1Welcome to the Machine
Have you ever imagined an easy-flowing and stress-free life? Can you remember a time when you lived that way? When things were not too complicated? There were not too many commitments to clutter your day, and when things became a little challenging, you rose to the occasion and handled them with ease? Is it even possible to live predominantly stress-free?
Well, this book claims that it is—that it is easy to achieve and that it is your absolute duty to make that a reality. Stress, as a cycle, is not difficult to understand, and when you get how it works, it’s not difficult to avoid and suspend. A bit of stress is needed to keep us safe and help us reach peak performance, but to be stressed all the time is not how things are supposed to be.
Our machines seem to be broken. We need to get them into the workshop and fix them. But before we do, like any good engineer would, we need to grasp the very details of how the machines work in the first place.
BIOLOGY, CHEMISTRY, AND NEUROSCIENCE
Feeling stressed is the product of a very complex process that happens across the nervous and endocrine systems of your body. Complex but highly predictable, as in it happens exactly the same way every single time you or I have ever felt stressed. That feeling we’ve become accustomed to in the modern world requires a highly synchronized interaction between biology, chemistry, and neuroscience for you to feel it. Several parts of your brain and nervous system work in tandem with your glands to get you there. Like with the turbocharger on a sports car engine, when mixing the fuel with oxygen in different ratios, a normal engine turns into a beast of a machine. Similarly, when you’re stressed, you’re a totally reconfigured machine, different from your normal self.
There’s been a bit of a debate across the scientific establishment for years around where stress originates. While the traditional view seems to imply that thoughts in your rational brain trigger your stress, lots of recent research points to the opposite—that your stress is triggered first, and then the emotions and physical sensations resulting from stress prompt your rational brain to think. Those thoughts would then help you calm down or boost you to become more stressed. I guess both scenarios apply depending on what stresses you. Let me explain.
FEELING STRESSED
Stress is an automatic response. Your stress starts with a trigger. An event that seems like a possible threat takes place.
The event stressing you is not even recognized by your thinking brain. For example, when that friend you never really liked sneaks up behind you and shouts, “Boo!” As he stands there laughing, you jump out of your skin, your heart beating fast, and you feel a version of the stress that you would feel if you were up against a saber-toothed tiger. In a fraction of a second, you feel the stress first, and then you think about it later. What engages instantly, in those cases, is one side of your autonomic nervous system (which, as the name implies, is responsible for automatic functionalities of your body, such as keeping your heart beating without you thinking about it). The side of this system that engages is normally referred to as the sympathetic nervous system, which is activated upon recognizing threatening events that demand a fight, flight, or freeze response. Your survival instinct does not have time to analyze what that apparent threat is all about. It reacts first to sound the alarm.
The security guard in charge of sounding the alarm is the amygdala. Located at the very bottom of your brain right before your brain stem, thus in the best possible position to communicate with the rest of your body, the amygdala truly can be considered the paranoid part of you. It’s constantly on the lookout for things it needs to protect you against (it also is responsible for feelings of pleasure when life is good, but we’re not going to discuss those today—just stress for now).
When the amygdala is engaged, emotion is in full swing, and that’s when the electrical signals passing through your nervous system hand over to the chemical side of your body. A highly synchronized trio, normally referred to as the HPA axis, takes over. The HPA includes a group of hormone-secreting glands—namely, the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and adrenal glands.
Stressful emotions, felt by the amygdala, trigger the hypothalamus to release a hormone called CRH—or corticotropin-releasing hormone—which, in turn, signals the pituitary gland to secrete a hormone called ACTH—adrenocorticotropic hormone—into the bloodstream. The news carried by ACTH travels fast across the bloodstream to prompt the adrenal gland to release the infamous hormone called cortisol. Now it’s official. You are stressed.
Cortisol is a crucial hormone that protects overall health and well-being. Because most cells have cortisol receptors, it affects many different functions in the body. Cortisol helps control blood sugar levels, regulate metabolism, reduce inflammation, and assist with memory formulation. It balances the ratios of salt and water and helps regulates blood pressure. Cortisol also supports the developing fetus during pregnancy.
That’s in normal, easy times. During moments of stress, however, cortisol serves one primary function—to get you out of trouble. To do this, it needs to direct energy to your brain, so you can think of a way out, and to your muscles, so you’re ready to run or fight if needed. The food your brain prefers to burn for energy is glucose. Cortisol’s clear instructions in moments of stress are for the fat cells to release fat into the bloodstream, and for the liver to release glucose. It tells the muscles to burn only fat so that all the sugar remaining in the bloodstream is available for the brain to burn. The result? A turbocharger that leads superpowered feats—all the energy and focus you need to get things done, save your life as you need to, then come back to your normal self.
