Repress Your Stress!
Stress And The Stress Response, Distraction Behaviour And How To Overcome It
Reading time: 10 minutes
Our brain has the capacity to override and ignore danger signals from our body. Image: CDD20
What is stress? The question has as many answers as there are people because it’s literally different for everyone. On the other hand, the physiological (or: physical) stress response can be measured in everyone, at least to a large extent. That might prove especially helpful for those of us who suffer from physical or mental discomforts which cannot be explained by regular healthcare assessments.
As soon as our buttons are pushed which triggers our 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, like for instance:
1. Heartbeat; our heart beats faster and harder;
2. Movement of the breath; we are breathing faster and higher (from belly to chest);
3. 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 increasing amounts of oxygen and fuel. 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 breathing movement, allowing us to absorb more oxygen every time we breathe in.
Other phenomena are that our eye pupils enlarge (in order to be able to keep a sharp eye on the alleged threat) and that among other processes our digestion, depending on the severity of the perceived threat, 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 epinephrine and/or glucocorticoids into the body, which effectively triggers the stress response.
All the known changes which occur in the body during a stress response can be measured. This provides valuable information, especially when our buttons are pushed so frequently that we don’t even notice our own stress responses anymore. 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 them almost continuously, while they themselves are consciously oblivious thereof. 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 (which he didn’t even notice himself), he never missed a match. In the 1930’s, 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 talking stress response. Disregarding himself in such an extreme manner eventually led to ALS – the disease that would come to bear his name.
Lou Gehrig. Image: Baseballhall
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 and serve others in poor physical condition. Therefore he kept violating his own boundaries until the end when his body couldn’t keep up with his self-destructing behaviour anymore, and finally said ‘no’. Moreover, there’s a good chance he was never even aware of what was happening inside his body (and mind).
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. He was obsessively loyal, completely ignoring himself and his own needs. But, like any organism, he also had certain needs, for example recovery periods from his continuous activity.
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 epinephrine into the body to trigger a stress response at lightning speed. Yet in a mild threat, two glands in the middle of the brain, the hypothalamus and pituitary, respectively, send a messenger to the adrenal glands to pump glucocorticoids 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.
This used to be a realistic threat for many in earlier times. Illustration; satheeshsankaran
Once epinephrine and/or glucocorticoids 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 completely. 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. Yet even 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. Reading the message pushes our buttons and triggers the stress response. 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 epinephrine and/or glucocorticoids, 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 sensations! A wish that commerce only too happily satisfies because uncomfortable makes unhappy, so ‘buy this product or service and happiness will be yours!’ Thereby maintaining 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 preparing us to face an alleged threat.
This is an apt example of an alleged threat which merely takes place in our mind. Illustration: Mohamed_hassan
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 off 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 or mental discomfort. For example, it may well be that we believe 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 racing heart. As long as we do not realize that a stressor like intense worries about the workplace in the form of panic thoughts for instance trigger our stress response, we’ll surely come to believe something is wrong with our heart. Imagine the stress responses (yes yes, plural) when we hear from the cardiologist that our heart’s just peachy; we then begin 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 our personal attachment and thereby the negative charge, eliminating the need for distracting behaviour. If the distracting behaviour still takes place, then regard that 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 learn to sense, recognize and locate our bodily signals, 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.
The gentle art of doing nothing (no-thing). Image: Peggy_Marco
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, instead of reacting like we usually do we can choose to sit down, concentrate on our breathing and observe ourselves during a stress response. Who or what do we believe to threaten us? 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’ is obviously not doing nothing because observing ourselves when our buttons have been pushed is difficult and hard work. However, when space is created to observe and examine ourselves, our thoughts, feelings and behaviours, anxiety decreases by definition. Concentrating on our breath and observing ourselves while we are triggered in a stress response offers the opportunity to find out what we are afraid of and whether or not that is justified. Because 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.
To sum up: remaining caught in automatic, involuntary 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 talents and predispositions of your unique body and mind.
[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
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