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Why are we so stressed: Psychology

By Concetta Ferretti
4 Min read
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It seems that we have reached a point where everything is stressful. Never in the history of our species have we suffered the mental, emotional, and physical consequences of this force as much as we are today. But what is the psychological basis of stress, and where does it come from?

What we experience as stress is the amplification of a normal physiological reaction to a threat.

Evolution equipped our ancestors to activate that reaction as a defense and adaptive mechanism. The changes that take place in the body when we face a threat are meant to put us in the best possible condition to save our life. This was true for a caveman chased by a lion, and it’s still true today when we are in life-threatening emergencies.

So, the fundamental reason why we have to experience stress is our evolutionary inheritance. When the brain receives the message that something is attacking us, like when we are fighting with someone, it activates—within milliseconds—the same response it would use in response to a major life emergency. However, such responses don’t typically end with the resolution of the conflict. We often share what happened with others, and we ruminate on it throughout the day. Sometimes this goes on for months, or even years. Every new reiteration activates it.

The stress response is a protective mechanism. However, today we don’t use to defend our life. We use it to defend our perceived value in society.

Too many situations, all too often, trigger an exaggerated reaction. Everything in our modern life has the potential to trigger us, even harmless situations.  Most of it happens within interpersonal relationships, both in our personal life and at work.

This happens because human beings don’t only see dangerous, life-threatening events, such as a fire,  earthquake, or flood, as a risk. We also see threats that put our value at risk. We often see conflict and interpersonal issues as a personal menace to our self-image.

An example: Rejections and the end of relationships are sources of stress. It’s normal to suffer in such situations, but we are meant to come out on the other side. Yet, for many of us, it takes a lot of effort and time to get over such situations. Events that are common—in the sense that they happen all the time to everyone and are considered part of life—may have lasting, detrimental effects.

Harmless situations are perceived as dangerous because many people didn’t learn positive responses to stressful events.

There is a general concept we share with the animal world: We learn during infancy what to do in face of challenges, and then we automatically repeat the same pattern throughout the rest of our life. Ideally, this is a smart thing. Imagine what life would be if we had to figure out from scratch what to do at any given moment of our existence!

During childhood we learn the best way to respond to the environment, but, unfortunately, the number of people experiencing some sort of trauma in their childhood is very high. This is even sadder if we consider that a traumatic event doesn’t need to be something catastrophic to leave a mark; more often than we think, the lack of emotional support during moments critical for our development is enough to leave a trace that wasn’t supposed to be there.

If a person learns how to cope with challenges within a traumatizing environment, she will see adversities everywhere.

When development happens in an environment that is unstable and unsafe, it is very difficult for a person to put things into perspective and gain a more neutral outlook on life. One’s entire life experience is spoiled, contaminated by the early hostile environment.

Such people are likely to experience burn out or overwhelming emotions later in life, and they will also have greater chances of getting sick.

In a way, we might say that we are too stressed out because we have stressed the very stress response that is meant to protect us!

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Stress – is it external or internal?

By Concetta Ferretti
5 Min read
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When we talk or think about stress, we’re usually referring to something outside of ourselves. In common usage, ‘stress’ is the situation, such as an exam, a mortgage, a job, or a spouse. However, those are stressors (situations that trigger stress); they are not the stress itself. Stress is an experience of tension and anxiety. It’s a state of body and mind that results from how the brain interprets and responds to a situation.

Stress is not simply a fact; it’s an automated, personal response.

I used to have a very low-stress threshold, in the sense that a situation could easily produce anxiety, insomnia, fear, and a deep feeling that ‘something is wrong and it will be this way forever’. Whatever the stressor might have been, my reaction was always pretty much the same—anger, frustration, low self-esteem used to be major parts of it. In retrospect, I now recognize that I had developed a standard coping mechanism for all sorts of difficulties. And that was the cause of my stress: My reaction.

The sense of helplessness and the intense fear that accompanied my reaction activated a strong defensive response. My mind and body responded to what I considered threats to my well-being, my happiness, my stability—in other words, my safety. A failed test at school, a negative comment from a friend, the rupture of a relationship: All of these situations were capable of throwing me out of balance in a very intense way.

My response was automatic, and for a very long time, I couldn’t control it in a more conscious and rational way. I was stuck to a first level interpretation of my external circumstances—an overwhelming emotional reaction that flooded my inner world, leaving me even more helpless. In fact, I felt defeated twice: The first time by the fact that I was challenged by the stressor and the second time because my reaction made me lose control of myself. It was like having ‘another me’ inside—one I disliked, yet who had this incredible power to spoil my well-being.