This kind of reaction to the stress you felt is good (we call this eustress). It keeps you safe and enhances your abilities. It gives you what you need to overcome the challenge.
A bit of stress is good for you.
Now we understand the biological cycle that triggers stress. A perceived threat. The amygdala panics. The hypothalamus orders the pituitary gland to sound the alarm. The signal is carried by the bloodstream to the adrenal glands, which release the booster that you need: cortisol, along with other stress hormones, such as adrenaline and norepinephrine. This enables you to perform the superhuman miracles you need to survive or overcome adversity. But this is not where the cycle ends.
Once the stress has served its purpose, your body actively regulates so that you get back to normal. What ends the stress? Well, that’s another cycle that is normally referred to as the …
NEGATIVE FEEDBACK LOOP
Your human machine is designed to deal with stress as a disruption to its normal chill self. It understands that stress is not supposed to last indefinitely. When cortisol levels in the blood are high, the receptors back in the hypothalamus and the hippocampus sense cortisol’s presence, so they keep looking for threats. If they find any, they reinforce the cycle so you stay at your peak abilities, then scan the environment again. Eventually, when they don’t find any threats, in the absence of a lasting reason for concern, they recognize the discrepancy between the state of your body—stressed—and the reality of the situation—safe—and shut off the stress response to bring you back to normal. The booster is removed from your bloodstream, and you’re back to the calm version of you. Simple, really.
Put together, the stress cycle and the negative feedback cycle form a full trip down the stress lane that looks something like this:
WHAT IS STRESS?
The term stress has had many negative connotations attached to it in our modern culture. This is a natural response to stories like mine and Alice’s as we each watched our fathers being consumed by stress, then dying from illnesses that resulted from it. Everyone knows at least one person who has gone down that path. Stress does not have to be negative. It can be good for you.
At the very top level, stress in humans is just another survival mechanism. It’s the turbocharger, the high-octane fuel, that provides you with the boost you need to survive challenging situations. When it works well, it’s awesome to be stressed. Like those days before a big proposal when you got together with your team at work and pulled an all-nighter, working hard, laughing, and feeling the camaraderie, or that day when you intended to ask her to marry you. Stressful? Yes! But enjoyable and rewarding still.
NONSTANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES
So what turns those pleasant, though stressful, experiences into burnout, depression, and even suicidal thoughts?
As an engineer, I learned that in order to understand a machine fully, I needed to observe its performance in all possible scenarios. I call that a full-cycle simulation. A well-designed machine—say, your mobile phone—will perform as expected as long as it’s operating within the environment in which it was intended to operate. Put it in extreme heat or extreme cold, or fill its memory with garbage data, and it will end up behaving very differently. It will be our task to identify those odd situations that get our stress machine to malfunction and observe how we behave as a result.
Let’s start with an accurate description of the normal working conditions that we have discussed so far—a stress-response cycle triggered by a threat to elicit a response, followed by a negative feedback loop that brings us back to calm.
Stress is a biological survival response that reconfigures our bodies and enables us to react to situations with the best abilities those bodies are capable of.
Nothing more. Nothing less. In this normal-operating-procedure scenario, stress truly is your best ally.
Now let’s talk about other, unnatural operating conditions. That’s when things can go wrong. Very wrong!
STARTING WITH A THOUGHT
Our normal stress cycle starts with detecting the possibility of a threat. In the early days of humanity, no one really cared if they had acne on their forehead; that did not count as a threat then. Accordingly, what your stress response system scanned the world for then were physical threats, such as a tiger or a fire. We still experience similar stresses, such as being surprised by an approaching car when crossing the street, or when there is air turbulence during an otherwise comfortable flight. But generally, civilization has managed to reduce physical threats to our survival to a minimum. The way things more often go today is that our …
Modern-day stress often starts with a thought.
