The Psychology of Stress

“Prescriptions comes from outside: transformation comes from within.” Dr. Gabor Mate, Canadian physician

Do the phrases “I am stressed out” or “wow, that situation was stressful” sound familiar? How about “I am under a lot of pressure” or “I am up to my ears in work”? If you’re anything like the rest of the world, then these phrases might even be something you’ve said in recent years.

The pandemic has opened our eyes to how much stress we live with daily.  It had become so part of our language that we don’t even realize it is there.

However, when it is chronic, high level and ongoing, it is damaging to our mental and physical health. If we aren’t careful, stress can take over our lives, our minds, and our bodies. If we don’t pay attention to our stress, our physical well-being can be severely compromised to the point of illness.

We know that stress can have negative impacts on our health and our minds and that’s why it’s important to learn how to properly navigate tension. Stress is something that you can minimize but not eliminate and that’s why we need to learn various coping skills and strategies to snuff out the stress before it gets to us.

 

The Body as a Machine

For the last 300 years, we have lived under a false premise that has disempowered our ability to be an active agent in our own healing. Since Descartes, the Mind and the Body have been thought to be separate and distinct systems.  The prevailing attitude in the medical profession is that there isn’t a connection between the two. That what we think, and feel does not affect our overall health.   In this attitude, the body is seen as a machine. Our physical and emotional well-being can be treated with an outside agency – prescriptive medication and/or surgery that swaps one part for another.  This is not reality.

I love idioms because they say so much about what we already intuitively know in the depths of our being. Our language already portrays what lost ancient knowledge and wisdom traditions have known for years and years.

Our language, whether we are aware of it or not, weaves together the connection of the feelings in the body with our subjective experience.  We use the phrase “feeling sick” when we want to describe physical symptoms, such as when we are fighting a virus or have a fever. We also say this phrase when there is an outer experience that overwhelms us emotionally.  For example, if we see someone being treated cruelly or inhumanely, we often say “it made me sick to watch what happened.” When we are sad or grieving, we feel the emotion physically in our hearts.   We know on an intuitive level that our emotional life lives in our body.

What the Research Shows

The list of scientific peer-reviewed research studies grows longer and longer every year.  These studies correlate the behaviour of our cells with our behaviour in everyday life.  The conflict between the brain, the body and chronic stress weakens our immune system and makes us more susceptible to illness and in some cases, disease.

In 1996, the authors in a Canadian Medication Association Journal article wrote that healthy people have neuroimmune mechanisms that provide the host defences against infection, injury, cancer, and control immune and inflammatory reactions. And conversely, disease and inflammatory reactions reflect a situation where the internal environment is disordered”.    The message is that stress knocks our bodies out of balance, which makes it difficult to be resilient in the present.

Researchers from the HIV institute at UCLA found that the patients who were stressed didn’t respond as well to the drugs to fight the virus as those who weren’t as stressed.

Research also demonstrates that we add to our stress by dwelling on stressful worrying experiences from the past and anticipating stressful tense situations that may or may not happen in the future. By remembering or anticipating, we release the same stress hormones into our body activist our fight or flight mode.   Our worrying thoughts about anything recreate in the moment of now something that happened long long ago.  We become conditioned reactive beings because our nervous system has been programmed in a conditioned way.

Other studies of patients with serious illnesses found that a risk factor is the inability to express emotion, especially negative emotions such as anger.  Although it is not the only risk factor, the researchers found that repressed anger increases physical stress on the body.

Three Components of Stress

We can imagine chronic stress as a simple equation – “excessive stress occurs when the demands made on the organism exceed the reasonable capacity to fulfill them”.  Whenever we encounter a situation that overwhelms us, over 1,400 chemical reactions happen in the body, releasing into our psychic and body system 30 hormones and neurotransmitters.  The body, in its instinctual adaptive way of surviving, knows how to respond before we are even aware.

It is important to break down stress into its parts because of the opportunity to identify the places where we have agency, where we can do something about the effect on our systems.

There are three components according to Mate: the stressor, the system that processes the stress, and our response.  In looking at our stress response, we can identify many ways where we can minimize the dangerous effects.

• The event – The first component is the stressor itself. This is the outside situation which we experience as threatening, beyond our control or triggering in some way. In many cases, we have very little control over what the stressor is.
• The processing system – The second component is the system that experiences and interprets the outside threatening event. One could say that this is the nervous system of the body. I would like to expand that to include the psychological system of our past and attitudes that make up our complexes.  In this case, our attitudes and beliefs that have been formed from our experience come into play and colour our interpretation of live events.  It is often the interpretation of the outer event or stressor that compounds the chronic stress that we experience in the body.  The negative beliefs that we have of ourselves or others, that is.
• Our response to the stress – The final component is how we respond to the threat. This is both physical and behavioural. This is our reaction to life.  What is your natural response to stress?  Some people drink, some people repress the emotions out of a powerless belief, and some don’t do anything at all.  Healthy responses to stress include meditation, yoga, exercise, or counselling. All the later responses allow for opportunities to acknowledge the stress and to process the experience at all levels of our being.

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Awareness and Responsibility

Gabor Mate explored in his book “When the Body Says No” the idea of pandora’s box of blaming the victim of profound suffering of physical disabilities. He suggests that the conversation about blame misses the essential point.  He writes “blaming the sufferer – apart from being morally obtuse – is completely unfounded from a scientific point of view”. Instead, he advocates an expansion in awareness and perspective, and that we assume responsibility for our lives rather than just reacting to the circumstances. Life happens. In many cases, life happens in a way that is outside of our control. And the ability to respond, that is, to make authentic and true decisions about our lives and our health demands that we are aware of, can make a big difference in our experience of well-being.  Taking responsibility is related to being conscious, to cultivating consciousness, that is the capacity for awareness.

Questions for Reflection

1) Do you know the signs of stress?  When you are doing too much or when your body must stop and say, “No more”?  Do you know the signs of burnout?  Many people don’t.

2) Think about the last time you were stressed – truly stressed. How did you manage that stress?

3) Reflect honestly for a moment; are you a person that dwells on the past? Do you worry about future situations that may or may not happen? What is a way that you could funnel that energy into something more productive?

4) If you could name one thing that stresses you out the most – be it family, work or your health – what is the biggest factor in adding to that stress and is there a way to try to manage it differently?

Copyright Christina Becker
September 2021

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