Stress, Stress Response and Distraction Behaviour

Image: CDD20

Reading time: 10 minutes

What is stress? That question can be answered as many times as there are people because of the complete and utter subjective nature of the matter. On the other hand, the physiological (or: physical) stress response, at least to a large extent, can be measured in everyone. This might prove especially helpful for those of us who suffer from physical discomfort for no apparent reason because oftentimes stress plays a part.

As soon as we are triggered in a stress response, changes take place in our body that cause us to become alert to a supposed threat. Some of the changes are quite easy to sense:

Heartbeat; our heart beats faster and harder.
Movement of the breath; we are going to breathe faster and higher (from belly to chest).
Muscle tension; our skeletal muscles tense up.

Threat implies that our brain more or less expects to have to flee or fight it, hence our muscles tense up. Going from a relaxed to a tense state means they consequently need more oxygen and fuel than while at rest. Oxygen and fuel are transported via our blood, so when the heart rate goes up blood is being pumped around our body faster. At the same time, our airways widen so that we can suck more air into our lungs per breath movement, allowing us to absorb more oxygen per breath.

Other phenomena are that our eye pupils enlarge (in order to be able to keep a sharp eye on the alleged threat) and that our digestion, depending on the severity of the stress response, is suppressed a little or completely. Also, with prolonged excessive stress, the immune system begins to function less and less effectively.[1] All this is triggered after our adrenal glands[2] receive a signal from our brain to pump adrenaline and/or cortisol into the body, which effectively triggers the stress response.

Both the changes we can sense and the ones that are not consciously perceptible can be measured. This provides valuable information, especially when it comes to clearly present stress responses but without us noticing. In his book “When the body says no”, Gabor Maté uses the measurable physical changes of the stress response to show his patients that they experience stress responses almost continuously, while they themselves hardly notice it at all. Partly because of this, their susceptibility to diseases such as MS, ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease), rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular diseases, obesity, Type II Diabetes and even malignancies is increasing.

That has to do with personal convictions. Lou Gehrig was an American baseball player nicknamed "The Iron Horse." Healthy or sick, with or without broken fingers, he never missed a match. In the 30s of the last century, when there was no modern physiotherapy or sports medicine, he played 2130 consecutive matches – a record that stood for more than six decades. Lou's conviction was that he had to be loyal to his boss and teammates at all costs. In doing so, he almost permanently overstepped his own boundaries, making him physiologically a walking stress response, which eventually led to ALS – the disease that would come to bear his name.

What we see here can be described as distraction behaviour in extreme form. Lou was convinced that the threat of disloyalty was many times greater than continuing to work in poor condition. The changes in his body as a result of a stress response to the mere thought of disloyalty were probably so violent that he wanted to avoid them at all costs. So he kept violating his own boundaries until the end when his body finally said ‘no’. Probably without ever being aware of what was happening inside.

The reason we can call Lou's behaviour extreme is because his loyalty didn't stop with his employer. He was loyal to his teammates, his mother, and anyone who asked him for help got it. He was obsessively loyal, completely ignoring himself and his own needs. But, like any organism, he also had certain needs, if only rest and a break at regular intervals.

Ignoring our own needs ultimately leads to stress responses with corresponding physical sensations.[3] If the stress response is severe enough, those sensations will be considered highly uncomfortable and undesirable, and every effort will be made not to feel or experience them. But before we philosophize about that, let's first look at how a physical stress response actually begins.

A stress response starts when our brain becomes aware of a certain threat. If the threat is large enough, a stress response is triggered as a defence mechanism. In the event of a major threat, the sympathetic part of our nervous system sends a signal to the adrenal glands to pump adrenaline into the body to trigger a stress response at lightning speed. In mild threat, two glands in the middle of the brain, the hypothalamus and pituitary, respectively, send a messenger to the adrenal glands to pump corticosteroids into the body for a mild and somewhat slower stress response. A rapid stress response will occur if our brain perceives existential threat, and a slow stress response will occur for instance during an exam, where (usually) no death threat is experienced but a high degree of alertness is required for a somewhat longer period of time.

Once adrenaline and/or corticosteroids are pumped into our body by the adrenal glands, the physical changes we’ve discussed take place to protect us from a perceived threat. We can usually sense the change in heart rate and breathing movement, while the increase in muscle tension can manifest itself as stiffness or pain (usually in the back, neck/shoulders or head, but can also occur in other places). In addition can be experienced (without pretending to be complete): pressure on the chest, increasingly tight band around the stomach, a stone in the stomach, abdominal pain, the feeling as if the throat is being squeezed, swelling tears behind the eyeballs or the feeling that someone is manually pulling our stomach through the oesophagus out of our mouth.

Most of these sensations are, as a rule, being regarded as uncomfortable (this also applies when an increased heart rate is experienced as palpitations and an accelerated breathing movement as hyperventilation). Uncomfortable means undesirable so that we prefer to avoid these sensations as much as possible, or, if we really can't avoid them, prefer to forget or repress them quickly. And yippy-ka-yee, that's where the distractions come in,[4] because we have enchanted ourselves into believing that if we focus on ‘positive’ things, the ‘negative’ ones are no longer there.

