Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

Following on from my previous post on what stress is and how you can deal with it, here’s part 2 of my miniseries based on John Medina’s Brain Rules chapter on stress.

Stress, Medina points out, is an adaptive reaction which in our not-so-distant ancestors’ time lasted just long enough to get us out of physical danger. We saw the tiger, we ran from the tiger, we either got away or got eaten.

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Modern life isn’t like that. The things that trigger off our stress response are often in our environment for years, because our stress response is triggered just as much by things that we perceive to be social threats as by things that we perceive to be physical threats. (Because we’re social creatures, a social threat ultimately is a physical threat. If you’re low-status in the group, you don’t get access to the best food or the best mates.)

Here are three systems that Medina discusses, and the short-term and long-term effects of stress on each.

First, the arousal system, the key hormone of which is adrenaline. In the short term, adrenaline boosts cardiovascular performance. My sister, a moderately fit, not especially large or strong woman then aged in her early 50s, once pulled a large ride-on mower off our nephew after it rolled on him. This is the kind of feat that adrenaline is there for. It boosts blood pressure and heart rate, increasing blood flow to the limbs up to five times the normal level, and turns you briefly into a superhero.

photo credit: Olaf

(Before you ask: No, that’s not my sister.)

Long-term, however, if your system stays awash with adrenaline it stops regulating blood pressure surges, which lead to scarring on the artery surfaces. This, in turn, leads to clots as various substances build up. The consequence can be a stroke or a heart attack, as the clot cuts off blood flow to either part of the brain (stroke) or heart (heart attack).

(An odd thing I noticed, by the way, browsing the National Heart Foundation’s site: They do not mention stress as a risk factor for heart disease. It most definitely is one.)

Meanwhile, in the immune system, short-term stress boosts immunity and raises the white blood cell count, as you’d expect. If you’re under threat, your chance of injury, and hence infection, is going to increase. Long-term, though, stress reduces immunity and white blood cell count – so stressed people get sick more.

It can also cause the immune system to fire at non-threats. The same thing happens to police or soldiers who have been on duty in threatening circumstances for too long; they are liable to shoot civilians or their fellows by accident. When this effect occurs in the body, it results in allergies (the immune system responding to substances in the environment as threats) and autoimmune disorders (responding to parts of the body itself as threats).

photo credit: Kyle May

Medina reports an interesting experiment done at UCLA with the cooperation of the drama department. Actors were divided into two groups and told to use “method” acting to summon up the emotions portrayed in the scripts they were given. One group got happy scripts and the other sad scripts. At the end of the day, blood samples already showed reduced immune response in the “sad” group.

Finally, the memory. Under short-term stress, memory is more vivid and recall quicker and more accurate, again as you’d expect. You want to be able to remember danger, recognize it again, and quickly and accurately remember not only what it looks like but what happened last time, what worked and what didn’t work to get you out of it.

Again, though, long-term stress reverses the effect, and more. It harms processing of mathematics, language, memory (short and long-term), the ability to generalize and adapt old information to new situations, concentration, declarative memory (memory for facts) and executive function (the ability to organize, prioritize and shift attention from one task to another). In other words, just about everything that you need to function well in your work, and for that matter your daily life.

Just to take one example, I remember, at a time when I was very stressed, being given something, putting it in my pocket, and immediately forgetting that I had done so. I would have sworn in court that it hadn’t been given to me, had it not been sitting there in my pocket where I had obviously put it.

Photo credit: abominable_eagle

If you’re suffering from the effects of long-term stress, or if you think you might be, right now is a good time to review my previous post on how to deal with stress, only one of a number of posts on stress on this site. And some therapeutic relaxation using my free hypnotherapy script is likely to do you some good.

And if you’re in Auckland, I run a course called “Befriend Your Stress” which may be of benefit.

Technorati Tags: stress, relaxation, work stress, stress effects, brain rules, adrenaline, heart disease, immune system, memory, performance

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