What is stress part 1
SPEAKER Clay Cook: Welcome to lesson one, Why resilience?
In order for us to have a productive conversation why to become resilient,
we have to put it into context.
The concept of stress puts resilience in context.
There's a lot like to be thankful for, have appreciation,
that causes us to be happy, and we seek pleasure from.
But there's also a side to life that causes
hurt, suffering, and sometimes despair.
All we need to do is look around at those around us
and we can see how people are upset, disappointed, frustrated,
and ultimately some are in anguish.
And we can easily turn inward to realize that we too suffer and struggle
with certain things that cause us to feel saddened,
disappointed, and ultimately struggle with life.
So we're going to jump into a discussion of how stress is unavoidable
and a universal phenomenon that we all experience.
And it's what we do with stress that ultimately determines our resilience
and overall well-being.
So stress is unavoidable, and it's a universal aspect of our life.
Why is it so universal?
It's because we're prewired or hardwired with it.
Our ancestors have given us a legacy of stress.
And this is how it works.
So imagine we have Caveman A and Caveman B. Caveman A experiences stress.
So a saber toothed tiger comes rolling along,
and Caveman A sees the sabre tooth and experiences some stress
and wants to get the heck out of the area.
Caveman B doesn't experience stress and instead sees a saber toothed tiger
and does nothing, doesn't try to flee, doesn't try to fight.
As we can see in this example, one caveman's
likely to go on and pass the gene while the other caveman's likely to despair
or perish.
So we are now hardwired with stress.
And we call it the fight or flight response.
So a lot of times stress is communicated in the context as being something bad,
but we'll learn too that stress can be good.
It's the amount of stress, it's when stress
becomes too intense, that can impact our well-being
and ultimately our effectiveness and overall quality of life.
So what do we mean by stress?
We hear a lot of terms about, "that was stressful," or, "that's a stressor,"
but are we talking about the same thing?
So let's define stress.
I think Robert Sapolsky provides perhaps the best definition of stress.
He's a professor at Stanford University, and he's
a world-renowned expert in stress.
He defined stress as anything that knocks us out of homeostatic balance.
Well, that's great.
What the heck's homeostatic balance?
So let's dive in a little bit deeper and figure out what homeostatic balance is.
Homeostasis is essentially a state of being.
Really, it's defined as an ideal everything, an ideal body temperature,
ideal glucose level, an ideal bloodstream, an ideal everything.
You feel good.
You're calm and in a relaxed state.
A stressor is anything that knocks your body
or your system out of that homeostatic balance.
And so when we define stressor, we say it's
something that knocks you out of being calm, rested,
and in an ideal state of being.
So let's imagine what could knock a mammal out of homeostatic balance.
And we're going to go to the Serengeti plains.
And this is borrowed from Robert Sapolsky,
and he provides this example of a zebra on the Serengeti plains.
Now let's imagine that zebra is in homeostasis, a state of homeostasis,
and is sitting there grazing and eating grass.
And all along comes a lion.
The lion is the trigger, the stressor, that
knocks the zebra out of homeostatic balance.
The zebra will attempt to flee the situation
and be at a heightened level of arousal until it successfully escapes the lion.
The thing with the zebra, however, is that once the lion leaves,
homeostatic balance can be regained quite easily.
So what's different about us?
How do our brains and bodies respond to stress?
We have this little area.
It's called the limbic system.
So if this is the brain and this is the front of your brain,
this is called the limbic system.
And within the limbic system, we actually
have what's called the amygdala.
This is kind of the emotional center of our brain.
This is what communicates to the rest of the body
when something actually is a stressor.
So what happens is when a stressor comes in,
something that's perceived as a stressor, the amygdala gets activated.
And when it's highly activated, it can actually what we say blow your lid.
You can become very stressed out.
And what happens is the frontal lobe of the brain no longer performs
its duties.
The frontal lobes are responsible for good decision-making,
weighing consequences of actions, rational thought,
all important mechanisms.
We often call it the CEO of the brain.
Now the amygdala sends signals to the autonomic nervous system.
And the autonomic nervous system branches out to the rest of our body.
And there's two pieces of the autonomic nervous system
that we really refer to as the stress response.
The main one is the sympathetic nervous system.
It's also is referred to as the gas pedal.
When this is hit, we go into what's called a fight, flight,
or freeze response.
The body gets activated.
