THE ONE THING YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR HEALTH RIGHT NOW
By: Valerie Stark
Tags: Stress Management, Coronavirus, Mindfulness, Stress, Meditation

THE ONE THING YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR HEALTH RIGHT NOW

Have you ever seen someone getting scared about something that shouldn’t be scary at all, like seeing a spider or taking a flight?

You might have noticed them having real physical reactions — clenching their fists, becoming tense, sweating or showing other signs of panic. Yet while witnessing these very real signs of stress, you’ve likely been sat there wondering what is wrong with them — after all, they’re seeing and experiencing the exact same things that you are.

However, while you remained calm, that exact same situation created stress for someone else. Their brain perceived the situation as a highly stressful event, producing a cascade of chemical and physical reactions, triggering the stress (or fight or flight) response you saw.

These types of situations highlight how, even when the input (visual representation) is the same for two people, they can each interpret that input very differently.

This is because the human brain processes visual input based on our individual knowledge and previous exposures to an object or situation, and then produces a reaction according to our respective personal meanings of the event. This process means that stress and the stress response both occur inside the brain and are only stimulated by external triggers.

At the same time, stress and the stress response are not solely produced by simply encountering those triggers. Your personal appraisal, which has been developed from your exposure to said triggers, also plays a crucial role.

THE SCHOOL OF STRESS:

The fear and stress response is learned. If someone had never learned to be scared of a big hairy animal — for example, a bear — they wouldn’t find it scary upon seeing one for the first time.

Similarly, children don’t immediately realise the danger of oncoming cars — it’s their parents who must instruct them to move away from the traffic, when they’re cruising back home from school on their scooters. This example highlights another way to learn fear and subsequently produce a stress response — this is via exposure to other people’s reactions and their experiences.

Recent developments considered, your entire family doesn’t have to catch COVID-19 and barely survive for you to be afraid of disease. The consistent exposure to negative media coverage is sufficient to build your appraisal, so that every time you think of the disease, it produces a stress response — but this in turn, weakens your immune system, making way to a higher chance of infection.

In an experiment conducted by Schachter and Singer in 1964, 184 males were injected with a drug called epinephrine, a hormone which produces bodily reactions, such as trembling, increased heartbeat and rapid perspiration. All participants were told they were trialling a new drug that would test their eyesight — however only some of them were told about the side effects.

The participant groups were then placed in separate rooms, where the doctors conducting the experiment would act out different types of behaviours, such as angry and happy.

The participants who were told nothing about the drug felt more emotional, intensely mirroring the feelings shown by the person conducting the experiment, whereas those already told about the side effects had a more controlled response. The latter immediately associated their physical sensations with the drug itself, not just what they were witnessing.

What this experiment confirms, is that our pre-conceptions make us see things differently to how we otherwise would. Even the strongest physical sensations from the body can be reappraised by the brain, depending on what we’re told and how we’re expected to react.

This is the same for life events, our stress response is heavily influenced by the people surrounding us, their opinions and the explanations we’re given — but what happens if we do not know how to react to something unprecedented, such as a global pandemic, and we don’t have an explanation for it?

Well, just like those participants in Schachter and Singer’s experience, who were unaware of the side-effects of the drug, we feed off the atmosphere and mimic the emotions and responses from those around us.

This was also made clear in the now infamous experiment involving Little Albert in 1920. Today it’s considered greatly unethical, but the results are still used to show psychology students how fear conditioning occurs.

In the experiment, a nine-month-old toddler named Albert was exposed to various fear stimuli, including animals as small as a rat or rabbit, and as big as a dog. When Albert showed no fear to any of the animals, those conducting the experiment started striking a steel bar with a hammer every time he touched a rat.

Eventually, poor Albert would show a fear response each time a little rat appeared. Notably, after learning that fear, he would then become distressed by any hairy things, including dogs, which were never accompanied by the loud striking noises in the experiment — he was even scared of a Santa Clause mask with a furry beard on it.

What become of Little Albert is unfortunately unknown, but I’m sure we all have seen those fully grown Albert’s leaping out of their skin to avoid “danger,” causing everyone to turn around looking for impending danger — only to see a man in his 50’s running away from a pocket dog.

To this man’s brain, the dog constitutes to danger, and one of the main functions of the brain is to save the man’s life — no matter how small that danger may seem to everyone else.

STRESS CHRONICLES:

Once your brain receives a visual, sensory or audio input that constitutes danger for you personally, it produces a cascade of bodily reactions in order to save your life. To the brain, there’s nothing more important than saving your life — your survival ensures your brain survives, after all — it directs all resources to this very important task.

The stress response then produces a series of hormonal, biochemical, neurological and physiological reactions, such as slowing down your metabolism (who needs to digest food when you’re about to lose your life, right?), increasing your heart rate, elevating adrenaline and flooding your body with cortisol — also known as the stress hormone that is commonly associated with storing fat.

