Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Why You MUST Stress Less
So What Exactly is Stress?
How Stress Damages the Brain
Chapter 2: Understanding the Complexity of Your Stress Systems
How Physiological Changes Trigger Stress
Chapter 3: How to Manage Normal Stress
Chapter 4: Meditation
How to Get Started With Meditation
Tips
Correct Breathing for Stress Reduction
Chapter 5: Mindfulness and CBT
Cognitive Restructuring
Conclusion
CHAPTER 1: WHY YOU MUST STRESS LESS
We all know that stress is bad for us and this is something we get told very often. However, it’s all too easy to write this off as being a minor nuisance or frustration rather than anything to really worry about. We all get stressed from time to time, right?
In reality though, this is the wrong way to think about stress. While it is fairly common place, that is not to say that it isn’t serious. In fact, stress is incredibly serious and can cause severe problems both in the short term and long term.
Stress can shorten your lifespan. Ruin your enjoyment. Cause serious illness. Shrink your brain. Hurt your performance. Ruin your relationships. Cause impotence.
Do those sound like small matters?
To understand this better, it can help to look more closely at what precisely stress is. How it causes the problems it does and how and why you need to do everything you can to prevent and reduce it.
So What Exactly is Stress?
Stress is what we feel when we’re overworked, when we’re dreading something that’s about to happen or when we’re generally unable to relax and stay calm due to outside or inside factors influencing our thoughts.
But it actually goes beyond this. Stress is a basic physiological reaction that is designed to help us focus and survive. In itself it is not a bad thing and is actually rather adaptive. The problem is that it has been taken out of context, which means the positive effects become outweighed by the negative.
Essentially, stress is what causes the ‘fight or flight response’. This is a physiological response to perceived danger, designed to improve our chances of survival. If you were to see a lion for example, this would trigger a cascade of effects collectively resulting in the stress response.
This begins when we observe danger or experience fear. Increased activity in our brain, causes the release of adrenaline, as well as dopamine, norepinephrine and cortisol – our stress hormones. These then trigger a number of physiological changes: increasing our heartrate, making us breathe more quickly and making us more acutely focussed on the potential threat.
A list of the symptoms should include:
• Increased heartrate
• Rapid, shallow breathing
• Muscle contraction
• Tunnel vision
• Heightened sensitivity
• Increased blood viscosity
• Suppression of the pain response
• Suppression of the immune system
• Suppression of the digestive system
• Dilation of the pupils
• Dilation of the blood vessels
• Reduction in prefrontal cortex activity (temporo-hypofrontality)
In the short term, this is good for us. In the short term, these things help us to evade danger and win combative situations. Increased muscle tension makes us stronger. Increased blood viscosity makes our blood more likely to clot in case of an injury. Dilated pupils let more light in to improve our vision. Suppression of secondary functions means that more blood can be sent to the muscles and the brain. Reduced pain means we can carry on fighting or running despite injury.
In short, anything that can help you to survive is prioritized, while secondary functions are suppressed. The idea is that once we get to safety, we can then turn off this fight or flight response and instead enter the ‘rest and digest’ state in order to recover. Once the predator is gone, we can recover.
But the problem is that in our modern environments, predators aren’t the main problem. It’s rare these days for us to be chased, to get into a fight or to need to escape a forest fire.
What’s not so rare, is for our boss to shout at us and to tell us that we’re late for our deadline. It’s not rare for us to be in debt. It’s not rare for us to have marital problems.
And unfortunately, the brain interprets all these signals in just the same way: as threats. And this causes the same fight or flight response. But because these types of threats aren’t so easily resolved, this means we’ll often end up on heightened alert for a longer period of time.
This is also why stress causes impotence in men. If you are highly stressed, blood is sent everywhere except the genitals!
And this takes a tremendous toll on our bodies.
As you might imagine: it is not good for you when your immune system and digestive system are suppressed for days. It’s also not good for your brain to be flooded with norepinephrine and cortisol. It’s not good for your heartrate to stay elevated, or your blood pressure to stay high.
This is the problem with chronic stress as opposed to acute stress. And it’s the problem with heightened levels of stress, as opposed to the gentle, motivating force of ‘eustress’. We’ll look at all of this more in the long term, but suffice to say that the longer stress like this continues, the more you start to feel drained, malnourished, fatigued, ill and possibly eventually depressed.
How Stress Damages the Brain
When we are stressed, it effectively makes us less intelligent. This is due to the reduction in pre-frontal activity, which in turn is designed to make us more focussed and alert. Essentially, the pre-frontal cortex is the part of the brain responsible for forward planning, creative thinking and other ‘high-order’ brain activity.
When you are being chased by a lion though, it is really not the time to be thinking about the meaning of life!
So shutting down this part of the brain and placing your focus on feedback from your senses makes much more sense.
Of course that’s not particularly useful in the workplace though: and this is why the stress response is so seriously unhelpful when we have to give a presentation, answer a question on the spot or go on a date. This is when we lose all articulation and start stammering and saying useless things.