We reconstruct present stressors based on hurtful past memories.

If we look closely, we can recognize that despite the constant change in external events, the thoughts and feelings that arise with the stress response stay more or less consistent. We tend to perceive current stressors based on negative past memories, and we use the same coping mechanism we tested and learned the moment those memories were formed.

In my case, I had many powerful emotions associated with my stress response: A sense of unworthiness or of not being enough, a fear of abandonment, a fear of losing my stability, and the belief that I couldn’t recover from a negative situation.

Things improved when I realized that I wasn’t responding to an actual situation; instead, I was responding to my perception of that situation.

 Also, I understood that the part of me who was hyper-reactive wasn’t my authentic self. Instead, it was an ideal, hyper-achiever, perfectionist, rigid self. Talking with others and observing others’ reactions, I realized this is a shared human dynamic. We are rarely upset, afraid, or hypervigilant because of what is happening in the present moment.

Thinking that stress is external to us, labeling circumstances or other people as responsible for our feelings is just another way that our egos deceive us and one of the ego’s best ways to make us victims.

Acknowledging the subjective dimension of stress is the first step toward improving our response to challenges.

We all have a default stress response, a first line of defense when presented with a stressor, a series of inner events that are our best way to cope with a difficult situation at a given moment.

The outside world is an endless source of stressors—meaning, potential triggers—but it’s our interpretation that will ultimately determine how much a potential stressor will be translated into a more or less intense response. It has less to do with the external and more with our personal image, as well as our personality and our identity.

I don’t want to dismiss the fact that there are toxic people or situations and that we must get away from them to feel better. There are situations that are objectively bad for us and that we are not equipped to handle. However, how many times do we continue to suffer from the stress caused by one person or event even when we’ve cut the cord or the situation is over?

The memory is enough to trigger our stress response again. In such cases, we are reacting to the image of the experience that we have created inside ourselves, rather than to the experience per se.  In other words, we often find it so difficult to move on because people or circumstances have the power to echo feelings of discomfort and unpleasantness that were already within us before that particular person entered our life or that particular situation occurred. This is one of the reasons it may seem like we’re always finding ourselves in the same type of dynamics.

Acknowledging the part we play in our stress response is the first step toward correcting it or, at least, making it less intense.   

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What is stress

By Concetta Ferretti
8 Min read
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Somehow, stress remains a nebulous concept. We are encouraged to lower stress levels because of the dangers to our health, but it’s also quite normal to share our symptoms with a doctor and hear him or her say, “Oh, it’s just stress”, implying that it’s not that important—indeed it’s quite normal—to suffer from some stress-related symptoms. After all, we are the stressed species. We are considered to thrive under competition and pressure. We live in a society where “business” actually means “busy-ness”. The more drained we are, the better. In some circles, stress has become a kind of measurement of status, and enduring large quantities of stress is a reliable indicator of the potential success you are going to achieve in life.

Whether you are a top manager in your specific industry or a stay-at-home mom with your kids, stress seems to be the price to pay to keep up with the demands of life.

The culture of stress is coming to terms with the biology of stress.

The dichotomy between the scientific motto “stress is bad” and the social acceptance of stress as the formula for productivity and success (or as an ineluctable part of modern society) is very confusing for the person who ultimately just wants to figure out how to live well.

Despite cultural changes, our biological systems have not changed the way they handle stress. After all, the few thousands of years that culminated in our culture are a mere speck on the long timeline that encompasses the existence of our species. This means that our nervous, hormonal, and immune responses cannot support today’s chronically stressful lifestyle.

We say we are stressed on the eve of an exam, when we can’t get our kids to listen to us, when the boss asks us to complete an impossible task. We say we are stressed when we feel trapped in a job we don’t like. We say we are stressed when we cry as soon as we get home, exhausted, after the umpteenth day of a long commute, or when we feel not understood by a partner or a friend.

Stress seems to be a normal part of our regular life. And, surely, it has become so. But, what exactly is stress?

Stress = stressor + response. It’s the emotional and physical reaction to a threat.

When we talk about stress, we are usually referring to the psychological and emotional adaptation to difficulty and to its negative consequences to our health. In fact, stress is not just mental, but also physical.

The brain is the organ that decides what is potentially stressful and how it will handle the stress response. The type of interpretation and the severity of the response differ among individuals, and they largely depend on previous life experiences. The effects of the stress response on human health rest at the intersection of individual life history, genetic variations, and lifestyle.

