Source: Virginia Young/Used with permission
Anyone who’s had a dog or cat suspects that they aren’t walking around thinking about yesterday, or tomorrow. Animals concentrate on their sensory experiences of the moment. They monitor what they are seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting, and they focus intently on any stimulus they find unusual or interesting. For example, when a bird flies by a cat’s window, that bird may become the most important thing in the cat’s universe. This sensory state is the normal baseline behavior of many healthy biological organisms.
But when an animal perceives a threat, its body is flooded with adrenaline, cortisol, and other hormones to bring their system to a maximum state of alert. This can be thought of as maxing out a system, like bringing a car’s tachometer into the red zone. It provides a burst of power but is overwhelming and unsustainable.
For hundreds of millions of years, our prehuman ancestors exhibited these same animal behaviors. They might be walking through the jungle focusing on their senses until, for example, a tiger jumps out from behind a bush. At that point, they’d go into their fight-or-flight response. And in nature, it’s just a matter of moments before they either run away, fight the threat off, or lose the fight for their life. In any case, the state of heightened arousal is very brief. And minutes later their physical and mental state returns to baseline.
However, in the timeline of evolution that is measured in hundreds of millions of years, it may have been as recently as 100,000 years ago that we modern humans emerged with a fully formed prefrontal cortex. No longer is our mental activity limited to processing input from our senses. We can now conceptualize and abstract concepts that are not physically present. While this power may have many wonderful and beneficial effects, one can haunt us: The tiger no longer needs to jump out from behind the bush. We can simply imagine it’s there.
Just thinking about the threat causes our bodies to react as if it were actually present. We’re flooded with the same chemicals and undergo the same physiological processes. The problem here is that, unlike before, we can sustain our stress from this imaginary “threat” indefinitely. This sustained reaction is what we call stress. And our bodies have not had time to adapt to this evolutionary aberration. Over the years, it takes a physical toll.
Stress can eventually kill you (Mayo Clinic, 2023). As a therapist in Silicon Valley, I have found that one of the most common reasons new clients provide for seeking treatment in therapy is that they recently had a health scare of some kind, and their doctor told them stress was a contributing factor. These clients endured years or even decades of misery until it became a normal part of life that they took for granted, just as a fish probably doesn’t think about water. It’s just there. Clients in this situation tend not to seek help until something physically prevents them from tolerating the status quo any longer.
But by the time someone is experiencing significant health challenges, a certain amount of long-term damage may have already been done. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and other stress-related conditions replace the situational stress as the new normal, and coping with their effects can last the rest of a person’s life. Although improvements are often still possible, it’s far preferable for people to recognize the stress and address it before it does irreversible damage. While some stressful situations are solvable, we can often learn to cope with the ones that aren’t in our control.
The biological nature of stress means that coping tools don’t exist in a vacuum. Often, we can’t effectively implement stress reduction techniques until we’ve physically and mentally prepared ourselves to be responsive to them. I liken this to tilling a field before planting, or setting a stage for success. For example, one interesting fact I learned in a grad school class was a tactic that cults use to recruit new members. They invite people to a multiday retreat or festival. And during this time, all the food provided will be heavy on carbs: bread, oatmeal, etc. The reason is that when the brain is deprived of protein, critical thinking skills are diminished. Our physical state determines our mental state.
Today the threats most of us face on a daily basis are not from nature but from the fear of poverty, humiliation, worthlessness, isolation, and other powerful drives that have been hardwired into us as social creatures. If our ancestors were banished from the tribe, that would mean certain death, and we’ve developed a corresponding visceral aversion to the thought of expulsion. The prospect of losing one’s job, for example, taps into these primal fears and becomes a modern-day threat. But stress can be mitigated through self-care, rethinking the messages we tell ourselves, and mindfulness. To learn more, check out my post on these topics.
