How Thoughts cause Stress

Think of life in survival mode by picturing an animal, such as a deer contentedly grazing in the forest. Let’s assume that it is in homeostasis - in perfect balance. But if it perceives some danger in the outside world—say, a predator—its fight-or-flight nervous system gets turned on. This sympathetic nervous system is part of the autonomic nervous system, which maintains the body’s automatic functions such as digestion, temperature regulation, blood-sugar levels, and the like. To prepare the animal to deal with the emergency it has detected, the body is chemically altered—the sympathetic nervous system automatically activates the adrenal glands to mobilize enormous amounts of energy. If the deer is chased by a pack of lions, it utilizes that energy to flee. If it is nimble enough to get away unharmed, then perhaps after 15 to 20 minutes when the threat is no longer present, the animal resumes grazing, its internal balance restored. We humans have the same system in place. When we perceive danger, our sympathetic nervous system is turned on, energy is mobilized, and so on, in much the same way as the deer. During early human history, this wonderfully adaptive response helped us confront threats from predators and other risks to our survival. Those animal qualities served us well for our evolution as a species.

Thought Alone Can Trigger the Human Stress Response— and Keep It Going

Unfortunately, there are several differences between Homo sapiens and our planetary cohabitants in the animal kingdom that don’t serve us as well. Every time we knock the body out of chemical balance, that’s called “stress”. The stress response is how the body innately responds when it’s knocked out of balance, and what it does to return back to equilibrium. Whether we see a lion suddenly on that forest road, bump into our not-so-friendly colleague or boss at the shopping mall, or freak out in long  traffic because we’re late for a meeting, we turn on the stress response because we are reacting to our external environment. Unlike animals, we have the ability to turn on the fight-or-flight response by thought alone. And that thought doesn’t have to be about anything in our present circumstances. We can turn on that response in anticipation of some future event. Even more disadvantageous, we can produce the same stress response by revisiting an unhappy memory that is stitched in the fabric of our gray matter. So either we anticipate stress-response-producing experiences or we recollect them; our bodies are either existing in the future or in the past.

To our detriment, we turn short-term stressful situations into long-term ones. On the other hand, as far as we can tell, animals don’t have the ability (or should I say disability) to turn on the stress response so frequently and so easily that they can’t turn it off. That deer, back to happily grazing, isn’t consumed with thoughts about what just happened a few minutes ago, let alone the time a lion chased it two months ago. This kind of repetitive stress is harmful to us, because no organism was designed with a mechanism to deal with negative effects on the body when the stress response is turned on with great frequency and for long duration. In other words, no creature can avoid the consequences of living in long-term emergency situations.

When we turn on the stress response and can’t turn it off, we’re headed for some type of breakdown in the body. Let’s say you keep turning on the fight-or-flight system due to some threatening circumstance in your life (real or imagined). As your racing heart pumps enormous amounts of blood to your extremities and your body is knocked out of homeostasis, you’re becoming prepared by the nervous system to run or fight. But let’s face it: you can’t flee to the Bahamas, nor can you throttle your fellow employee—that would be primitive. So as a consequence, you condition your heart to race all the time, and you may be headed for high blood pressure, arrhythmias, and so on. And what’s in store when you keep mobilizing all that energy for some emergency situation? If you’re putting the bulk of your energy toward some issue in your external environment, there will be little left for your body’s internal environment. Your immune system, which monitors your inner world, can’t keep up with the lack of energy for growth and repair. Therefore, you get sick, whether it be from a cold, cancer, or rheumatoid arthritis. (All are immune-mediated conditions.)

When you think about it, the real difference between animals and ourselves is that although we both experience stress, humans reexperience and “pre-experience” traumatic situations. What is so harmful about having our stress response triggered by pressures from the past, present, and future? When we get knocked out of chemical balance so often, eventually that out-of-balance state becomes the norm. As a result, we are destined to live out our genetic destiny, and in most cases that means suffering from some illness. The reason is clear: The domino effect from the cascade of hormones and other chemicals we release in response to stress can dysregulate some of our genes, and that may create disease. So what was once very adaptive behavior and a beneficial biochemical response (fight or flight) has become a highly maladaptive and harmful set of circumstances.

For instance, when a lion was chasing its ancestors, the stress response was doing what it was designed to do—protect them from their outer environment. That’s adaptive. But if, for days on end, you fret about your promotion, overfocus on your presentation to upper management, or worry about your mother being in the hospital, these situations create the same chemicals as though you were being chased by a lion. Now, that’s maladaptive. You’re staying too long in emergency mode. Fight-or-flight is using up the energy your internal environment needs. Your body is stealing this vital energy from your immune, digestive, and endocrine systems, among others, and directing it to the muscles that you’d use to fight a predator or run from danger. But in your situation, that’s only working against you. From a psychological perspective, the overproduction of stress hormones creates the human emotions of anger, fear, envy, and hatred; incites feelings of aggression, frustration, anxiety, and insecurity; and causes us to experience pain, suffering, sadness, hopelessness, and depression.

Source

Excerpted from Dr Joe Dispenza’s classic book ‘Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself’