When someone asks you "How do you respond when you get stressed out?" what is the first thing you think of? Do you immediately focus on how tense your body gets? Do you think first about how "spacey" you might feel? Do you reflect back on how you might feel on-edge during stressful periods? Or do you think about how you might stop caring about most everything around you? All of these are very normal reactions to excessive stress. Yet all of them reflect a different dimension of ourselves. The muscular tension we might experience in our body is, of course, a physical reaction. Feeling "spacey" is a common mentally-based response to overwhelm. Feeling on-edge may be characterized as an emotional response, while loss of meaningfulness may be spoken of as a spiritual response.

Of course we seldom respond to excessive stress in any singular way. Instead we more typically respond with our entire being, with the stress affecting our bodies, minds, feelings, and souls, not to mention our social relationships with others. Likewise, it is rare for us to experience any sensation which is purely physical, emotional, cognitive, spiritual, or social. Our thoughts might affect how we feel, our feeling might affect our tension level, our tension level might affect how likely others are to withdraw from us, and, in turn, the social abandonment by others may affect our spiritual sense of the goodness of the world. As our spiritual sense of the world fades, it inevitably affects our mental state, which begins the cycle over again. Where we begin within the cycle depends as much on who we are as human beings as it does on the stressor with which we are faced. We all perceive stress in a different way and we all choose different paths to follow for dealing with the Desert of Distress.