The Stress Response Cycle
Or, the surprising benefits of dancing, journaling, painting to beat stress
đ Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
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Q: How do we beat stress?
Today, letâs talk about stress. The internet is littered with infinite content on managing stress. Most of them donât know what they are talking about. The basic premise is always to âlearn to chillâ. But if it were so simple, there wouldnât have been so many motivational videos and blog posts on âmanaging stressâ in the first place.
Stress is a physiological phenomenon. Unless we understand the science behind it, we cannot possibly know how to manage it. In her phenomenal book, Come As You Are, sex educator Emily Nagoski talks about the physiology of stress, and gives us important pointers to deal with it.
Letâs start by separating stressors from stress.
Your stressors are the things that activate the stress response. For example, exams, bills, family, office, fretting about your career, all of that.
Your stress is the system of changes activated in your brain and body in response to those stressors. We refer stress as the fight-or-flight response, but its full description is: fight, flight, or freeze response.
Stress is an evolutionarily adaptive mechanism that allows us to respond to âperceivedâ threats, such as being chased by a lion.
These days we are not chased by lions, and yet our bodyâs response to threats such as an incompetent boss is largely the same as it would be to a lion. Our primitive brain doesnât differentiate much.
When your brain perceives a threat, you experience a massive biochemical and physiological change. Your bloodstream is flooded by adrenaline and cortisol. Your heart rate, respiration rate and blood pressure increases. Your immune and digestive functioning gets suppressed. Your pupils are dilated thereby shifting you into a battle-ready state. You body prepares itself for the action to come.
What the âactionâ will be depends on the nature of the perceived threat. If itâs a lion, your brain informs you itâs the kind of threat that you are most likely to survive by trying to escape â flight. If the lion doesnât get hold of you, you reach your village safely, and rejoice in relief.
There are times when your brain decides that you can best survive a threat by conquering â fight. You jump on the thief who tries to run off with your wallet, beat the shit out of him, and hand him over to the police.
This is the stress response cycle. It starts with a stressor (when your brain screams, Iâm at risk), action (fight or flight), and relief (Iâm safe). These two responses â fight and flight â are both âacceleratorâ stress response â the âGO!â
But suppose a stressor is such that your brain determines that you can neither survive it by escaping nor by conquering. The lion has already grabbed you, you donât have any weapons to attack, and itâs too late to run.
Your body has already undergone a similar series of changes to prepare itself to deal with the threat, but this time you get the brakes stress response â the freeze â the âSTOP!â instead of the âGO!â
Your body shuts down. You canât move, or can move only sluggishly. You senses slow down and you become dizzy. You surrender!
Animals in the wild play possum as a last-ditch effort to convince a predator that theyâre already dead. Surrender also facilitates a painless death.
If it luckily survives such an intense threat to its life, the animal doesnât simply get up. It shudders. It trembles. Its paws vibrate. It heaves a great big sigh. And then it gets up, before shaking itself off and trotting away.
Whatâs happening here is that freeze has interrupted the âGO!â stress response of fight or flight, leaving all that adrenaline to go stale inside the animalâs body. When the animal shakes and shudders and sighs, its body releases the brake, completes the process triggered by fight/flight, and purges the residue, thereby completing the cycle.
Something similar happens to human beings as well.
My partner underwent a surgery a couple of years back. After coming out of anaesthesia, she started screaming without any obvious cause. Emily Nagoski calls it âthe Feelsâ. Anaesthesia is medically induced freeze. She wasnât in any danger, but she had a lot of Feels that needed to work themselves out in order to complete the cycle.
Only rarely in our everyday lives does unlocking from freeze take such a dramatic form, but even in its smaller scale, thatâs how the stress response cycle works, beginning, middle, and end â all innately built into the nervous system. The cycle needs to complete in order to relieve stress.
It sounds very simple, and it is. It is only modernity that has made stress so complex in our lives. For starters, modern stressors are lower in intensity and longer in duration â chronic stressors, in contrast to acute stressors like being chased by a lion.
Acute stressors have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Completing the cycle â running, surviving, celebrating â is inherently built in. Itâs not so with chronic stressors. If our stress is chronic and we donât take deliberate steps to complete the cycle, all that activated stress just hangs out inside us, making us sick, tired, and unable to experience pleasure in anything.
On top of that, our emotion-dismissing culture is uncomfortable with the Feels. As a result, most peopleâs idea of stress management is some version of âjust relaxâ as if stress can be turned off like a light switch.
But most importantly, our ultrasocial human brains are really good at self-inhibition, stopping the stress response mid-cycle because ânow is not an appropriate time for the Feelsâ â especially if you are in a public pace. We use this self-inhibition in order to facilitate social cooperation. We donât want to freak anybody out, do we?
But unfortunately, our culture has eliminated all appropriate times for Feels. Weâve locked ourselves, culturally, into our own fear, rage, and despair. Hence most people resort to doing things that distract them from stress, such as alcohol, endless partying, binging on fast-food and Netflix. Theyâre all intended to do one thing: manage the underlying feelings. But it can be done in a healthy way as well. We just have to build time, space, and strategies for discharging our stress response cycles. That is the only way to deal with stress.
Think about what you would do when you are chased by a lion. You would run. So when youâre stressed out by your job, what should you do? You should runâŚor walk, or get on a bicycle, or go out dancing.
Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy to complete the stress response cycle and recalibrate your central nervous system into a calm state. When people say, âExercise is good for stress,â that is for real.
Alan Turing famously ran miles everyday to relieve stress. When asked why he does that he said, âI have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard; itâs the only way I can get some release.â
In his phenomenal book Spark, John J. Ratey, MD, talks about how simple physical actives like running, jogging, skipping can help us become not only fitter, but also happier and sharper.
In communities like No Lights No Lycra (NLNL), strangers gather to dance in the dark together, all sober, to shake the blues away. They are present in over 75 locations around the world, including Mumbai.
If you really want to move your body, you donât have to go very far. Your home can become your stage. I personally, love to dance. Not that Iâm a good dancer, but I love this as an activity to work up a sweat.
Few other activities that help you âfeel betterâ are: sleep, humour, affection, meditation, allowing yourself a good old cry, or a primal scream.
Sleep is essentially trauma and stress therapy, and I cannot âstressâ upon the importance of 8 hrs of daily sleep, no matter what.
If you are naturally humorous, it helps. If you are comfortable enough to crack bad jokes just to keep yourself entertained, it helps as well. Since weâre spending so much of time together after the lockdown, my partner and I do this all the time. We crack silly jokes that others would find weird, childish, and sometimes even stupid. But this helps us deal with the day-to-day tribulations related to work and household chores.
A warm affectionate hug from your partner, your friend, or your parents is a great stress reliever. An affectionate hug essentially says, âYouâre okay. You got it. Itâs gonna be fine.â Hug more. Hug often.
If youâve ever locked yourself in your room and sobbed for ten minutes or got on the top of a building and shouted your lungs out â and felt tremendously relieved after heaving a big sigh, you have essentially helped yourself complete the stress response cycle.
Art, used in the same way, can help. My partnerâs sister does paintings in gouache. It started out as a hobby, but eventually it became a way discharge stress through a creative process.
Journaling helps in similar ways. When mental health professionals suggest journaling or other expressive hobbies, itâs not because activities such as writing or drawing are inherently therapeutic, rather they help you complete the cycle.
Donât forget to treat yourself with affection during stressful times. I know people for whom a hot shower and the rituals of painting their nails or doing their hair fully transition them from a stressed-out state of mind to a warm, social state of mind.
These rituals and behaviours are forms of self-kindness. Apes eat insects out of each otherâs fur. Bath bombs and body glitters are the modern human equivalent.
Everybody has something that works â and everyoneâs strategy is different. Whatever strategy you use, take deliberate steps to complete the cycle. Allow yourself to coast to the end without hitting the brake. Emotions are like tunnels. You have to walk all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end.
Yes, thereâs light at the end.
Timeless Wisdom
When you compare yourself to others, you are often comparing their best features against your average ones. You naturally want to be better than them, but the unconscious realisation that you are not becomes self-destructive. Comparisons between people are a recipe for unhappiness unless you are the best in the world. Which, letâs be honest, only one person is.
You can be anything but you cannot be everything. Therefore what really matters is what you think about what you do, what your standards are, what you can learn today. The only game you can really win is becoming a better version of yourself. This way your effort and energy go towards upgrading yourself, and not worrying about what others are doing. You become happier, free from the shackles of false comparisons, and focused on the present moment.
The most important things in life are measured internally. Thinking about what matters to you is hard. Playing to someone elseâs standard is easy. Thatâs why a lot of people do it. But winning the wrong game is pointless. You get one life. Play your own game.
Comparing yourself to others allows them to drive your behaviour. Stop doing that.
đ More LBWs
Interesting Finds
If Everyone Else is Such an Idiot, How Come Youâre Not Rich? â âIf you see a personâor a companyâdoing something that seems completely and inexplicably boneheaded, then itâs unwise to assume that the reason must be that everyone but you is a complete idiot who is blind to fairly trivial insights.â
The Art Of Learning For Software Developers â âTransfer is applying the knowledge from the learning context to another context. For example, it could be applying the programming knowledge your learned at school to the side project you always dreamt to build. Transfer is not a necessity for learning. After all, you can understand and remember something without ever using what you learned.â
Why Donât You Design A School? â âBack in 2011, I was invited to give a TEDx talk in London themed around school design. I invited the audience to consider school design through the lens of different innovators from Steve Jobs to Frederick Taylor by asking the question, âif they designed a classroom would it be a room?ââ
The list of all the articles Iâve written can be found here. And the past three editions of Sunday Wisdom are here: 44, 43, and 42.
What Iâm Watching
Failure Doesnât Exist â âFailure is a figment if our imagination. It doesnât exist. Failure is not real. Kobe Bryant explains how he doesnât love to win or hate to lose, he strives to get better.â
Education And The Fourth Industrial Revolution â âIn this talk, Graham Brown-Martin considers the opportunities, exciting possibilities and significant challenges of the fourth industrial revolution and how schools can respond. He focuses on the areas that are key to future job creation: the ones that machines canât do.â
How Marvelman Changed Superheroes â Alan Moore (re)introduced Marvelman in a comics anthology called Warrior. What resulted changed superhero comics and superheroes forever.
What Iâm Reading
âWe believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Hammurabi might have defended his principle of hierarchy using the same logic: âI know that superiors, commoners and slaves are not inherently different kinds of people. But if we believe that they are, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society.ââ
â Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
Before You GoâŚ
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Iâll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek đ