The first order of business is defining stress; it’s one of those overused words whose meaning has become rather ambiguous. But before we get into that, we need to dive into a subconsciously controlled system which underlies most of your bodily processes: the autonomic nervous system.

The Autonomic Nervous System

It’s six o’clock in the evening, and you’ve just come back from a hard day of work. You drop your suitcase on the floor, unbutton your shirt, and plop yourself on the couch just in time for your show. Almost instantly, your body switches into “relaxation” mode – biologically, your “parasympathetic nervous system” has just been activated. This is essentially a series of connections going from your central nervous system, the brain and spinal cord, to a number of organs. The activation of these connections causes a number of changes, most of which are predictable given the relaxed state of the organism. The gastrointestinal tract becomes more active, digesting your food. The heart slows down and the bronchioles of the lungs constrict – you don’t really need to be delivering large amounts of oxygenated blood to your body. The parasympathetic nervous system can also be quite selective, allowing for the individual modulation of target organ function – such as urination. While the constriction of the bladder is a parasympathetic nervous system function, it does not happen automatically, lest everybody would be walking around in diapers.

The parasympathetic nervous system is functionally antagonistic towards; that is, its actions can be seen as the opposite of the “sympathetic nervous system”. This series of connections is activated when you are faced with danger, and is referred to as the “fight or flight” response, seeing as you have two choices in such a situation, to fight or to flee, both of which would be greatly aided by sympathetic activation. Unlike the parasympathetic nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system sends its activation signals to every target very rapidly, since a hostile bear is not going to give you time to decide which organs you want to optimize for flight before it attacks you (though you should never run from a bear).

The changes that are brought upon by the sympathetic nervous system are also quite predictable: tachycardia (fast heartbeat), bronchiole dilation (more lung space), more blood flow to the legs (so you can run), less blood flow to the skin (in case you get cut), dilation of pupils (so you can see as much as possible), relaxation of the bladder (this really isn’t the time), etc.

The parasympathetic nervous system is activated by a chemical known as acetylcholine, while the sympathetic nervous system, for all intents and purposes, is activated by adrenaline. Once a sympathetic nervous system activation is triggered, the adrenal gland is triggered to release adrenaline into the bloodstream. Once the threat is gone, this adrenaline does not disappear quickly; rather, it slowly dissipates, such that even after a momentary fright, you can still feel anxious for some time afterwards

It is easy to see how these systems would’ve been quite useful for our ancestors. The ability to optimize the body within seconds for hunting or evading being hunted would be extremely beneficial. To have a simple universal switch that can turn a person from relaxation mode to fight or flight mode and back again is quite ingenious. Unfortunately, the world has changed, but we have not. A few thousand years is not nearly enough for slow micro-evolutionary steps to keep up with the unprecedented rate of change that mankind is experiencing, and here lies the problem.

Overstimulation and Overcompensation

The world is a busy place, and it’s only going to get busier. The sheer amount of information that we are subject to in our lives would completely overwhelm a person from the last generation, and it does. Fortunately, the brain is more adaptable than we can imagine, and it does, to a great extent, learn to cope with this new world. However, sometimes it gets rather confused. This overstimulation from televisions, cellphones, school, the internet, our jobs, or huge friend networks, our hopes, our dreams, people’s expectations, our own expectations—these are all interpreted by the brain as “stressors”, immediately relevant events and ideas that must be ruminated over at all times. Furthermore, the brain doesn’t actually know that the test that you have this evening isn’t a wild animal or an out of control car – your thought patterns are quite the same in either case, and the brain feels it is necessary to prepare you in its own special way. It switches on the sympathetic nervous system, floods your body with adrenaline, and you feel the effects. Your palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy…you get the picture. If you’re worried enough, you’ll start hyperventilating, and if you’re particularly sensitive, or you think you haven’t studied enough, your heart will start pounding.

So the test is over, you feel alright about it, and walk out of the classroom, when you remember the essay you have due tomorrow. Your brain sees this as a stressor, and turns on your sympathetic nervous system again, more adrenaline, there goes your heart again, pounding away. You try to write the essay, but you can’t even grip the pen, much less think about what you’re writing. Your mind is racing, hypervigilant, darting between thoughts in your head and objects all around you. These effects are very useful for the hunter running through trees trying to catch a boar while trying not to hit their head on a low-hanging branch, but you’re just trying to write an essay. You decide to play a video game – Fallout: New Vegas. Now you’re running around a nuclear wasteland fighting odd creatures and running from super mutants – your two most powerful senses, hearing and vision, are completely taken by the game, and your brain interprets the stimuli as you actually being in danger, and there it goes again, giving you another shot of adrenaline.

