Stress as a Catalyst for Strength
Debbi Murphy, PhD, ERYT500
Workshop at True North
Stress is not new – it is an adaptive process that helps most all living things evolve & thrive, YES THRIVE.
#1 Stress is part of our DNA. Our brain….our BodyMind is built to expect danger, react to it with stress hormones and then move on. Our brain is always seeking homeostasis…..it moves into fight or flight or freeze mode when danger is detected, but, ideally, it would return to the parasympathetic response to repair the damage the stress response causes our bodymind. The HPA loop happens about every 30 minutes.
The HPA loop, or Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal axis, is a complex hormonal system that acts as the body’s primary stress response mechanism, where the hypothalamus releases corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) in response to stress, signaling the pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), which then prompts the adrenal glands to secrete cortisol, the main stress hormone; this cortisol release eventually feeds back to the hypothalamus to signal the stress response to slow down through a negative feedback loop, effectively regulating the body’s response to stress.
Key steps in the HPA loop:
- Stress Perception:
When a stressful situation is perceived, the hypothalamus in the brain is activated. - CRH Release:
The hypothalamus releases corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) into the bloodstream. - Pituitary Activation:
CRH travels to the pituitary gland, stimulating it to release adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH). - Adrenal Gland Stimulation:
ACTH travels to the adrenal glands, specifically the adrenal cortex, prompting the release of cortisol. - Cortisol Effects:
Cortisol circulates throughout the body, mobilizing energy reserves by increasing blood sugar levels and suppressing non-essential functions, preparing the body for a “fight or flight” response. - Negative Feedback Loop:
Once cortisol levels reach a certain point, it acts on receptors in the hypothalamus and pituitary gland, signaling them to decrease CRH and ACTH production, effectively shutting down the stress response.
Important points to remember about the HPA loop:
- Adaptive Function: The HPA axis is crucial for managing short-term stress, allowing the body to respond effectively to immediate threats.
- Chronic Stress Concerns: When the HPA axis is constantly activated due to chronic stress, it can lead to health issues like impaired immune function, metabolic dysregulation, and mental health problems. STICKY BRAIN is the cause of many issues physically and mentally and even spiritually.
#2 Stress can be dangerous
“Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” Sopolsky
The problem is, nowadays, with our fast paced culture, stress is detected much quicker with fewer breaks in between. We do have a chronic problem….the HPA loop is getting faster and faster. A thousand years ago, we might have looked over our shoulder every 40 min., now we might jump at a sound every 15 min in anticipation of danger. Our bodies are not designed for this.
According to the APA, Up to 25% of adults feel their
#3 What’s the upside?
This makes stress sound pretty bad? I thought I was going to learn “How can it help us get stronger?”
Besides keeping us safe from danger (and why, as a species we’re here) there are many cases of how stress produces strength.
….our own physiology….we get stronger when we stress systems. This is true for our mind and body.
….it can serve to motivate us
my own example…learning to speak in front of others.
Jesse’s competition for the World’s in Kayak Freestyle….at one competition, he listened to Enya to destress beforehand. He lost his mojo!
Think of times when stress did help you by either motivating you to do your homework or to be more observant in situations that could be dangerous or to prepare for a job interview.
There are other examples in electricity, etc….but I will leave that to engineers to explain.
Stress mobilizes our resources….whether it’s to run a race, speak before others, write a song, do work like Jane Goodall does. It motivates us. It gives us courage, helps us get over phobias (Mel Robbins’ fear of flying).
Stress and excitement share a commonality in that they can both trigger similar physiological responses in the body, like increased heart rate, rapid breathing, and the release of adrenaline, due to the activation of the sympathetic nervous system; the key difference lies in how the brain interprets these sensations, with stress often associated with negative anticipation and excitement with positive anticipation of an event.
