Healing for your Mind, Body and Spirit

Stress is an everyday fact of life. But, as an old TV advertisement for underarm deodorant suggests, Stress Stinks!

But what can we do about it? After all, stress is caused by things that happen to us that are out of our control, isn’t it? This is an extremely important question: Are we victims of stressful events that occur outside of us, as is commonly believed, or is there more to it than that?

Common sense, even our own experience, suggests the simple answer – something stressful happens, we get stressed. Obvious, isn’t it?

Well in this case, except for certain physical stressors, common sense is wrong.

The idea that stress is a response to external events comes from physics. Here, the human body is viewed as a mechanical thing, like your car. And in some ways your body is very much like a car. If you abuse it, if you slam it with blunt or pointy objects, or feed it the wrong fuel, it will be damaged, i.e. stressed.

But, here’s where the analogy ends. Unlike your car, most of the stress we suffer from is emotional, not physical. With emotional stress, the direct connection between an external event and our internal stress response is an illusion the mind creates.

An external event cannot cause a specific emotional response. It takes a mind to interpret the event first. And it is this interpretation that leads to a specific emotion.
Right now you are receiving and processing millions of bits of information from both inside and outside of you. In order to extract meaning from these millions of bits of information that bombard your senses every second, the brain creates models or templates that guide your emotions and behavior.

Over the course of a lifetime each of us has developed millions, perhaps even billions of these templates or models of the world. They are great timesaving devices. Among other things, they allow us to live our lives without having to reinvent the wheel every time we drive a car.

The down side is that these templates are almost completely outside of our awareness and control. In fact, they unconsciously direct our emotions and behaviors.

Our present understanding of how the brain works goes like this: Your senses detect an external event. This is followed by an unconscious appraisal – present sensory data is compared with past sensory data. When a match, or even an approximation is found, an emotional response is triggered that corresponds with the past sensory data. This then prepares the body to respond in a certain way, or in some cases actually elicits these behaviors. This is followed by a conscious appraisal of the situation, which is severely biased by the unconsciously aroused emotional state.

When it comes to the intensity of this unconsciously aroused emotional state, there are some individual differences that we need to take into account. I’m sure you’ve noticed that some people seem fairly calm in most situations, while others are highly sensitive and react to almost any provocation. The more emotionally reactive you are, the stronger your emotional response will be.

These individual differences in emotional reactivity are due mainly to your learning history. The physical structure of the brain actually changes in response to how often and how intensely you experience stress. These physical changes can either increase or decrease how reactive you are to future stressful situations.

So, you see it is the templates (unconscious patterns of state-dependent learning, memory and behavior) that primarily determine how you react to an external event.

Your attempts to alter an emotional response by force of will are mostly doomed to failure. It’s almost impossible to change an emotional response. For example, when you respond with anger or hurt, to something your spouse or partner says or does.

The situation is not hopeless, however, because we have discovered at least three ways of reducing or altering this stress response:

1. Social engineering – change the environment so the stressful situation does not occur. If you know there are tigers in the woods, don’t go in the woods. Not always practical, but it does work.
2. Personality engineering – decrease your overall emotional reactivity through meditation or relaxation training. A practice that has numerous health benefits, but takes a long time.
3. Emotional engineering – work on altering the templates (unconscious patterns) themselves. This is the most direct and in many cases the most effective way of lowering the stress in your life.

In future articles we will explore these ways of reducing or altering this stress response.