Stress Is All In Your Head

Posted on February 10, 2009
Filed Under Alex Mandossian, General | View Comments

Humans have a stress response to protect us from predators. When we’re chased by a lion, we secrete glucocortocoids whose purpose is to give energy to our light muscles, like our thighs, allowing us to ignore pain and run faster.

But because we aren’t often chased by lions, and because we haven’t evolved the ability to cope with more modern stresses, we treat every stress as if it were a predator threat. The tiger is replaced by pyschological stress, stress that we humans, if we are fortunate enough to live in a society where we aren’t routinely threatened as prey, mostly create for ourselves.

We do that very well, stressing over money, power, position, relationships, global warming, school yard and boardroom bullies, etc. In fact, virtually all the stress we experience in the post-dinosaur age is stress created for us either by other humans or by our own thoughts.

The problem with this is that psychological stressers we encounter don’t require us to run, so the energy burst to our muscles of our natural stress response doesn’t do us any good. In fact, exposure to glucocortocoids released by stress leads to other chronic problems like destruction of neurons in the hippocampus (the center of the brain responsible for memory), and to chronic diseases like cancer, stroke and autominue diseases like arthritis.

To recap where we are so far:

  • We have a natural stress response that is designed to save us from things that want to eat us.

  • Now that we mostly don’t have to worry about being eaten, our bodies respond to any perceived stress with the same chemicals it used to help us get away from lions.

  • These chemicals don’t help us at all with psychological stress, in fact they themselves lead to chronic illness, even death.

If we create our own stressors, and if we can control what constitutes a stress for us, can we also create a stress response that actually helps us?

In his study of baboons in Africa over the past 20 years, Dr. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University, has observed what cognitive psychology has told us for years: psychological stress is overwhelmingly about how much control you perceive you have, how predictable the stress is, whether or not you have adequate social support and whether or not you have a way to release the energy built up by the stress.

Here is a formula for a modern stress response, based on the traits outlined by Dr. Sapolsky. This involves working with your habits of thinking, and like any habit, it is simple, but not easy to instill.

  1. Decide it’s not a problem. We can do very little to control the external events that come into our lives. What we can do is control our thoughts about those events. If we don’t have enough money in the bank for the bills this month, for example, we can decide to focus on what we DO have and to be grateful for that. This attitude releases hormones that energize and uplift, providing more energy for doing the things that need to be done to rectify the situation.

  1. Anticipate Stress. Life happens. Every day brings challenges and obstacles. If we anticipate that, not hope for it or obsess about it or fear it, simple expect that from time to time there will be challenges, we are less likely to be blindsided by things when they DO happen. This makes stress more predictable, and therefore, less damaging.

  1. Consciously Connect. The more isolated you are, the more stressed out you are likely to become. But just being around other people isn’t enough. Build a support system for yourself that you choose consciously to reflect the kind of life you want to lead.

  1. Consciously Create. There are countless ways to release the energy built up by stress. The key is to be conscious about what you choose. Screaming at the barrista at the coffee shop is a primal way to release…that’s just what Sapolsky’s baboons do – beat up on the next one down the hierarchy. Consciously choose an outlet that is life supporting: painting, drumming, conscious sex, emotional release work, being in nature, exercising, mindfulness work and meditation, all excellent ideas for healthy stress outlets.

The key thing to remember is that by and large, the things that stress you out are not REAL THREATS. You make them threats with your mind.

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