Key points about the similarity between stress and excitement:
- Physiological overlap:
Both emotions can cause physical reactions like sweating, muscle tension, and a “butterflies in the stomach” feeling due to the body preparing for action. - Adrenaline surge:
Both stress and excitement can lead to the release of adrenaline, which is responsible for the heightened physical response. - Mental interpretation:
The difference between feeling stressed or excited primarily lies in how the brain interprets these physical sensations based on the context and perceived threat level. Cognitive reframing.
Research on stress and excitement.
“Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement” Alison Wood Brooks Harvard Business School
Individuals often feel anxious in anticipation of tasks such as speaking in public or meeting with a boss. I find that an overwhelming majority of people believe trying to calm down is the best way to cope with pre-performance anxiety. However, across several studies involving karaoke singing, public speaking, and math performance, I investigate an alternative strategy: reappraising anxiety as excitement. Compared with those who attempt to calm down, individuals who reappraise their anxious arousal as excitement feel more excited and perform better. Individuals can reappraise anxiety as excitement using minimal strategies such as self-talk (e.g., saying “I am excited” out loud) or simple messages (e.g., “get excited”), which lead them to feel more excited, adopt an opportunity mind-set (as opposed to a threat mind-set), and improve their subsequent performance. These findings suggest the importance of arousal congruency during the emotional reappraisal process.
Life’s Challenges build Resilience & serve as a Catalyst for Change
When you exercise, you are, in essence, tearing muscle fiers, but as they heal they build back stonger. In the same way, obstacles in life provide an oppportunity for personal growth . tI’t slilke the the most inspirational and influential people yu know have been through significant adversities that made them the person you now admire.
so let’s look at how we can manage stress and turn on it’s good attributes so we will “use it before we lose it”
Much of this came from Alyssa Pel, author of The Stress Prescription: 7 Days to More Joy & Ease”. She has studied of how chronic stress can get under the skin to affect health, and how we can reduce stress with mindfulness, meditation retreats, and other science-based strategies.
As a society, the majority of us spend our days rushing. We are dealing with stressful events in our days and our world, but also the most common type of stress, our own thoughts (back to the Buddha’s 4 Truths). This level of feeling stressed every day can lead to inflammation and accelerated cell aging. Yoga, meditation, and exercise are fantastic for stress, but there’s so much more than these.
There are three types of strategies: Change your mind, change your body, change the scene.
- Change your mind: Cognitive Reframing. We need stress (constantly in the blue zone isn’t good either). So change your mind or mindset helps us see beliefs and thoughts that can stress us out and those that can actually help us approach stress as a positive challenge. The stress of an accident can motivate us to be more careful, a health crisis can put us on a better nutritional plan. Stress can motivate us!
- In my 5 stages of behavior change….we need an impetus to move from precontemplation to contemplation.
- Dr. Wendy Suzuki, dean at New York University, neuroscientist and professor of neural science and psychology returns to talk about everyday anxiety as it relates to social experiences. She emphasizes the importance of putting in effort to build social connections despite your nerves and offers tips for overcoming everyday social anxiety from her book “Good Anxiety.” Instead of fearing imperfections and awkward moments in social interactions, Dr. Suzuki encourages us to expect them.Ultimately, she says anxiety is a tool for learning and growth that helps us appreciate the contrast between negative and positive experiences. Mel Robbins, in her “5 second Rule”
- The 5 Second Rule The moment you have an instinct to act on a goal you must 5-4-3-2-1 and physically move or your brain will stop you. There’s one thing that is guaranteed to increase your feelings of control over your life: a bias toward action.
2. Changing our body means creating intense short-term stress states or deeply relaxing low arousal states to get rid of stress and metabolize stress in our body. This can include breathing techniques like slow breathing or vigorous and intense breathing practices that can reset and freshen us.
3. Change the scene means notice the stressful cues around us like screens or re reminders of work and take a break from those.
We’re very sensitive to our work environment. We’re sensitive to stress cues and other things that stress us out at home in ways that we’re not even aware of, but we can make that work toward our wellbeing. We know that, for example, city dwellers have larger stress responses than rural residents, and that exposure to nature and calming pictures of nature has a calming effect on our brain responses.
