How to fight Stress … and Hydras!

After having spent about half a day finding and rereading the essential parts of the books I have covering the topic of stress, looking at my old notes from Uni and spending the other half taking new notes to have it all fresh in my head. And now having spent another full day of writing about it and how to handle it, I am starting to hear Simon Sinek’s whispers in my head.

— “Why? Start with why!”.

So why will I be writing about stress and how to handle it?

• That will be answered below at length, but my short answer would be because it sucks.

But why would you want to read about stress and how to handle it?

• That is a bit trickier for me to answer, but maybe because you also think it sucks?

Truth be told, stress was not something I had dealt with or felt in any serious way before the last summer. I had read a lot about it both for school, out of my own interest and to help people close to me. And sure, I had been stressed about studying for a test every now and then, I had been stressed out over not having had sex when that topic came up in high school and I had been stressed out over not gaining more muscle when my sole focus of life was to go to the gym. But I had never really been stress stressed, the kind of long term stress that *spoiler alert and PG 18+* literally might just end up eating your brain, killing your sex-drive and making you lose your muscles, all at once. No, I got to know that kind of stress last summer so since then, I have gone from knowing intellectually that stress was kind of an important deal to actually seeing, feeling and dealing with it myself.

So, what happened last summer? Well, I am glad you asked! Not to go into too much detail but this is what the situation was like: I was planning a bachelor party, having important roles for planning, transporting and budgeting for a camp at something called Borderland, studying full time, attending a course on leadership, trying to start a romantic relationship, trying to start a company with friends and planning the build of a giant potentially deadly seesaw, all the while thinking about moving to a new city and what that would entail and having people very close to me being sick and dealing with that. Writing it all out I can tell it was a really, really stupid idea thinking that it would be smart or even possible to do it all at once. Having been through it, I can tell you that it was just that, a really, really stupid idea, or even several stupid ideas, to be more precise.

After that summer, having juggled all of these things resulting in me failing miserably at the most important ones and just passing the bar on the least important ones I started noticing some curious things happening within myself. First I started having trouble focusing on things, most things to be honest but also stuff I would have no trouble focusing on before. I started feeling a general lack of motivation which led to a hard time studying, which is what I do, so that was also hard. I did not feel like socializing with friends, except the ones that I was living with, and I am really glad I was living with them at the time because just being around people meant a lot although I did not see or feel it at the time.

Apart from these I also started noticing some even stranger things as well. Because while most of the previously mentioned symptoms could be linked to depression, which I get lighter bouts of at the most inconvenient times, I now started having a really hard time sleeping, something that had never happened to me before. On top of that, I was also starting to struggle to remember previously known facts and names, I could feel how they were there and that I knew them, but I just could not reach them in my memory. This made me feel bad, really bad and it all ended up getting me even more stressed since I for the longest time had been someone who had a lot of pride and feelings of self-worth into being a healthy person that was smart and knew stuff. So now going from that to being a tired person that kept forgetting stuff was kind of a really hard thing. Something I have not mentioned to anyone is the fact that I am honestly surprised myself over the fact that I made it past the oral defense of my thesis. I had forgotten some of the key stuff I had spent the better part of the previous months writing and researching, so it was all getting kind of bad.

That all being said, there is no need to feel sorry for me because it was a great lesson to get that kind of wake up call this early in life. I can feel that it is getting better slowly but surely day by day and now after having spent two months pretty much doing nothing at all, I can for the first time since the beginning of last summer say that I am looking forward to doing stuff again. I once again feel like I have something akin to intrinsic motivation, where I no longer feel like I am having to respond to whatever life throws at me but that I am starting to regain the ability to throw stuff back, which I am happy for.

This is why I will write about stress: The combination of wanting to do something during quarantine, having quite a bit of formal and practical knowledge in the area, wanting to help myself and others from not getting too stressed in the future and the times being what they are, stress is something that feels very important, inspiring and dare I say even fun to take on.

This is how I will write about stress: First of, this will likely be a monster of a task, see, I used the word monster because the topic of stress is just like the mythical hydra. Stress, just like the hydra, will grow two new heads if you chop one off, making it a real horror, both to deal with and also to write about. Therefore, for me to at least have a chance to take on stress, it is only logical for me to follow Heracles' example in dealing with the hydra, one head at a time rather than trying to kill the whole thing at once, so that is how.

This is what I will write about stress: I will aim to review and promote science-backed approaches to handling stress. Knowing myself and also having read a lot of real scientific literature, I will also mix it up with some more fluffy and general tips, mainly to make this thing at least somewhat enjoyable to read and to make it more fun for me to write as well.

In this post, I will start by giving a short introduction to what stress is and why it is so tricky to deal with.

In the following ones, I will go on to the actual science (and fluff) behind some proven stress prevention methods.