Stress is not limited to major life events; instead, it’s become a constant of life. This happens because everyone can have a different interpretation of what is considered a threat. Stressors differ among people, and the majority of our stress-related issues stem from an inappropriate interpretation of these stressors. This causes a non-specific stress response. In a sense, our definition of ‘threat’ is already a response.

I’ve been reading the scientific literature on stress for many years, and I’ve never come across the same definition twice. Sometimes the term is used to describe the stressor (the trigger), sometimes the response, and other times the consequences of the response. If we put all those elements together, what emerges is that ‘stress’ is a state of both mind and body that arises when the presence of a perceived threat is coupled with a response. Simply put, stress is the psychological and physical response to a real or imaginary threat.

Because it seems that we suffer the most from our perception of challenges, and from the consequences of an inappropriate stress response, I think that the best way to define stress is by virtue of the type of response we can activate.

In other words, the stress we suffer from is not so much about what happens to us, but, rather, about the way we react to what happens to us.

Stress is an adaptive response.

Stress is the physiological and emotional reaction to a challenge. It’s not a disease by itself. It is a complex adaptive response that depends on our individual characteristics and that has the evolutionary goal of protecting us.

Our evolutionary heritage has equipped us, both biologically and psychologically, to react when the environment is demanding. In this sense, stress is meant to be part of life—the stress response is a way to move through challenging times.

So, evolution equipped us to use this response in the presence of life-threatening events. With the growing complexity of human life and societies, the types of threats have changed, but the response has stayed the same. However, we use it more frequently (unfortunately, also when it’s not truly needed) and without proper recovery time. That doesn’t mean that the stress response is standard for everyone: Different people will react in a different way to the same difficulty. In other words, everyone perceives a given situation in a subjective manner, and that almost never has to do with the actual struggle, but, instead, with the way we faced the same type of struggle in the past.

The subjective dimension of stress is an inner event, an intimate experience that tells pieces of an individual’s life story.

A few days ago, my husband read about the suicide of a 22-year-old. He asked me, “Why should such young people consider life unbearable? What might have happened to this girl to take her to that point?” And I replied, “She went through childhood and I guess that was enough for her” –implying that childhood too often means ‘pain’ and not ‘play’ for many people, even in the absence of major traumatic events.

Our stress doesn’t begin with school exams, mortgages, or parenthood. Stress begins at birth—if not during prenatal life.

Childhood and adolescence can be the most significant stressors we undergo in life, because whatever happens during our formative years is more likely to leave a permanent trace in our life history. Early memories of struggles and challenges are going to resurface during the rest of our lives in both our mental and visceral dimensions—and they will elicit the type of stress response we associated with them.

Stress is related to the shaping of the personality and to the development of an individual’s emotional style.

From an objective perspective, the stress response unfolds with a series of bodily changes that are pretty much the same for everyone, but when we consider the mental and emotional aspects—which are subjective—stress becomes a sense of strain and tension within ourselves and is not necessarily proportional to the actual problem.

Often, stress is present even without any trigger other than the individual’s own thoughts and sensations linked to past memories. This is possible because our brain has a predictive nature and foresees dangers and difficulties based on past negative experiences. If someone has formed a negative concept of the world, she will be more vulnerable to stressors.

Conversely, there are people more resistant to stress, who face challenges with confidence. They usually have a positive mindset; they do not think that everything is always ok, but rather that a problem won’t last forever and it’s not the end of the world. They don’t foresee disasters all the time. They are less prone to interpret unpleasant life situations as threats, and, compared to someone living inside a constant trigger, they can detach more from problems.

Stress is a personal response, and the quality of that response influences the quality of our lives as well.

Our type of response to challenges makes us more or less vulnerable to mental and physical diseases. However, the subjective dimension of stress has a positive meaning, too. If stress is a personal adaptation, it can be considered an active response. In other words, stress doesn’t happen to us, leaving us powerless or doomed; instead, we have the ability to control it—even when it’s not immediate or easy.

From a biological angle, the intrinsic potential to change and improve our type of response stays with us forever. If we recognize that our stress response works against us, rather than for us, we can learn how to change it. This will have a positive effect on our general well-being, making us feel more deliberate in taking care of ourselves.

Improving the stress response also has positive effects on health. In fact, from a bodily perspective, stress is the way our biology deals with life. By diminishing the reactivity to life stressors, we have the ability to improve our health.

References:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23045648

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181832/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12614627

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