What If Everything You Know About Stress Is Wrong?

Nothing is more dangerous for a new truth than an old Misconception.

Knowing the science can be a smart way to find a solution to any issue. When it comes to science, things might get complicated but results are assured. I haven’t got in depth and any teenager as well as adult would find it interesting to know. These facts can change your life. Do you find the above quote irrelevant? Read the rest and you will find the explanation. This article is a sequel to previous article. Click here to read it.

For last many decades, most of the psychologists and doctors are committing huge mistake. They are projecting stress as an enemy. They say that stress makes you sick; it increases the risk of everything, from cough and cold to cardiovascular diseases. But I have a different perspective towards stress.

A study tracked 30,000 adults for 8 years. It asked them regarding the level of stress they faced last year and if they believe that stress is harmful to their lives. They used public death record to find out who died—people who experienced a lot of stress have a 43% increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for their health. Later, researchers estimated that over the 8 years of study, 1,82,000 people died prematurely, not from stress but from the belief that stress is dangerous.

When you change your perception towards stress, you can change body’s response to it.

A study was conducted in the Harvard University where participants were told that their body’s stress response is helpful. They were told that the heart is pounding hard to prepare you for action; you are breathing fast to get more oxygen to your brain. Participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident but the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed. The typical stress response is, the heart rate goes up and blood vessels constrict. This is one of the reasons why critical stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease. But in the study when participants viewed stress helpful, their blood vessels remained relaxed like how they were before encountering stress. Their hearts were still pounding but it is a much healthier cardiovascular profile. It actually looks a lot like what happens in the moments of joy and courage.  This could be the change; the difference you need to bring to yourself.

This experiment reveals that how you think about stress matters. This is a part of ‘Placebo effect’ (I will talk about this effect in my later articles). You should actually get better at stress instead of getting rid of it. Hopefully, next time when your heart is pounding with stress, you will remember this long tiring article and you are going to think to yourself, “This is my body helping me rise to this challenge.” And when you view stress in this attitude, your body believes in you.

Here is one of the most obvious ways to tackle common type of stress. Around the home, designate a place for things that are easily lost. This sounds manifest but there is interesting science behind to back it. It is based on the way our special memory works. There is a structure in the brain called hippocampus which helps to keep track of the locations of important things. The experienced cab drivers have their hippocampus enlarged. If you designate a spot for particular things, things will always be there.

During stress, due to cortisol hormone, brain hampers thoughts regarding some functions within itself like digestive system which it feels unnecessary at the situation. In this hampering, brain also suppresses logical and analytical thinking. Therefore, if your system won’t work well, make the surrounding system adaptable to you. This is called pre-mortem strategy (opposite of post-mortem). Research conducted in 1989 by Deborah J. Mitchell, Jay Russo, and Nancy Pennington, found that ‘Prospective Hindsight’—imagining that an event has already occurred—increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%. They have used prospective hindsight to devise a method called a premortem, which helps project teams identify risks at the outset.

There is a hormone released by pituitary gland called ‘Oxytocin’. It is also called as the cuddle hormone because it’s released when you hug someone. But this is a very small part of what oxytocin is involved in. It fine tunes the brain’s social instincts. It craves you for physical contact with your friends and family; it enhances your empathy; it even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about. But here’s what most people don’t understand about oxytocin, it is a stress hormone. Pituitary gland pumps this hormone out as a stress response. When oxytocin is released, it motivates us to seek support. Stress response also tells to be surrounded with the people who care about you.

One of the common example you must have experienced is when an angry dog sprints behind you, you try to approach other people for help. Yes that’s exactly why oxytocin is released for.

Oxytocin doesn’t only act on our brain but also on your body. It helps blood vessels to stay relaxed during stress. Heart has receptors for this hormone. It heals the damage caused to heart due to stress. Therefore when you seek help and reach out to people, it makes you heal from stress faster. This is the reason why we should share our problems with others and make ourselves open to people. In fact, this hormone makes stress social.

Stress response has a built in mechanism for stress resilience. And that mechanism is human connection. Caring creates resilience. The harmful effects of stress are not inevitable. Make stress your ally. How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress.

When you chose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. And when you chose to connect others with stress, you create resilience. Stress gives you access to your heart, that compassionate heart which finds joy and meaning in connecting others and that pounding heart which is working so hard to give you strength. When you chose to view stress in this way, you are not just getting better at stress, you are actually making a pretty profound statement. You are saying that you can trust yourself; you can handle life challenges and you are remembering that you don’t have to face them alone.

We should become more peaceful, more thoughtful, more present and more joyous people as we grow. Would you not agree? And if that’s true, then it’s time to start now. Get perspective, breathe, take a walk, smile, get organised and make yourself a better being because life is beautiful.