-Wells include;
Hope – One’s belief in a more positive outcome. One’s faith in a better tomorrow. One’s vision of a future that is both thriving and fulfilling.
Worth – One’s inherent possession of the value and sanctity of one’s life. One’s ownership of a dignity born from divine inspiration. One’s sense of the majesty regarding the rarity of one’s being.
Purpose – One’s spiritual mission. One’s destination towards one’s original shape and the divine intention of you. One’s process of becoming a part of the bigness completing the circle of life by achieving wholeness through one’s destiny contribution.
Resourcefulness – One’s capacity to create approaches to resolving challenges and set-backs. One’s ability to recover from disappointment injury, and loss. One’s ability to restore normal levels of functioning.
Will-Power – One’s ability to assert individual choices in the face of strong opposition or adversity. One’s individual strength to overcome inner compensatory drives and impulses such as gluttony, greed, lust, envy, pride, sloth and anger. One’s ability to endure effort (the spending of energy) and suffering (the loss of energy due to illness, injury and/or violation) beyond one’s normal limits.
This psychological energy that resides within the 5-Wells of the Souls is required by each human mind to meet the demands of the day. These demands are called external stressors. To clarify this process let’s say that the average stressor load for the average human being is approximately 75-units per day.
Let’s say that each well of the soul contains 20-units of energy x’s 5-wells equals the notion that each human mind starts the day with 100-units of energy. This would leave the average mind with 25-units of energy at days end. The Wells will then re-energize during the process of sleep and much like a battery that has been recharged the individual will start the next day back to that restored measure of 100-units of psychological energy.
The ability of the human mind to re-energize itself suggests that the mind or psyche is both potent and resilient meaning that the mind is powerful and able to both spend and restore its power source. The spending of psychological energy is occurring throughout the day as we solve survival and survival maintenance problems. These life maintenance problems or stressors (such as comfort demands, hygiene demands, work demands, social demands, intimacy demands, education demands, parenting demands) coming at the individual mind from the external universe are both constant and persistent.
One way to picture the constant stream of external stressors is the Arthurian vision of king and kingdom. The custom in this bygone era was that all the people in the kingdom would stream into throne room to petition the king for a dollop of the kingdom’s energy. The line of people with intent to petition the king could stretch for miles and continue for days. Such is our daily plight with our own external stressors meaning that you are the King or the Queen giving out dollops of your psychological energy to each external stressor that petitions you. By days end the Kingdoms coffers are all but spent. Yet magically when come the morning light you check in on the treasury and find that the chests and strong boxes are filled to the brim with silver and gold.
What is psychological distress?
In addition to external stressors there are internal forces that will make demands on the mind’s psychological energy. These forces include the neurotic (conditional acceptance) thinking system, grief, mental health conditions (conditions such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar, and schizophrenia), physical/medical illness and injury (conditions such as disabilities and chronic pain, and addiction problems.
These internal forces acting much like black holes in the mind consume large quantities of psychological energy. Due to the intrusive and reductive nature of these internal conditions they are considered to be sources of psychological distress. Over time their ability to severely deplete the energy in the mind causes what is called an acute state of psychological distress. This acute state of psychological distress occurs when the psychological energy goes into the negatives and is unable to recover ground zero.
For example, Depression will make daily energy consumption demands of the five wells consuming up to 8-units of energy per well. Totaling to 40-units per day. The Depressed individual then wakes up with 60-units of energy rather than the customary 100-units. This means that the depressed individual must now face the day’s stressors with only 60-units of psychological energy. Given that the average stressor demand per day consumes 75-units the result for the depressed individual is minus 15-units of psychological energy by days end. This state of depletion tends to increase anxiety levels as the individual now feels unable to handle the demands of the day. This anxiety then causes more energy depletion leading the individual into a state of acute psychological distress as the depletion of psychological energy cycles into negative energy measures from which the individual is unable to recover.
How do individuals react to this depletion of psychological energy?
Stay tuned for Part II of Deconstructing the Progressive Cycle of Psychological Distress
Larry Marshall is a Licensed Professional Counselor at Greenway Therapy . Learn more about him on his BIO page.