A short intro to stress

There are full books on how to make the perfect schedule to alleviate stress, on how to meditate for stress, on CBT for stress, on how you should eat to reduce stress, what crystals to use against stress, on what stress is, on how to parent without stress or how to travel without stress and the list goes on and on. A quick search on Amazon showed that they stock more than 50.000 books about stress(!). Therefore, getting a real hold on stress could end up being very stressful, to say the least. So, granted, it might sound like I have got a fair bit of hubris for me to think that there is something I could bring to the table with all this existing knowledge on the topic. However, this is, in fact, the case, I do feel that there is something that I can bring. I am not saying that I am the only one having noticed this about stress, I am sure that there are many others, but it is far from the mainstream view when experts are talking about stress.

What I am talking about that none of the other 50.000 books, or at least not the 10+ I have read on it mention, is stress eerie familiarity to the mythical hydra. Although I honestly think it is less of a secret or hard to get fact and more of a marketing thing. Unfortunately for me, but fortunately for you, I don’t have any crystals or books to sell, because if I did, I would probably also be focused on selling those. Instead, I will be trying to explain how many different ways of stress management there are and which ones work and how.

To get you deeper into the understanding that stress is a hydra and where all the other books are misleading, I would like to retell an old Buddhist tale. At least I think it has its roots in Buddhism, or that’s the context I heard it in first, and yes, I can also already feel how my credibility is getting lost by the word.

My fast, butchered and kind of to the point version of the story would go something like this:

There was once a couple of blind people in India who had an elephant nearby, kind of dangerous would be a great first response but lets assume for the simplicity of the story that this elephant was nice. The blind bunch found their way to the elephant and perhaps out of boredness decided to describe to each other what kind of animal or thing they thought they were touching, here, at least in my version, we have to assume that neither of them knew it was an elephant. So they were describing the actual part they each found upon encountering it.

The first guy said — “I am holding a duster”, here we can guess this was the tail.

The second girl said — “I think I am touching a wall”, educated guess, the stomach.

The third fellow said — “I am holding a treetrunk”, presumably being one of the legs.

The last old lady said — “I am holding a snake”, the trunk.

You get the deal, they were all touching or holding the same elephant but thinking they were holding different objects or animals. Please google something like “Buddhist blind elephant story” if you want the real thing, I am sure it is much better but I did not want to interrupt my flow to find another version.

When people write books with titles like “CBT for stress release”, “The anti-stress diet”, “Meditation for stress” or “Run away your stress”, they are looking at one part of the stress hydra (elephant?). And while CBT, propper nutrition, meditation and working out are all really important on their own, we also have to admit that they are all also sub-parts of good stress management and are not likely to be panaceas on their own.

What is important to preface is that the source and therefore also the solution to stress is different for different people, because we all live our own complex lives with their unique potential stressors and we have our pre-existing ways to cope with them. For some people, a book on how to eat might just help them because that was the part they were missing. For others, the starting of a meditation practice will be helpful and so on, but the problem is when it does not. When it does not help and you are only told the story by one of these blind people, trying to convince the others that the stress is a snake and only a snake, so you just have to focus more on dealing with the snake. What to do if it is still not working after you read my snake book? Well, maybe you should buy my subscription to snake poison! Still struggling with that snake? You should attend my annual snake catching seminar!

I have to admit that it is hard to tell, some of these people might think that snakes are what it is all about and just happen to be super committed to their snake thing and honestly not know of other ways to recommend. But many others just want to sell their snake cages.

What stress is

So apart fromthe fact that stress is a hydra, that is kind of similar to an elephant, because it still also is that, this is what stress is:

Dr. Robert Sapolsky points out at the start of his wonderful book “Why zeebras don’t get ulcers”, that stress is a biological response that evolution set up to prime us for action. In academic psychology, a more correct definition of stress would be: “Stress is the general term that describes the psychological and physiological response to a stimulus that alters the body’s equilibrium” (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), and while the latter might sound a bit more complex, it is kind of the same thing, not exactly, but the “prime us for action” goes a long way and I might use to the more advanced definition when needed. The word stress itself was most likely stolen by psychologists from engineers and other smarter people that used it to describe the process where something exerts a force on another thing, which is also a good way to think of it.

The nifty thing with Sapolskys definition over the two others is that it is easier to think of as being both active and reactive, when the lion starts hunting the zebra, they both initiate the same stress response, because they both need an action of some sort. The other two definitions make stress sound more like a reactive thing that you only experience when something happens to you rather than when you happen to it, and it is important to keep in mind that stress can, and usually is, both.

When we get stressed several things happen, a simple way to put it is that a cascade of chemicals will flood your whole body and end up doing all kinds of crazy stuff. Some of these effects are still not fully understood by the scientists themselves and I do not have enough endocrinological knowledge to cover them in depth anyways. But I will try to give a brief explanation and you don’t have to look any of the weird names or acronyms up because they are mainly there to make me sound smarter.

