April is Stress Awareness Month, so, throughout April, I will be posting some blogs to help you understand stress and to offer you some strategies in how to manage it. So, first up: what is stress?
I find the following definition most helpful: the body’s response to something, either internal or external, that the survival brain considers a threat to the mind-body system. More simply, stress can be delineated into this equation:
Stressor + Perception of Stress = Stress Response
Ultimately, stress causes the mind-body system to consider itself under threat and gives itself one job: ensuring survival in the immediate term. Literally minute to minute.
This equation is embedded in our DNA, and our stress response (which I will cover in the next blog) is much the same as our Homo Sapiens ancestors and much of the animal kingdom. Why? Because it works so well.
It’s the perfect formula for keeping us alive when our very existence is threatened. If it wasn’t so successful, evolution would have been abruptly halted.
However, the differences in contemporary human stress equations are the increased stressors and our heightened perception of stress.
Stressors
As 21st century humans, we are extremely unlikely to face a sabre tooth tiger that thinks we would make an excellent snack. But modern life has released a whole new category of stressful situations on us: work deadlines, being accepted by peers, information overload and cascades of unknowns.
Our stressors have become more psychological, symbolic and anticipatory, but this is not to say they are any less valid or that it is all in your head. Absolutely not. Quite the opposite: it makes stress harder to recover from.
Perception of stress
The perception of stress flows from the parts of the brain we cannot control (the survival brain), where our life’s experiences are assimilated into implicit memories. These memories inform our understanding of the world and impact our behaviours without our awareness – rational thought has a very limited role to play here. It is also worth noting that negative experiences are more likely to imprint and inform our experiences because we learnt more about survival from negative experiences.
The survival brain does not distinguish between modern stressors and stressors we may have faced in the past. Our perceptions of stress are rooted in our individual experiences, which are far more varied in modern life than our cavemen ancestors. This means stressors will be different for everyone. It also renders the ‘well, that person seems to cope with this, so I should, too’ rhetoric extremely unhelpful.
Managing Stress
Despite the unconscious nature of the stress equation, there are ways to intervene in and manage stress when it becomes chronic or detrimental to normal functioning.
The key aspect of managing stress is to ensure recovery, returning the mind-body system to its optimal and baseline functioning and allowing the survival brain to intuit that the stress has passed. Without recovering from stress, we become chronically stressed. Not only can this harm our health, it also reduces our future tolerance for stress, as the survival brain considers the stress to be ongoing and/or that we are unable to defend ourselves. The survival brain is made to feel very vulnerable without recovery.
Tackling stress is, therefore, more about working with the mind-body system to rewire and reassure in ways it can understand, which excludes telling ourselves that we are stupid for being stressed and ploughing through, nonetheless. This is not the language the body speaks. I will set out how we can use a ‘bottom up’ approach in the subsequent blogs.
Eustress
It is important to also mention the positives of stress. The body was perfectly designed to endure it and to actually perform exceedingly well during stress: acute stress can help us to meet deadlines, perform well in the gym and to focus on what’s in front of us. This is called Eustress (Greek for ‘good stress’). It is the window of ultimate functioning, and the more we are able to intervene in our stress equation, the better we will be at finding and operating within this window.
In the next blog I will cover what happens in the body when the stress response is triggered.
If you have any questions, please do reach out!