This takes place at the very top of what makes our brains human, in the thinking bit of the brain known as the cortex. The cortex is where we analyze our life events. For example, the news networks start to cover a violent conflict in a country you have never even heard of before. They discuss the resulting casualties and the expected adverse impact on the economy over there. You listen to all this coverage while in the comfort of your home, no conflict anywhere near you, just around the time your salary hits your bank account. You’re not starving, not without shelter, and not in any real threat. You’re basically okay, and yet, you start to feel that things are wrong. Not because they are for you specifically but because your thinking plots out all the possible scenarios and recognizes that things could change for you too. You may not be in any immediate danger, but you sure are expecting challenges ahead. Your thinking brain—specifically, the prefrontal cortex—analyzes the situation, but it does not assign an emotion to it. It doesn’t tell you how to feel about it. At least not yet.
Feeling stressed about events that have not yet happened or events that are completely outside our domain of influence and control is not part of the standard operating procedure of our stress machine. The biological stress machine is capable of only one form of engagement: boosting your human physical abilities to deal with a physical threat. And while this same machine proved useful when it enabled you to boost your ability to concentrate during the short time available for an exam, it fails when a physical response won’t improve the situation. When your stress response is unable to fix the situation that is generated, not by a real event but by a thought, the negative feedback loop detects the continued presence of the cognitively generated threat and keeps you in a hyper-tuned mode of physical performance for hours, days, or sometimes years. When mentally stressed, there is no real danger to take on.
The stress lingers for as long as the thought remains.
In a world where floods of negativity that are floating around in mainstream and social media, when we allow our thoughts to stress us …
Our capacity for stress is limited only to our capacity to think negatively.
Which, sadly, unless actively kept in check, is infinite, with no solution in sight for most of the negative thoughts we generate. The volume of thoughts that can trigger stress in any of our typical days today far exceeds the number of actual physical threats our ancestors experienced, even in the wildest of all jungles.
Our stress machine was not designed to deal with an endless stream of negativity. We need to intervene before those thoughts are generated in the first place if we are to keep our stress response confined to its standard operating environment. Your high-octane stress response is not saving you. It is destroying your misguided biological machine.
STRESSED BY AN EMOTION
Another unfamiliar territory that our ancestors likely did not experience is the stress we suffer as a result of our emotions. Our thoughts trigger our emotions, and then those emotions trigger even more emotions. Think about it. When we are single, we may feel lonely, which—to the human psyche, because we are social animals—feels like a threat. That makes us feel down and inadequate. It makes us worry that we will never find love, and that too feels like a threat. Then when in love, we feel elated at first but then may feel jealous. Our need to protect what we have makes us feel possessive and obsessive. We feel worried and threatened that the relationship might end. No specific event triggers any of those feelings. Those feelings seem to take us over and overwhelm us as if coming out of nowhere. They stress us, triggering our survival response while we are not even aware what we are fighting against or running away from. You feel stressed as long as the emotion is felt, without even being aware, cognitively, of what happened—because nothing actually happened.
Often, you are not even aware of the reason behind your stress.
My friend, and one of my true heroes, the neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, says:
We are feeling creatures who think, not thinking creatures who feel.
Not only are we capable of endlessly feeling emotions, but our internal mechanisms let emotions create more thoughts and more emotions. The feelings that we feel often precede cycles of consecutive remuneration that lead to more emotions, which in turn lead to more negative thoughts—an endless cycle that is in no way comparable to the kind of stress humans felt when threats were simply physical. The number of times some of us are likely to feel stress in a typical day of watching the news or roaming the modern dating scene far exceeds the number of actual physical dangers our typical ancestors faced in a lifetime. The magnitude of modern stress we deal with is way beyond the capability of our stress machine. Like our mental stress, emotional stress is not dealing with any specific present danger to take on. It is just raging in our hearts. It too lingers for as long as its trigger—the emotion—lasts.
DEALING WITH A GHOST
The move to mental and emotional stressors has enabled humanity to create massive volumes of stress out of thin air. The irony is that none of what we stress about ever actually exists in the present moment. How do I know that?
The very fact that you have the time and space to stress about a thought or an emotion inside of you is in itself evidence that there is no nearby physical danger outside of you at this very moment.
Please think about this for a minute. If a tiger were about to pounce on you, you would not have the time to think about what might happen if you lose your job. Get it?
We are dealing with ghosts created by our thoughts and emotions when they don’t really exist in the present moment.
As a matter of fact, we are dealing with a whole army of them. They’re generated inside of us like pixels on a screen, and no fight-or-flight stress response can erase them. And they linger and multiply.
Our modern world is not more stressful than the past. It is much safer in every possible way. Why, then, has stress turned from being humanity’s savior in the wild to being a killer today?
If we were to narrow it all down to one reason, it would be the …
Copyright © 2024 by Mo Gawdat and Alice Law
