Stress is Actually Cool

"You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength." — Marcus Aurelius

Stress feels like the mosquito of your body's responses—no real purpose, just buzzin' around wreaking havoc. But what if I told you that's completely wrong? Your stress response is actually one of the most sophisticated biological systems you have, designed specifically to help you succeed. The problem isn't stress itself; it's how we think about it. Let's break down what's actually happening in your body when you're stressed, why it's beautiful, and how you can leverage it every single day.

What is Stress?

To put it simply, (and redundantly), stress is an internal response to stressful external triggers (i.e. rising gas prices, relationship strain, society's imminent collapse…). But what exactly is happening in the body? How, and why, do we 'stress'?

It starts in your brain—no surprises there—beginning with this little thing called the amygdala. The amygdala sends a distress signal to the hypothalamus, which is this little command center in your brain that has the final say in how your body responds to its surroundings.

So the hypothalamus gets the message and instead of leaving the amygdala on 'read' it begins to activate the sympathetic nervous system (remember the sympathetic nervous system, it will be important later).

This message travels through all these winding nerves until it finds itself at the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands say "Sir, yes Sir!" and start releasing epinephrine (aka adrenaline) and cortisol into the bloodstream.

As many of you have experienced before, this surge of adrenaline and cortisol brings on a number of physiological changes. Your heart begins to beat faster than normal, pushing oxygen-rich blood to your muscles and other vital organs at a much higher volume. Your pulse rate and blood pressure go up as a result, and your breathing becomes more rapid.

Your lungs kick in the afterburners, opening up your airways wide so that the lungs can take in as much oxygen as possible with each breath. This surplus of oxygen is sent to the brain, which helps to heighten alertness, sight, hearing, and other senses. While all these cool biological processes are going on, your stress hormones also trigger the release of glucose and fats from temporary storage sites in the body. These newly freed nutrients flood into the bloodstream like Friday rush hour, supplying energy to all parts of the body (Harvard Health, 2020).

The incredible fact of the matter is all these changes happen in a perfect synchronous fashion near instantaneously. Feel free to throw your thoughts of coincidence out the window.

Stress is Amazing!

The stress response is a beautifully orchestrated cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters that can trigger even before the brain's visual centers have the chance to fully process what is happening. This contributes to why people are able to jump out of the path of an oncoming car, even before they are able to cognitively think about what they are doing. Thousands of years of evolution crafted this perfect natural response with the ability to place your body in the "fight or flight" position that is paramount for survival.

This response extends far beyond just our reactivity to danger. Back in the good old days of hunting large prey and living in a cave, stress played a vital role in staying alive because "when channeled correctly, the stress response can be beneficial, putting the brain and body in an optimal position to perform" (Crum 2020). Stress is built into who we are. It has this uncanny ability of pouring all our body's resources into 'survival mode' by narrowing our perspective, recruiting attentional resources, and increasing the speed with which the brain processes information (Hancock & Weaver, 2005).

When you are stressed your body is revved and ready to perform—whether that be to survive a foot race with Michael Meyers or to finish that paper you put off till the day it was due. Your stress response may feel debilitating and suffocating because, well, most of the time you are not in real danger. In your everyday life, you don't need your survival instincts. You no longer have to brave the dangers and pitfalls of the wild in order to find food—although I would argue certain sections of Walmart aren't far off.

The stress you feel is not a consequence of pursuing tough goals but rather your body trying really, really hard to help you succeed the best way it knows how.

Mental performance is just scratching the surface of what this incredible mechanism can do. There are more tangible benefits, too! In fact, "the experience of stress also elicits anabolic hormones that rebuild cells, synthesize proteins, and enhance immunity, leaving the body stronger and healthier than it was prior to the stressful experience" (Crum 2013).

So not only are you cognitively and physically sharper in a moment of stress, but the preceding effects of that response help to physically rebuild potential damage. Stress or the "fight or flight" response is nothing short of a miracle when it comes to life-or-death scenarios, but like we said before, that's not what my day-to-day life requires.

But how on God's green earth can I utilize this survival mechanism into my school or work life? Can I? The answer is yes! When channeled correctly, the physical and mental enhancements of stress can absolutely be leveraged to aid, not inhibit, your pursuit of challenging goals.

How Can I Leverage Stress?

Let's take a moment and imagine we are in a small boat. Maybe you envision yourself in a canoe on a frigid lake in Wyoming, or maybe you're in a kayak braving the open water of the Pacific Ocean. Think of all the wonderful sights and smells, the breeze in your hair, the water lightly lapping at the sides of your craft. Now let's imagine that the vessel you currently pilot starts to take in water from a small hole in the hull. What do you do?

An immediate response might be vigorously scooping out the water, which takes time and a lot of physical effort. However, scooping the water out does jack-squat when the hole continues to allow water in. A smarter approach would look for the source of the leak and simply plug or patch the hole, attacking the problem at its source.

We can call these two types of problem solving downstream solutions and upstream solutions respectively.

Downstream solutions look to resolve the consequences that result from a particular problem, but often do not address the actual origin of the aforementioned problem. Scooping water out of the boat means nothing if the hole is not first dealt with. You are treating the effects, but not the cause.

Upstream solutions, on the other hand, do not care about the consequences until the origin of the problem is dealt with. Plug the hole, stop the leak, then worry about scooping water out. So why all this talk of upstream and downstream, you may ask? Because we have to start reframing how we deal with our stress, and start using "upstream solutions".