Slightly longer-term is adrenal fatigue. This is what happens when your brain has exhausted its supply of adrenaline and other stress hormones. That might sound like a good thing but you actually need a little norepinephrine, dopamine and cortisol to stay motivated – and even to wake up in the morning! Adrenal fatigue leaves you listless, demotivated and potentially depressed. It can also cause what is known as ‘learned helplessness’ – a condition where you essentially completely give up because your brain has been conditioned to learn that any attempts to change its situation will be met with failure. Not good!
Worse, when you are highly stressed, it can lead to long term problems for your brain health. As we briefly mentioned: it can literally shrink your brain! Studies show that in the long term, it leads to structural changes that shrink the hippocampus and shrink grey matter – the all-important neural connections throughout the brain. Even a single, severe traumatic event can result in significant reductions in the medial PFC, anterior cingulate and subgenual regions of the brain. The effects of ‘cumulative adversity’ meanwhile, cause smaller volumes in the medial prefrontal cortex (the PFC), insular cortex and anterior cingulate regions.
These regions of the brain correspond with emotional control, decisionmaking, reasoning and self control.
In other words, the eventual result of stress is to leave you more reactionary, more depressive, more impulsive and less disciplined.
From here, every aspect of your life will start to see negative effects.
But there are things you can do about it…
CHAPTER 2: UNDERSTANDING THE COMPLEXITY OF YOUR STRESS SYSTEMS
But what if you’re not stressed?
What if your work isn’t particularly high pressured, your relationships are good and you have plenty of money? Does that mean you’re fine?
Probably not. Unfortunately, many other aspects of our modern lifestyles cause symptoms similar to those of stress.
One example is our use of technology and artificial lighting. The brain is designed to use external cues (‘zeitgebers’ to use correct terminology) to set its own biological rhythms including the sleepwake cycle (circadian rhythm).
This actually triggers the release of stress hormones at certain times of day. That’s because stress hormones are one of the tools that the body uses to wake itself up when you are sleeping. The release of stress hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine triggers activity in the brain that stirs you out of sleep and makes you fully alert.
But if the light is on at night, or you’re looking at your phone in the evening, this will cause the release of similar stress hormones right when you’re meant to be relaxing. That means you’ll continue to feel alert and won’t give your brain time to recover.
And what doesn’t help is the way that everything on the web and on TV is designed to grab our attention and pull us this way and that – this has been shown to cause effects similar to ADHD in the long term and make it harder for us to concentrate on any one thing for very long.
How Physiological Changes Trigger Stress
The above is an example of how stress is entirely a result of what’s going on in your life or even of what you’re thinking. Instead, stress can be a result of outside factors that physically influence you.
A way to think of it is like this:
Physical Sensations > Feelings > Emotions > Thoughts > Behaviors
That is to say that your emotions are very often the result of physical things affecting your physiology.
For example, if you’re in a colder environment, this actually increases the amount of cortisol and the amount of norepinephrine. Physiologically, this is the same as low-level stress and that’s why a cold shower is a great way to wake yourself up!
This is also why being cold for too long can make you ill – as the stress response is suppressing your immune system.
Likewise, if you are hungry, then this triggers a physiological type of stress. Essentially, hunger causes your brain to release cortisol due to a decrease in blood sugar. When blood sugar is low, cortisol is released and the body responds to this as it would any other type of stress.
Why? Because as far as the body is concerned, this is a form of danger. If you are hungry, then you need to become active and get out there in order to seek out a source of food. Ghrelin, the hunger hormone, is released alongside cortisol and myostatin which breaks down tissue to provide energy.
When you eat on the other hand, this causes a sudden spike in your blood sugar. That in turn will cause you to release insulin, which absorbs the sugar for use around the body (either in the muscles and brain, or to be stored as fat).
This also has the effect of leaving behind another substance called ‘tryptophan’, which is found in most foods but doesn’t get absorbed. Tryptophan makes its way through the circulatory system all the way to the brain, where it crosses the blood brain barrier and converts to serotonin (as it is a ‘precursor’ to serotonin). Serotonin is the ‘feel good hormone’ and it’s also a precursor itself: this time to melatonin – the sleep hormone.
This is why when you eat a large meal, you tend to feel full, then happy, then sleepy. Christmas dinner ring any bells?
This is the opposite of the stress response. This is the aforementioned ‘rest and digest’ response.
And this is another cycle that your body goes through constantly: it moves from fight or flight, to rest and digest. You just don’t notice this because in a perfect world, that shift will be subtle and you won’t feel it too much. You just move slightly up and down the spectrum, becoming slightly more alert and focussed and then slightly less so.
Nevertheless though, this constant fluctuation does have an impact on things like your productivity and your mood. And it is also closely tied to the sleep-wake cycle. When you wake up for instance, you are in a fasted state having slept all night: thus you have high cortisol.
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