Sheva Carr - Physiology of Stress and How to Beat It Handout
Your heart is racing. Your feet are pacing. Your mind is overwhelmed by what it is facing. Stress. You plow through it and your shoulders tense, or you decide to wait for a calm moment and end up missing an opportunity by sitting on the fence. Long term this daily grind can negatively impact more than just the mind, producing the wear and tear on our bodies that leads to the statistic “as many as 75 to 90% of all visits to primary care physicians result from stress related disorders.”(1) In one study published by the British Journal of Psychology, people who were unable to manage their stress had a 40% higher death rate than non-stressed individuals. (2) Many people think, when it comes to stress, there’s nothing that one can do, but that is when HeartMath® can be a solution for you!
It used to be that “stress” was defined by the number of times a person needed to change focus in a given time period, and 10 times per hour was considered enough to create a high stress environment. Now, we have cell phones, pagers, fax machines, T.V.’s with split screens; it is common to be multitasking and changing focus within a single second!
As a result, modern researchers have had to redefine stress as the cascade of physiology within our bodies that responds to how we perceive circumstances, as opposed to the circumstances themselves. “…the body’s stress response encompasses more than 1400 known physical and chemical reactions and over thirty different hormones and neurotransmitters.” (3) It is common knowledge that our perceptions can be adversely affected by the stress response – “I was so angry I couldn’t see straight!” This causes a vicious downward spiral of inaccurate perceptions and negative, imbalanced responses to them. How can one turn that energy around into a peak performance rebound? It is possible! Here’s how.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine the main organ that affects perception and “stress” is the heart. Modern science is just beginning to confirm this ancient knowledge, having discovered sensitive pathways they call “The brain in the heart,” or “neurocardiology.”
Imagine the heart to be the baseline drum beat of an orchestra, the conductor determining the time
signature and tempo of the entire performance. When the conductor keeps an impeccable, consistent rhythm, all the other players can easily follow and therefore do their part in subtle harmony with the rest to transport us into a melodic and beautiful world (in the case of your body, the players are the organ systems, sense perceptions, functional systems such as the immune and endocrine and nervous systems, etc.). With everything working together, your body gets the signal, “All is well,” and is able to put extra energy and attention into luxuries like opening the higher cortical centers of the brain for clear thinking, creativity, and innovation.
In modern times, where our stressors are often psychological (like an important board meeting, or exam at school, or child raising challenge) higher brain function may seem more like a necessity than a luxury, but the problem is that our bodies don’t know that. They do not know the difference between our aggravation in traffic when we are running late, and a saber tooth tiger chasing us for bait. Even if a stressor is not life threatening, when we react to it negatively our body gets the signal, “red alert!” In the stress reaction, the heart
rhythm begins to race erratically. Suddenly the conductor of the orchestra is unpredictable! Imagine what the music sounds like now. With no coherent leader to follow, it is more like the cacophony of dissonant chaos as instruments are being tuned, instead of the lull of a beautiful Concerto. Noise in place of music is how the world can sound to you when you are stressed.
In the fight or flight stress reaction, the lizard brain of survival will take over. Processes that are unnecessary for immediate survival (like digestion, sexual drive, higher brain function, etc.) shut down to maximize the efficiency of our effort to get away from the perceived threat as fast as possible. Many North Americans live life from this stress response nearly all day every day.
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