It goes like this: we regard the physical sensations after a stress response as something negative and therefore undesirable. In addition, technological development has caused a rather misplaced feeling of invincibility in many of us. The conviction has taken root that we can continuously obtain or maintain the positive while avoiding the negative. So as soon as we deal with negative sensations, we are convinced that we can ‘solve’ them through certain actions: smoking, gambling, drinking, eating, working, sexing, social media-ing, sporting, and so on. And even though if we distract ourselves long enough that we’re not consciously aware of the stress response sensations anymore after some time, does that mean we have successfully ‘distracted’ them away?

Suppose we receive a highly unpleasant text message on our mobile. Reading that message pushes our buttons and the physical stress response is triggered. As soon as the message has been read and we have recovered from the first scare, our brain starts searching for solutions to the problem that has just arisen. The text message that startled us to begin with, the so-called ‘stressor’, has now faded into the background. End of the stress response, you’d think. Why then do those highly uncomfortable sensations remain so persistently present?

That is because we need a cooling down period after being triggered into a stress response. We can compare it to a car that speeds up at a traffic light and goes from 0 to 100 km/h in 3.3 seconds. If the driver brakes hard after 4 seconds, the car does not stop immediately but needs a braking distance. Or think of a sprinter in the 100 meters in athletics. After the finish, he/she does not stop immediately but needs some running out before coming to a full stop.

As soon as the stressor has disappeared and the adrenal glands no longer release adrenaline or corticosteroids, the organs in which the changes have taken place need time to return to their normal state. But if we don't know that, and we're still experiencing those relentlessly irritating sensations while the threat (e.g. the text message) is already out of sight, we usually want only one thing: to get rid of them! A wish that commerce only too happily satisfies because uncomfortable makes unhappy, so "buy this product or service and happiness will be ours!" That maintains the illusion that if we do nothing about the sensations of a stress response, we ourselves are to blame for our miserable state. While the only thing these sensations actually do is alert us to an alleged threat.

That’s right, alleged threat. Whether the threat is real or not, we feel threatened. A stress response gives us information about people and situations that we obviously perceive as threatening. Our body communicates continuously and this is one of the means of communication with which we try to protect ourselves. But as so often, the protector is mistaken for the evil doer. In the Middle Ages, for example, it was believed that fever was a disease. Medication against fever was developed that proved successful at some point. One patient was successfully ‘cured’ of fever and a week later he died. At the time people didn’t yet know that fever is a defence mechanism of our body to fight viruses and bacteria.

Today we reject the physical sensations associated with a stress response in a similar way, especially when we don’t know that stress is the cause of our physical discomfort. For example, it may well be that we think to suffer from palpitations. We see a cardiologist and after examining us we are told that our heart is fine. Nevertheless, we wake up at night with a palpitating heart. As long as we do not realize that, for example, intense worries about the workplace in the form of panic thoughts trigger our stress response, there’s a good chance that we will become convinced something is wrong with our heart. Imagine the stress responses when we hear from the cardiologist that our heart’s just peachy; we start to doubt our own perception and judgment, we feel not being taken seriously, we worry because we don’t know what is going on, and so on.

Yet what to do then with those bodily sensations after a stress response, which we consider uncomfortable? Well, for starters, we can remove the predicate ‘uncomfortable’ and consider them instead as information. This removes negative charge, eliminating the need for distracting behaviour. If the distracting behaviour still takes place, regard that too as information instead of experiencing it as a pleasant promise or unpleasant weakness.

In other words, instead of wanting to control and rule our body with an iron fist, let's learn to communicate with it (i.e. with ourselves). That means taking time to pick up our bodily signals, learn to recognize them and investigate what information we can filter from them. From that point of view, stress responses, especially those triggered when our emotional buttons are pushed, can become invaluable – provided that in time we can replace our usual distracting behaviour with doing nothing.

Nothing? Exactly. Through the physical sensations associated with a stress response, we now know that our buttons have been pushed. If the perceived threat does not require action at that particular moment, we can choose to start observing ourselves during a stress response. Who or what do we presume to be threatening? What thoughts come to mind? What thoughts are there now? Where do I feel this stress response in my body? Which emotion is underneath that? What am I going to do; can I consider my own discomfort without wanting to ‘fix’ it or am I still falling into one of my old distraction behaviours? If so, do I have an opinion on that? What thoughts come to mind? Etc.

This 'doing nothing' however is obviously not mere idleness because the act of observing ourselves, particularly under stress, could initially feel like difficult and hard work. Yet when space is created to observe and examine ourselves, our thoughts, feelings and behaviours, anxiety decreases by definition. Doing nothing while we are triggered in a stress reaction offers the opportunity to find out what we are afraid of and whether or not that is justified. As soon as we focus the spotlight on our fears, their power decreases. Anxiety enjoys operating in the shadows, the light of the spotlight has the same effect on it as daylight on a vampire.

Distracting behaviour perpetuates anxiety and only leads further away from relaxation and balance, where self-examination can lead us towards them. In the end, we all get merry about that!

Jolly greetings,
Erik Stout

[1] Keep in mind that the changes mentioned only partially describe all the physiological changes of our stress response.

[2] The adrenal glands are located on top of our kidneys.

[3] See this blog post for tips on how to find the needs of our unique organism.

[4] More about distraction behaviours and the phenomenon of ‘letting go’ in this blog post.

Image gallery:

Smoking praying Mantis: RyanMcGuire
Secretly watching smartphone: sik92
Social media addiction: Mohamed_hassan