Step 1: Something stresses you, or you choose to be stressed by something.

Step 2: Your hypothalamus, a region in the brain, gets excited and can help but to tell other parts of your nervous system about the news. (Fun fact: Excited is actually a word a real neuroscientist could use in this situation.) The way a brain region tells other parts of your body or brain is by sending electric impulses and releasing neurotransmitters. In this case the Hypothalamus sends a message trough the spinal cord and also releases something called CRH into the pituitary gland.

Step 3: The adrenal medulla is stimulated by the sympathetic division (also quite fun to think that you have something clinically called the “sympathetic division” inside of yourself) of the nervous system and the pituitary gland releases ACTH that acts on the cortex of the adrenal gland. So to make it clear, this is the same adrenal gland on your kidneys, but different parts of it getting excited by different stuff.

Step 4: The medulla part of your adrenal gland releases adrenaline that is fast acting and the cortex part of your adrenal gland releases cortisol that is slow acting. I know, finally some words you have herd before so it is probably not all bogus!

Step 5: The aforementioned “all kinds of crazy stuff” happens. If this, against all odds, is something that interests you, go to your nearest library and look up the HPA-axis in a physiology textbook and read more from there.

The main takeaway from this short explanation, if there even is one, is the stuff you had already heard about before, the release of adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline being the short-lived and very active part that is mainly doing good and cool stuff while cortisol is the lame and the one that is often associated with the more negative parts of stress.

An important thing to mention here as well is that stress is not another synonym for bad. Stress is one of those words that have gotten a bad rep without really deserving it, as said before, stress is there to prime us for action. So to be honest, stress has most likely saved more lives throughout the years of this planet than any other system we know of, so much for the “VUCA” I tried to promote the last time, all you need is stress! And not to go all Jordan Peterson and his hierarchical lobsters on you here this close to the end, but something cool and quite profound is that the biological foundations of the stress system are so old that similar ones have been found in stuff that was floating around even way before the lobsters.

Now we know that nature developed stress in animals and most other creepy crawlies to make them flee from a predator or to excite them for other important events. The majority of stress responses ever initiated throughout history either ended up with their host being eaten, eating or just plain exhausted. Stress was never really developed to be the prolonged release of cortisol we know it as today, as a response to the ever-volatile stock market or worrying about when we, if ever will be able to use that voucher we got for our newly canceled flight, damn flights.

So stress was set up and was meant to be this temporary thing that made you do stuff with your body, and this was the case. This was the case until you, and me, and the rest of us human beings, were gifted with the unique ability to think about the future, yay!

The beginning of this sort of new mentally aimed stress rather than that old physically aimed stress that most likely happened around the time we got our smarts on, i.e. about 80–40.000 years ago. This time also marked when stress as a subject started to migrate from only living in the realm of biology and enter some of the terrains we now call psychology. One would think that this is a super long time, I do for sure, but evolution does not. For this reason, we are still not adapted to the constant worrying we are so good at, which kind of sucks. Something to keep in mind is that just as it is hard to pinpoint exactly when we as a species started to stress about long term stuff in a historical domain, it is also hard to pinpoint what belongs to biology and what to psychology in the scientific literature about stress. These two fields are very much connected via that thing called the brain, and this brain is also attached to another thing called the body, and this body is living in an environment, so you should be beginning to see why stress is so big and tricky as a subject, and why I will be covering a bit of everything in the following posts.

Wrapping up: The fact that stress is as old, complex and fundamental as it is likely means that it is an inevitable part of any normal life. But wait, remember! That was the old, good kind of stress that saved our lives right? Well, the fact that we are so smart and managed to remember that, and also that we are smart enough to stay away from lions, stupid zeebras not having figured that simple one out.. means we also have to pay the price for it. We humans are blessed in countless ways, but since nature rarely gives someone a free lunch, she figured that a good price for being smart and not having to worry about lions would be long term stress. So, now we simply have to deal with that instead, and that is what I will try to do from here on!

Some of what I will be covering in the following posts, in no particular order:

Gratitude
Meditation
CBT
Weird miscellaneous stuff starting on B like Birdsong and Breathing
Priorities
Nature exposure
Music
Social Media
Working out
Tattoos
Relationships
Appraisal
Sleep
Religion
Stuff you can eat on D such as Drugs, Dung and Dark Chocolate
Doing your own thing
Writing
Philosophy

P.S. I know what you are thinking, “But, some of this is not Psychology at all? And other points just seem to be there at random with no seeming relation to either stress or psychology?” My answer is yes, but at least I promise the posts about the topics to be very fact-based, or, at least most of them, most of the time.