We want to add safety signals, signs of nature or sensory cues like aromatherapy. This is especially helpful when we’re doing a mind-body practice like yoga or meditation. These can help us really let go, really release tension from our body stored up stress.
Guided Meditation
It’s important to establish a baseline;
Where am I now. Guided meditation w/ABC list
(Use Good Energy Chart eventually)
Let me start by giving you a view of the range of different mind states that may help you identify at any moment what state you are in and where you want to shift to.
We focus on four states, red, yellow, green, and blue. Mind states, red mind states are when we’re very activated, we’re stressed out by something. This stress response is helpful to us, but it is energetically costly. It uses a lot of energy or a TP, so we wanna recover quickly.
The book offers ways to work on engaging a positive stress response that moves us from the expansive threat response to a more positive challenge response, which is different biologically and can help us respond to the stress more effectively. Yellow mind is when we’re going about our day. This is our typical baseline. We’re not necessarily dealing with any particular stressful event, but we’re not in a relaxed state and in fact we’re far from it.
This is a state when we have low grade stress arousal, we may not even notice it because we’re so used to it. We may be taxed by a lot of information coming at us, a lot of stimuli, a lot of demands, so we’re carrying around stress that we may not even be aware of.
Green and blue mind states are ease states. These are states when our body’s stress arousal is turned off and we are in more of a relaxed state.
There are ways to consciously open our sensory gates that really allow us to enter these states more easily. Green mind is true relaxation. This often, often occurs when we’re fully engaged in something pleasurable or relaxing. This is about monotasking and not about multitasking.
So true relaxation probably does not occur while watching TV or having typical conversations. Nature is a strong way to to induce green mind states, especially when we lead ourselves through sensory immersion, allowing ourselves to pay attention to what we’re hearing, seeing and smelling and feeling in our body.
There’s something even better for our body than relaxation, and that’s restoration.
The restorative state of blue mind states, this is when we’re deeply relaxed. We’re not trying to control or do anything. Our nervous system becomes more parasympathetically dominant. Our breathing slows. We can most easily enter blue mind states when we’re doing mind-body practices or slowing our breath directly. Glue mind states require a feeling of safety, and then that gives our body signals that we are safe and it’s time to restore.
It’s time to do housekeeping in ourselves. Cleaning up junk, restoring our battery, We probably spend most of our waking time in yellow mind states above our baseline level of arousal.
Take a moment: Consider where are you?
Yellow mind, too much time in red and yellow mind is exhausting. Part of carrying stress around with us is our need to control things and our discomfort with the inherent uncertainty of the future.
So ask yourself a few questions and see how much of the time you are in a yellow mind state. How much time do you spend thinking about difficult situations, situations that are not necessarily even under your control?
How much do you feel like you’re trying to control things and control the future? How comfortable do you feel when you don’t know what will happen tomorrow? Can you feel relaxed?
And right now, check in with your body. Are you holding tension? Are your hands relaxed? Are you brows relaxed? From global events that we witness to the fragility of life around us, we control very little. Many things don’t go as planned, especially these days. We’re living through a time of volatile uncertainty where there are dramatic sudden changes in our world, we can’t change that.
But when we can’t tolerate uncertainty at all, we suffer more from anxiety and depression. So one of the biggest mental shifts we can make is to expect the unexpected that allows us to comfortably bear the stress of uncertainty. It’s an attitude that protects us. It means we need to be humble in our expectations.
All plans are subject to reality. Remember, we control now and maybe today and we can live in this present more fully. We can’t get rid of stressful events, but we can live well with ’em. I really like this zen proverb. Obstacles do not block the path. They are the path.
I like to think of the ocean with its waves as a helpful metaphor as well. Waves do not disrupt or swim in the ocean. They are inherently part of the swim. So how can we surf these waves? How can we flow easily with the tide? Guiding ourselves skillfully in this sea of life means embracing the unexpected, taking in experiences as they arise, tackling waves with a positive challenge, mindset and controlling only what we can and staying afloat as much time as we can so we can loosen our grip on trying to control and predict things.