Many practices and teachings on how to deal with stress are downstream solutions to the feelings brought on by our stress response. We should instead shift our thinking to an upstream solution. What is the origin of these stressful feelings? How can I go find and plug that metaphorical hole and stop the leak?

…that's what she said.

The answer to all your problems and more is *drumroll please* Mindset. Mindset, in fancy science speak is "a mental frame or lens that selectively organizes and encodes information, thereby orienting an individual toward a unique way of understanding an experience and guiding one toward corresponding actions and responses" (Dweck, 2008). In layman's terms, it is a disposition held in the mind that predetermines a person's responses to varying situations.

We form certain mindsets regarding different elements of our lives from our surroundings, persons of influence, and culture; most of which we are not even aware we hold. Mindset has been proven to have some incredibly powerful effects on our physiological and psychological functioning. There is a growing body of research which demonstrates that people's mindsets have the ability to influence their physical and mental health.

For example, researchers from Stanford's Mind and Body Lab documented that people who hold the mindset that aging inevitably leads to physical or mental deterioration actually die sooner than those with more positive mindsets. Moreover, they revealed that individuals given the mindset that stress is enhancing, had healthier physiological responses to work demands than those who viewed stress as debilitating.

It gets even better! In research on physical exercise, hotel-room attendants who adopted the mindset that their work is good exercise showed significant reductions in weight, body mass index (BMI), and systolic blood pressure (Crum & Langer, 2007). In another research proposal on mindsets and food consumption, individuals who held the mindset that they were drinking an indulgent, high-calorie milkshake showed steeper declines in ghrelin, (a hunger inducing hormone), than when they held the mindset that the same shake was a sensible, low-calorie milkshake (Crum, Corbin, Brownell, & Salovey, 2011). Together, these examples support the phenomenon that adopting one mindset or another can profoundly influence psychological, behavioral, and physiological outcomes in several life and health domains.

Mindset is an immensely powerful and seemingly simple tool that can have profound impacts on our day-to-day lives. Simply perceiving something in a positive light can drastically impact our body's ability to react beneficially both physically and mentally.

Mind = blown.

If you truly believe "stress is bad for me"—an idea that has been propagated and pedaled by researchers, journalists, and writers for decades—then chances are the stress you experience actually will feel debilitating. The problem truly lies in our own ability to channel it correctly, and the answer is not some crazy ritual practice that requires hours of daily dedication and monthly fees.

The answer is simply in whether we believe stress will impact us in a positive way. Which it absolutely can, as research has proven time and again. You can change how you view the stress in your life. All of the cognitive and physical benefits that the stress response produces can be leveraged for your own success, if your mindset towards stress is positive.

Work with your stress, not against it.

Your body is not out to make you feel gross inside. It has adapted and changed over thousands of years to create this beautiful response to perceived dangers in life. If you need, go back and read the first few sections of this email to really engrain all those amazing advantages stress can gift you if you let it. Slowly, but surely, I know your mindset towards it will shift.

Reversal

The body's response to dangerous situations is nothing short of an evolutionary miracle. However, the dominant cultural valuation of stress is that it is unhealthy. This valuation has emerged, in part, because of research documenting the negative effects of stress on health decisions, brain aging, cardiovascular diseases, and psychopathology. Further propagating this view are villainizing headlines like, "A cold fact: High stress can make you sick" and "Work-related stress can kill, study finds" (Brody, 1998). This view of stress can be extremely harmful in its own right, and while stress is truly an amazing way our body has learned to handle adversity, I would be remiss if I did not mention some of its dangers as well.

The reality is that altering our mindset can have a huge impact on how we react to stressful situations.

The upstream solution can plug that hole but there may still be water in the boat. Those downstream solutions are very important and do play a crucial role in managing stress. Do not discount methods or practices that aim to mitigate the feelings of stress. Remember the sympathetic nervous system I mentioned would be important?

Don't lie.

I know you forgot.

… It's okay.

We can think of the sympathetic nervous system as a gas pedal in the car of our body. The sympathetic nervous system is pushed and voila! full speed ahead! All our resources are diverted into surviving. The counterpart to our sympathetic nervous system is a metaphorical brake that exists inside us known as the parasympathetic nervous system, (they get so clever with these names).

Sometimes our body will step on the gas when it detects a perceived danger, but fails to push the brake when the danger has passed. This is known as chronic stress, the effects of which can be debilitating if not addressed. This is where those downstream solutions play an important role. Practices such as yoga, deep breathing, meditation, and other relaxation methods aim to nudge the body and say "Hey, push the brakes you nerd". Stress can be extremely rewarding in small doses and for short durations but it is equally as rewarding to take some time, breathe deep, and hit the brakes for a while.

Let's Sum it Up

Thinking of stress as debilitating sets a framework into motion that can manifest the very thing we are trying to avoid. We need to think of our body's functions as something to understand and befriend, not something to try and eradicate because it is uncomfortable for a time. Our body's response to stressful situations may feel like that coworker you don't really care for—they're kind of weird looking, they keep bugging you while you try to work. But maybe you can be the bigger person, give that annoying coworker a nice gift-basket, and ask them about their day. Take the first step in the right direction because as the chaos of life swirls and rages around you, the one constant you have complete control over is yourself.