‘We don’t realize how important stress is to us’

What exactly is stress?

“That question is difficult to answer because everyone understands it differently. That’s why scientists who deal with stress hate this word. I’ve done a lot of research into what people think it is by having them fill out questionnaires. Most think it’s time pressure. Not having time to do everything we want to do within a certain amount of time. As a joke I ask them: if so, why do we feel stress when we go to the dentist? It’s not that he throws you in the chair to do everything as quickly as possible and you have to worry that it won’t work…

Because of these different interpretations, it is not reliable to ask people if they feel stressed, we have to measure it. This way we know whether they are stressed, regardless of what they mean by it and whether they answer honestly. We now have a lot of knowledge about the biological response to stress. Your brain plays an important role in this. It continuously scans the environment for threats. Your brain is not made to put numbers on a form behind a desk. It can, but as soon as danger threatens, it will immediately switch. You have to fight or flee. Our brain uses stress hormones to make sure that we produce a lot of adrenaline at such a time. Adrenaline gives us energy to fight or run away from the danger – ‘the mammoth in prehistoric times’. These stress hormones can now be found in saliva, but also in our hair. The great thing about hair is that it doesn’t lose that information, even if we paint it or something. Since we know that hair grows about an inch per month, we can tell if someone is suffering from chronic stress.”

What is the biggest misconception about stress?

“That it’s only bad for us. Because of all the preconceptions about stress and the negative attitude towards stress, we don’t realize how important it is to us. Stress allows us to survive. Of course mammoths no longer exist, but if we want to cross the road and a bus is coming, it is just as much of a threat. Every time this wonderful system kicks in, it is essential to our survival. It only becomes a problem when the stress is chronic because there are too many proverbial ‘mammoths’ in our lives.”

What happens then?

“Around 1970, scientists discovered that the stress hormones you produce for fight or flight return to the brain within ten minutes. When they get there, they negatively affect your learning ability, memory, and your ability to control emotions. Then we began to understand how exposure to chronic stress can, among other things, change the way we interpret situations. The glass begins to appear half empty instead of half full. Chronic stress increases anxiety and depression. It increases our risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes and a less well-functioning immune system. Fortunately, most of those consequences can also be reversed.”

When is a stress response good for us?

“Take the people who now live in Ukraine. They have been exposed to a so-called absolute stressor: the war. Their stress response makes them more likely to survive. For example, it makes you seven times as strong. On social media I saw a photo of a fragile Ukrainian girl. She’d walked 17 kilometers with her thirty-pound German Shepherd on her shoulders. She probably could have covered another 17 kilometers. A stress response ensures that we hardly feel any pain. It also increases our vigilance. We are becoming masters at signaling danger.”

What if we are not in a war situation?

“Then we can still be stressed. This usually concerns situations that not everyone finds equally stressful, so-called relative stressors. Such as taking part in traffic, having to take an exam or giving a presentation. Even then, the stress response increases our alertness, strength and the ability to peak. The moment we start to see stress as something positive, it changes our lives. In research we have seen that people with a positive mindset towards stress produce less, but still enough, stress hormones than people with a negative stress mindset. Unfortunately, we are far too scared of stress by science and the media. Hence my personal mission to change that mindset. Among other things with the help of information, our free magazine Mammoth Magazine, my book and the informative site www.humanstress.ca.”

There is also a recipe for stress on your site…

“What is stressful for one person may not be for another. Yet there is a universal recipe for it, scientists have discovered. To make a situation stressful, it must always contain one or more of the following ingredients: unfamiliarity (novelty), unpredictability, threat to our ego and/or lack of control. For example, in the case of unfamiliarity, think of the stress you can feel when you have to learn something new on the computer, in the case of unpredictability of a boss who wants something different from you every day, in the event of a threat to your ego, you keep asking people why you do something at a certain point. approach (do they think I’m stupid?) and with a lack of control of traffic jams on the way to an appointment. We have these kinds of stressors all week, branch, branch, branch. If we experience too much stress for too long, we incur a stress injury, just like if we have run for too long. That happens to everyone, even me.”

What can we do when there is too much stress in our lives?

“First, using our body to stop the stress response. Do the abdominal breathing. Inhale and make a balloon of your abdomen, exhale and deflate the balloon. Or go sing. When we sing, the amount of stress hormones in our body decreases by 12 percent. Moving also helps. You don’t have to go to the gym, fifteen minutes of walking already works. That’s why I have a dog, haha. And when it rains I go dancing, so did the mammoth hunters. After the hunt, around the campfire. And finally: don’t stop yourself from laughing, especially in dramatic times. When you smile, you send a message to your brain that there is no mammoth. When you go through life stamping and angry all day, your brain thinks: aha, there must be a threat; brace yourself! That way you get a chronic stress reaction and eventually you fall over.”

Sonia Lupien (57) is founder and director of the Center for Studies on Human Stress in Montreal, Canada. With this center she wants to make scientific knowledge about stress accessible to a large audience. Her research has shown, among other things, that chronic stress can reduce memory. In October 2022, the English translation of her book, titled Well Stressed, will be published. Manage Stress Before It Turns Toxic (already available online as an e-book).

This is an article previously published in Plus Magazine September 2022. Want to subscribe to the magazine? You can do that in an instant.