And this can help us be more present for our life and everyday joy that we may be missing out on. Noticing mindful awareness is a foundation to help us understand how our mind works so we can recognize the uncertainty, stress that we may be holding onto even right now.
A mindful check-in allows us to move from yellow mind to green mind. We can identify and name what we’re uncertain about, situations, feelings, thoughts, and release them. So let’s do a short check-in. I’ve called Catch and release. Uncertainty often shows up as embodied stress, which is when we turn stress and negative emotions into feelings, sensations, and tension in our body.
We store them there. So our physical sensations also shape how we feel our emotions. By releasing tension in the body, we can improve our emotional state. So tune into your body. You might wanna close your eyes, ground yourself by taking three. Slow and easy breaths, inhaling long, softly, fully, and exhaling even longer.
Notice any physical sensations you’re feeling right now. You can scan your body with a flashlight of your tension starting at the top of your head and gradually moving down to your toes.
Notice where you’re holding tension. Neck, Shoulders back and breathe into it so you can release it. If your hands are clenched, gently open them.
Now. Ask yourself as you think about the day ahead or the week ahead, what’s on your mind? What are you feeling most uncertain about worries or even just feelings of discomfort? What expectations are you holding about how things will go?
Now that you’ve named a situation, something that you’ve been tense and holding, smile at this. Breathe into it. This is the unknown, the mystery that will unfold with time, the uncertainty, stress that we can name and help dissolve.
You might view the future with curiosity and openness, and finally, lean back, lean physically back in your chair when we’re more reclined. We’re more receptive, relaxed and open to what’s coming next. Recline comfortably and match your mental stance to the ease of your body’s posture.
Let experience unfold and come to you moment by moment. Savoring the certainty of this moment right now. You are safe. It’s okay to relax. Changing our mindset to tolerate and even embrace and certainty to release control we never had increases.
Restoration puts us in a green mind state when we can more easily feel the inner joy of life without the dark shadow of chronic stress. I wish for you some agile surfing of the waves, big and small, and more transitions in your day. From red or yellow, mind to green mind, and more time at least weekly in blue Mind states.
I know insight timers, deep restoration practices such as yoga nidra can help with this. So lean back, expect the unexpected, and at the same time, be present and savor the certainty of right now.
Step 2 – What do you love to do, what helps you feel in the Flow? What would you do now if you felt strong enough?
Step 3 – What is one small thing you could do to move you in that direction?
1. Positive events
We tend to fixate on the negative. So, try this: Switch your focus to something good today. It could be a beautiful sky, a delicious bite of fresh fruit, or a call from a friend.
Moskowitz is a coffee lover, so she suggests taking time to really enjoy that morning ritual, noticing the aroma and the feel of the warm mug.
When you pay attention to small pleasures, you may feel a shift to a sense of calm or comfort.
This is a simple concept, but it goes against our natural instincts. Humans evolved to pay attention to threats and problems. “That’s adaptive,” Moskowitz says. But don’t miss out on the good.
2. Savoring
Now that you’ve noticed a beautiful sky or delicious scent, take time to savor it. The goal here is to make the moment last. Say you’ve got great photos from a vacation or celebration, each time you look at them, you can re-experience positive feelings.
“Think of it as getting another hit of positive emotion,” Moskowitz says. You can savor a moment by simply remembering it, or you can write it down or tell someone else about it. This can amplify the positive feelings and give you an emotional buffer when stress and anxiety rise.
3. Gratitude
This one can feel like a platitude. I get it! But before you brush it aside, there’s a lot of research on the benefits. For instance, a recent study among women points to a potential longevity boost from feelings of gratefulness.
So, you can ask yourself this: If I had a list of all the things I’m grateful for, would it be long? Think of all the people, events and experiences that bring you joy. At first you may only think of a few obvious ones, but with practice your list can grow longer, as you notice more small things that enrich your life, Moskowitz says.