Once all of these systems are activated, the body is prepared to either run or fight. This is the reason behind these physical reactions — the body is embracing itself to respond to what could potentially kill you.

Remember that the stress response is something we learn and our body is only supposed to be experiencing it when we are actually in danger; once that danger has been avoided, our bodies gradually return to normal. But how often do our brains sense danger, resulting in stress, in our day-to-day lives?

How often have you felt like your heart is beating in your throat when you’ve remembered a tight deadline, had an impending mortgage payment, saw your child crossing a busy road or watched the news about COVID-19? On all of these occasions, your body is experiencing stress. This stress may be less intense compared to if you were about to be hit by a car, but it is consistent — it is chronic stress.

In the case of an oncoming car, once your stress response had helped you to avoid being killed, your bodily functions would gradually return to normal, but with chronic stress, our bodily responses remain active over the days, months or years, with no end in sight.

In fact, experiencing the full cycle of stress (fight of flight response), whether a positive or negative outcome, is more natural and therefore much healthier than being exposed to multiple stressors per day, over a long period of time — your body not knowing whether or not they will kill.

We are programmed to engage all of the body’s resources to avoid danger, we are not, however, programmed to be consistently primed for danger that will most likely never happen. Thinking about danger several times a day and living in a constant state of “what if?“ is incredibly detrimental to our health, because our bodies don’t know the difference between imaginary or real danger — they simply respond every time we ask them to.

Normally, things that stress us out, such as a deadly virus or a mortgage, are stuck in our minds in a continuous loop, and once we feel overwhelmed, we try to switch onto something more pleasant; something to keep us busy, but our body is still fighting a battle behind the scenes. Our heart rates and cortisol levels are still elevated; our metabolisms depleted.

We let this stress linger without actually addressing it and by the time all these levels start to go back down, we have more stressful scenarios running through our minds. This cycle leaves us in a chronic state of surviving, with no room for normal healthy functioning of the immune system — all resources are expended towards surviving.

Essentially, stress steals energy from your immune system, and it is immunity that you need the most in order to fight viruses, however it doesn’t just attack the immune system — it also hugely affects neurogenesis, the production of new neurons in the brain.

Not only does stress affect the production of new neurons, it also affects their survival. The hippocampal area of the brain — a region critical in memory formation, learning abilities and anxiety regulation — is one of the regions where neurogenesis is happening and new neurons are produced. Reduction in hippocampal neurogenesis has been linked to depression and Parkinson’s disease, to name a few of the many possible consequences.

What all of this means, is that unaddressed chronic stress, even if it’s only imaginary, eventually leads to depression and other neurodegenerative disease. In order to get rid of chronic stress, the stress response must be reduced, and your stress must be allowed to complete its cycles.

LIVING IN A HORROR MOVIE:

Every time we ask ourselves “what if?” — What if I lose my job? What if I catch COVID-19? What if my partner is cheating on me? — we only let our stress responses go half way, led by our imaginations, leaving ourselves hanging in the midst of an unfinished movie that never has an ending.

Every story has a tie, a climax and a denouement, unless it’s a horror story. Living through things half way — when we hold our breath in anticipation, sweating and feel chills running down the back — is a favourite method used by horror book authors and movie directors.

Neither Stephen King’s books, nor Hitchcock’s movies would be so nerve-wrecking if they didn’t employ the element of anticipation, where something is about to happen, about to happen, about to happen… until we’re only watching that movie from behind a cushion or the gaps in our fingers.

We are consistently worried about things that might not happen, especially when caught up in the hysteria fuelled by the news. It’s this anxiety that makes us binge-watch a series until 5 am too; the shows keep us hooked and worried, but if each series had a proper finale, we wouldn’t be glued to the screen like addicts.

This is why one of the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) methods for people with depression and anxiety, who tend to ruminate a lot, includes concreteness training and the ‘play the script until the end’ technique.

In concreteness training, people are trained to replace abstract rumination and worrying with a specific style of thinking. In the play the script until the end method, anxiety is reduced by imagining the worst-case scenario in nitty-gritty details, so that there are no feelings of impeding danger and perhaps even several solutions made available.

If you unconvinced by the modern CBT techniques, there’s Bushido, which translates to “a way of warrior’ and represents a samurai code.

In a famous quote by samurai Yamamoto Tsunemoto, in his commentaries to bushido, he stated the following: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail, one should consider himself as dead.”

Although this quote may sound ominous, it teaches us it to imagine the worst scenario possible, in order to get comfortable with it — this way, there is no energy wasted on never-ending worries or fear of the unknown.

In other words, this approach means replacing a “what if?” attitude with “so what?” keeping you calm, focused and also healthy by completing the stress response once, instead of living in a daily horror series that you have to binge watch until the immune system is completely run down.