It is hyperaroused.
Digestion slows down.
Blood gets conserved to the major organs.
Basically, you're in a position to either fight your way out
of the stressor, flee the situation in which the stressor's present
altogether, somewhat like the zebra on the Serengeti plains,
or sometimes it can actually freeze or paralyze the person.
The other part of the autonomic nervous system is the parasympathetic response.
And this is like the brake.
This helps us restore.
It helps us calm down.
It creates a sense of being rested.
So the sympathetic and parasympathetic are almost a yin and yang.
When a stressor comes in, the sympathetic nervous system's
activated, which causes the fight, flight, or freeze.
And the parasympathetic is that response that actually turns off the sympathetic
or puts the brake on the sympathetic nervous system so we
can refuel, restore, and relax.
And ultimately to become resilient, we have
to learn how to silence the sympathetic nervous system by activating
this parasympathetic response.
But that's how the stress response works.
It begins in the brain, and it goes to our nervous system.
Our nervous system branches out to the rest of our body.
That's why we can have an accelerated heart rate.
We can really have flushed face, like kind
of I feel now because stress happens to all of us,
as well as cold palms or sweaty palms or shortness of breath.
That's how the nervous system impacts the rest of our bodies
and we actually experience and feel stress.
So we're going to come back to the example of the zebra on the Serengeti
plains and contemplate, why are we different than that zebra?
And how does stress actually operate on us
differently than on a zebra or other mammals?
So recall that the lion comes.
The zebra wigs out and engages in a fight or flight response, predominantly
a flight response.
It tries to escape and get away from the lion so it can survive.
Once the lion's gone, the zebra calms down pretty quickly
and can go back to grazing, feeding itself, caring for its young.
Humans are different, though.
We have a very developed-- and we're a cognitively complex species
because of our frontal lobe.
So we can think at a much deeper level than other mammals.
Now this is the two-edged sword.
This brings about a lot of enjoyment.
It can bring a lot of excitement about anticipating
things that are going to happen in the future.
It also can cause us to feel gratitude because we can reflect on our past
in a way that makes us feel good and appreciate
things that are being afforded to us in life.
So it has all those positive elements.
It also can work against us, particularly with the stress response
because stressors can stick with us over time.
Or a stressor never even has to happen.
We can anticipate a potential stressor in the future,
and we will engage in the stress response.
So really, a stressor could be done with, meaning it happened years ago,
yet the stress response is still activated because your ability
to what we call ruminate or perseverate on the stressor.
You're unable to let it go.
It also has the element of never even happening.
But you anticipate or you're expecting a stressor.
And because you're anticipating or expecting it,
you've triggered that stress response.
So you're in a heightened level of stress, even though nothing's occurred.
The trouble is, as we're going to learn, that this
can create kind of chronic stress or what
we call toxic stress, stress that really doesn't abate or go away.
And it will produce ultimately a wear and tear
on our minds, bodies, and behavior.
All right.
So we've been talking about how stress can be bad, but I want to take a break
or take a step back, rather, and talk about how not all stress is bad.
There's a curve.
It's called the Yerkes-Dotson curve.
It's a very robust finding from scientific research.
And the Yerkes-Dotson curve is an inverted U.
And what it does this tell us about the relationship between stress
and our performance.
So here's what the Yerkes-Dotson curve tells us.
On one end means you're under no stress.
Actually, people don't perform and function well under no stress.
It can create lack of motivation.
There's no, I guess, skin in the game or impetus to perform.
Really, someone doesn't care when they're
under the influence of no stress or the absence of stress.
What we know is human performance and our well-being
optimized under moderate but manageable levels of stress.
And that's where you get into the middle of the inverted.
That's our performance.
Our performance peaks when it's actually moderate.
Now when does our performance really tank and go for the worse, plus it
has a really dire impact on our bodies?
That's when we have too much stress.
When we experience too much stress, we really have a meltdown.
And what I mean by a meltdown is a meltdown
in our ability to think clearly and perform well cognitively.
Our body has a meltdown in terms of the taxing
impact of stress on our body and well-being.
And lastly, it manifests in terms of problematic behaviors.
And we're going to dive into more about what that chronic or too much stress
actually does to us.
And that helps us to find and think about resilience.
We need to be resilient in the face of stressors
in order to manage, minimize it so it doesn't produce that chronic wear
and tear on our minds, bodies, and behavior.