4. Daily mindfulness
You’ve likely heard this one before: To feel calmer, tune in to your experience in the present moment, instead of getting caught up in your thoughts. But you won’t see the benefit unless you actually take the time to practice it. One way is to focus on your breath. It’s a shortcut to get rid of the clutter in your mind. To try it, find a quiet spot and take some slow breaths. As you inhale, let your belly expand. Make your exhales slow, about twice as long. Notice the way your breath feels in your belly as it rises and falls.
5. Positive reappraisal
When something unfortunate or unexpected happens, can you find a silver lining? It’s a familiar concept, but Moskowitz says it can pay off. One refrain she uses in her own life when something bad happens is “It could have been much worse.”
Try it next time you have an annoying experience — say, you take your car in for repairs, and it’s not ready on time. Instead of getting mad, could you use the time to take that walk you’ve been meaning to get in? Or treat yourself to some quiet time? It’s not possible to do this in every situation, but it’s a good way to gain perspective amid everyday challenges, like losing your keys or missing the bus.
6. Self-compassion
Are you your biggest critic? If your self-talk is negative, that’s a good clue. Many of us “hold ourselves to a very high standard that we would never expect of anyone else,” Moskowitz says. So, now’s the time to take the compassion you’d show to a friend and turn it on yourself. There are easy ways to try this. Take the time to do things that make you feel good, for example, or take a lunch break when you’re hungry instead of putting it off. You can even try giving yourself a gentle hug now and then.
7. Personal strengths
In the midst of challenges and struggles, we can forget what we’re good at. So, the course offers up a technique to recognize your strengths and take stock. Are you a good listener? Empathetic? Are you great at managing details? Knowing your strengths helps you stand strong amid challenges.
8. Attainable goals
If you know your strengths, it may make it easier to set goals that align with them. “The research on goal attainment shows that any progress toward a goal increases your positive emotion,” Moskowitz says. So, it’s worth pulling out a notebook and writing down some goals. “I find it extremely rewarding to cross something off my list,” says Moskowitz.
You may be skeptical that these simple things could make a difference. And it turns out, Moskowitz was a skeptic too. “My first reaction to anything is ‘that’ll never work,” Moskowitz says.
But after years of documenting the benefits, she’s become a convert. Of course, these skills are not magic. They can’t make your stress go away or solve the source of your anxiety, but they can help you become more resilient and find more moments of happiness.
Moskowitz says practicing these skills can help build a “reservoir” of positive energy that you can draw on when it’s time to cope with challenges or annoyances.
“There’s good data that feeling positive emotions makes people happier,” says Jeff Huffman, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. But he says more research is needed to understand the mechanics of positive interventions and the long-term effects of practicing these skills.
“We don’t know if that can affect health in a durable way,” he adds.
Huffman has collaborated with Moskowitz on research on the effects of these interventions, and his lab uses many of these same skills to help patients overcome stress and make healthy lifestyle changes.
There’s other research in the field of neuroscience that shows repeated practice of certain positive emotions can even change our brains.
Studies show that the parts of the brain that become activated after people are trained in empathy and compassion can start to build new connections.
Just as someone can get good at playing a sport by repeating the same motor movement over and over again, the same is true of positive emotional practices, says Jyoti Mishra, a neuroscientist at UC San Diego. “It can become a self-fulfilling positive cycle.”
This works for emotions like awe and gratitude too, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett told NPR. If you practice swapping negative feelings for positive ones repeatedly, it’s more likely you’ll experience positive feelings again, Barrett says.
Please note: These strategies have been shown to be beneficial for people dealing with stress from tough situations, but they are not a replacement for mental health treatments such as counseling or medication.
Vicky Hallett contributed reporting to this story.
Stress Less editors are Jane Greenhalgh and Carmel Wroth
Resources
Some resources were mentioned within this paper, but here are a few others…
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