Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

worry 1 by xymonau

I’ve been reading John Medina’s book Brain Rules, which is excellent. He’s engaging, often entertaining, writes well and clearly, and talks about a subject I know fairly well for a layman (brain science) but is always telling me things I hadn’t heard before.

I can see why he got a major teaching award: He uses his knowledge of how people learn to keep your interest and make his points memorable.

I want to do a little miniseries here on just one of his chapters, the one on stress. I’ll start with the definition.

Researchers Jeansok Kim and David Diamond came up with this three-part definition of stress:

1. There is an aroused physiological response, measurable by an outside party.
2. The stress is perceived as aversive (the person feeling it dislikes it).
3. The stressed person does not feel in control of the stressor.

If you have all three together, you have stress (by the Kim/Diamond definition).

It’s just this moment struck me that many smokers are experiencing their smoking as stressful by this definition.

Aroused physiological response – definitely. Nicotine causes the body to kick into fight-or-flight mode and release adrenalin, boosting the blood sugar level, and at the same time interferes with the insulin response which would normally lower it again. (This is one reason why people who are giving up smoking crave sweets; they are used to a high blood sugar level.) The adrenalin boost also increases heart rate, blood pressure and the rate of breathing. All of this is easily observed.

The stressed person dislikes it – not universally, but many smokers do actually dislike their habit. They dislike the taste, the smell, the cost, and even the feelings they get.

And the stressed person does not feel in control – very much the case with many smokers. No wonder a British study found that smoking was associated with reduced quality of life.

distraught by greekgod

Anyway, what I started out to say was that this definition immediately implies several possible approaches to dealing with stress.

First is the physiological approach. By the use of calming techniques such as breathing, biofeedback, progressive relaxation and the like, you can deliberately calm your body during periods of stress. The Relaxation Response Practice is one such technique, using your mind to calm your body down in order to reverse the physiological changes that occur during an episode of stress. (More on these changes and what they do to your body in Part 2 of this miniseries.) Since it was your mind which got your body wound up in the first instance, this is highly effective and relatively straightforward with a little practice.

Second is the reframing approach, in which you restate the stressor to yourself in terms which diminish its aversiveness – in other words, you take an experience you dislike and, by looking at it differently, make it neutral or even positive. This cognitive technique is essentially what is described in my post “Don’t suppress emotions – think“. It has been known to advanced Buddhist meditators for a very long time. For example, Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young teaches his students to distinguish between pain (which is a sensation like other sensations) and resistance to pain (which is what causes suffering). This mindfulness technique is similar to some cognitive psychology and hypnotherapy techniques for pain management.

Think about using this for procrastination. Some jobs are stressful because we make them stressful in our minds; we don’t want to do them, we resist. If we let go of the resistance and allow ourselves to do the jobs, we often find that they’re not so bad after all.

Finally, there is the aspect of control. Many, many animal experiments (some of them quite cruel) have established that the perception of choice or control is a key element of stress. This is why the famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People includes an exercise in thinking about what you can and can’t control, and concentrating on the things you can, the things within your “circle of influence”. Steven Covey recommends trying to shrink your “circle of concern” – the things you worry about – until it fits within your “circle of influence”, and this is excellent counter-stress advice. Worrying – thinking intensely and with emotional engagement – about things we can control can help us to make important changes. Worrying about things we can’t control can only harm us.

If an element of your stress is a situation you feel you can’t change, spend some time thinking about whether that’s really true. If it isn’t, weigh up the cost of changing it and make a change plan. For example, if your job is stressing you excessively, consider what you would need to do to get one that didn’t, or to adjust the one you have so that it doesn’t.

If your stressor really is outside your control, though, the control you still have is to choose your response to it. This is where you can use strategy 2 (re-think the situation so that it isn’t aversive) or, failing that, strategy 1 (calming yourself physiologically so that the stress doesn’t harm you so much).

Next time: what’s happening to your body when you’re stressed over a long period.

Technorati Tags: stress, worry, coping, brain, brain science, smoking, calming, mindfulness, techniques, relaxation, relaxation response, reframing, cognitive, resistance, procrastination, control, influence, circle of influence, circle of concern, change, personal change, mental attitude, rethinking

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