Deborah Hill Cone: Just add water and feel your stress wash away

Before you say anything stupid, have a glass of water. Photo / Thinkstock

This is going to be an especially random column. I'm always haphazard, but this week has been more of a super-shambles than usual.

Spotty had blood in his wee. I took him to the vet and had to run around after him with a tray trying to catch a clean urine specimen without leaves or twigs in it.

Turned out it was a UTI (urinary tract infection), and we all know how painful they are, don't we ladies? He's better now though, and apparently I need to make sure he drinks more water, although my vet didn't tell me that.

Incidentally, I don't think the veterinarian business model incentivises vets to be terribly zippy. They operate more in the manner of pretentious hairdressers, rather than rat-a-tat in the manner of 15-minute consult GPs.

I never seem to be able to get out of the vets in under an hour for less than $500. But I do live in the suburb of rich blondes with tiny pets, so that may not be representative.

Anyway, Spotty is better now.

On Friday night I stayed at home on my own reading about tantric sex whilst wearing my flannelette pyjamas. (Awesome! Sex for lazy people!) That was relaxing but not likely to yield any outrage to fill a column. Still, no UTI either. But I also learnt a new saying: "Not my circus, not my monkeys."

I've decided I need to learn to tolerate feeling a wee bit stink sometimes without having a tantrum about it. Just for a little bit.

As a whole new genre of books on failure have explored, you need to experience your own failures before you can conquer them.

In The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well is the Key to Success, Megan McArdle says we have powerful instincts urging us to hide from failure, to wish it away and try to avoid it.

But it's only by facing up to our mistakes and understanding what went wrong that we can correct it. Consequently, we all need to be able to bear feeling a bit uncomfortable sometimes.

Perhaps I'm not the only one who would benefit from learning this. As the election approaches I suspect most politicians would benefit from a lesson about how stress hormones like cortisol work.

When we are under attack, or make a mistake, we have a surge of stress hormones — that is our bodies telling us to "do something or you'll die".

As evolutionary psychologist Loretta Graziano Breuning explains, unhappy chemicals promote survival in the state of nature. If you are a hungry gazelle, you would rather be eating than running from a lion.

Cortisol has to feel very bad to get you to do what it takes to save your life. Cortisol evolved to give you the bad feeling that you will die if you don't "do something, now".

Your brain looks for ways to make the cortisol stop, and it chooses from the pathways it has. The problem is, some of those pathways — booze, fags, dumb sex, donuts, fighting, blaming someone else, putting out daft press statements — just make things worse. They mask your cortisol in ways that trigger even more cortisol.

You would be better off doing nothing for a moment. But when you do nothing, it feels like you will die because your cortisol is doing the job it evolved for.

So far, the best way I have discovered to distract yourself from that "I feel I might die" feeling is to stop and have a glass of water.

The link between water and stress reduction is well documented. All of our organs, including our brains, need water to function properly.

Studies have shown that being just half-a-litre dehydrated can increase your cortisol levels.

It is better to have a drink of water than say something you will later regret. I think this is why politicians, like the rest of us, find it difficult to just shut up.

So from now on, instead of arguing with someone, I'm going to just try to find a water fountain.

David Cunliffe: some election advice from Spotty for nothing; when in doubt don't woof, just drink more water. Glug glug glug.