Dosing Stress for Resilience

Stress has been a hot-button topic in many circles lately, generating controversy and confusion surrounding its role and importance. It isn't easy to know whether it's to be avoided or sought out.

               As far as I can tell, the short answer is "both", and the short but slightly longer answer is "when it comes to stress, the dose really does make the poison".

               Bouts of stress, followed by relaxation and recovery, can lead to significant improvements in our cognitive abilities like increasing short- and long-term memory, optimising our ability to forego emotional reactivity, and creating a bulletproof immune system. However, allowing stress levels to get too high for too long can deplete any hope of thinking straight. Essential functions like remembering if we have already paid the phone bill or keeping our emotional state from reverting to that of our 4-year-old self can become much more difficult. We start waking up with aches and pains, runny noses and bottomed-out energy. What I've just described and what we'll be talking about here is "chronic stress", the evil twin of "acute stress".

               Think of stress as a sort of physiological bank account: We make deposits while we sleep, eat a nutritious meal, hang around positive and loving people, take time to relax, and do things we enjoy so that we can make withdrawals when our body needs funds, like when fighting off disease and infection, having difficult but necessary conversations with friends or family, or recovering from a brutal workout. Therefore, following this bank account analogy, chronic stress results from us making withdrawals after withdrawal without making many deposits, leaving our bank account in the red and many of our bills unpaid.

               Our stress bank account tends to fund our lives best when it's in the green, letting us splurge when we need to without needing to take the next several days to recover. It's vital that if we've been living in the red and would like to return to the green sooner than later, we should be capable of checking our balance and know how to make some deposits into it.

               Unfortunately, there isn't an app for that (…yet). But not all hope is lost; fortunately, we have sets of cortical tissue devoted to detecting stress levels as they rise and fall. So all we have to do is understand those signals and what to do about them.

                I've written about stress and its associated processes in several articles, so I won't go too deep into the physiology of it here (you can find those articles here and here).

               Simply put, our subcortical (beneath the cortex, also known as the emotional brain) areas house many structures that drive stress processes, like the hypothalamus, amygdala, and pituitary. And our prefrontal lobes house many systems that drive the processes responsible for dampening and shutting off those processes. When it comes to stress, you can think of these subcortical structures operating like a gas pedal, while the prefrontal lobes might work more like a brake.

               Sitting between these two areas are several structures, namely the Anterior Cingulate Cortex, written as "ACC", and the insula. These two structures operate like messengers between the prefrontal lobes and the amygdala, relaying messages sent from one to the other. This enables us to, in addition to other processes, be aware of and respond to internal bodily cues of stress, like a racing heart or an accelerating breathing rate.

               Thankfully, this is where much of our solution to chronic stress begins, in noticing these signals. Many people can go days, months, or even years, without seeing that they are stressed. All they know is that the arousal signals in their body are telling them to go faster and harder.

               The quickest way to begin shutting those signals down is by activating the prefrontal lobes by directing your attention to the signs coming from your body. You can do this in several ways, the most practical being: say to yourself in your head, for example, "ah, my heart is racing. My body must be perceiving something stressful". Slow your breathing, and then scan your environment to send signals to your cortical visual areas that no stressful stimuli can be seen.

               By becoming aware of the signals of stress and using your attention to scan your environment, be that visually, auditorily, tactically, or otherwise, you are effectively activating the parts of your prefrontal lobes responsible for those "braking" processes that send messages to the rest of your brain and body that everything is okay.

               The better you get at playing this game of becoming stressed, noticing the signs, and turning on those braking processes, the more of the positive benefits of stress you'll be able to extract without incurring the costs that result from living in that revved-up state 24/7. 

               Stress is an unavoidable component of life, especially when trying to make something out of oneself. That yearning to live a full life and all the stuff that comes with it is sure to cost something. By practising your ability to break the cycle of stress, even if it's for a few seconds, you are making small but meaningful deposits into your bank account to withdraw when you really need to.