Now there are, of course, people who are generally relaxed, chilled out, and their brains are less eager to pull the adrenaline switch. At the same time, there are extremely sensitive individuals, such as those with anxiety or even panic disorders, where simply thinking of something even mildly stressful can throw them into a panic attack, quite simply the hyperactivation of the sympathetic nervous system to a degree where one is incapacitated. A number of symptoms of these panic attacks can be palpitations of the heart, hyperventilation, convulsions, confusion, dizziness, and chest pains, which can lead the victim to feel they are having a heart attack, and further exacerbate the symptoms. This is the sympathetic nervous system on overdrive. Most people are somewhere in the middle.

Now that stress has been defined; chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system, we can move on to why it’s bad for you.

Stress can kill you

A little bit of stress is not bad. Stress is often the kick in the butt that most people need to do something. You always have a little bit of adrenaline in your bloodstream, and it gets you up and running. There is a big difference, however, between a baseline level of necessary stress, termed “eustress” and a chronic high level of detrimental stress, termed “distress”. Eustress is the kind of stress you feel before a soccer game or a test. For the most part, this is good, because it gets you sufficiently aroused to perform at your maximum capability. Of course, too much arousal will lead to a sub-optimal performance, and this is where eustress leads to distress. Distress is a persistent elevated level of arousal that does not disappear even when the stimulus, be it an exam or a deadline, has disappeared. This can simply be the result of not enough time to relax between stressful stimuli, which never gives the body time to recharge; eventually, this can lead to elevated stress levels that do not fade even when given ample time.

Once a person has reached a state where they are consistently anxious, they are said to have anxiety disorder – while this imbalance in neurotransmitters can be partially due to genetic susceptibilities, family histories, etc., a stressful lifestyle can often play an exacerbating effect. Consistently being stressed; that is, constantly having above average amounts of adrenaline in your bloodstream, can become very detrimental. High blood pressure will be an almost unavoidable side effect, due to most of your peripheral arteries being constricted, thus giving your blood less room to move in. Your heart will therefore be consistently overworked, which can lead to hypertrophy (enlargement) of the myocardium in order to compensate for the added burden. While this may seem like a good effect for normal muscles, a bigger heart means less room for blood within its chambers, and can put one at greater risk for a number of arrythmias. Secretion of other molecules from the adrenal glands will suppress your immune system, which will make you more susceptible to illnesses. Finally, if there comes a time when you actually need to use the primal “fight or flight” response, it won’t be as powerful for a number of reasons such as adrenaline desensitization and adrenal fatigue.

Now that all the negatives are out of the way, we can focus on relieving the stress; specifically, eliminating distress while embracing eustress.

How to Deal

The easiest short-term solution to this problem is to simply quit whatever is that’s stressing you out, be it school, work, etc. However, this is implausible, since once you start running out of money, your stresses will only increase. Fortunately, there are many other ways to go about de-stressing, a few of which will be covered here.

The first way that I have realized to be quite effective is simple mindfulness. Attempt to detach yourself from the situation, view it from an outside perspective, and outline the reasons for which you are stressed. Most often, the stressor is largely exaggerated in your mind, and has ballooned into something occupying most of your thoughts. An outside view will help you determine just how important this stressor is and how much time you should actually be devoting to it. In my experiences in school, most students have an extremely poor concept of time. There is ample time every day to do everything, provided that while you are doing it, you are completely focused. I have never needed to stay up past 10 pm doing homework, much less had to pull an “all-nighter”, probably one of the dumber things students feel they must do. Mindfulness leads to prioritization which leads to time management, which eventually leads to de-stressing. Once you see that everything can be fit into the time you have to do it, stress levels will go down almost instantaneously. For better or for worse, we are creatures of habit, and it is said that to turn something into a habit requires 40 days.

The act of turning something into a habit is associated with a phenomenon called “neural plasticity”. It was thought for many years that the brain stops changing structurally by the age of five, but this has been very recently disproven. With a group of jugglers, for example, it was seen that as they honed their skill, an area of the brain associated with the control of hand movements actually became larger. This structural malleability of the brain is no longer considered pseudoscience, and forms the basis of behavioral modification. If you maintain an action for at least 40 days, whether it be juggling or managing your time, it will fundamentally change the structure of your brain to “embed” the action as a habit. More amazing still is the fact that this neural plasticity transcends motor actions and simple habits; even thinking patterns can modify the structure of the brain. Negative thinkers appear to favor the right side of their frontal cortex, while positive thinkers prefer the left. Buddhist monks who spend decades trying to attain complete control over their minds have an extremely left-shifted frontal cortex activation signature. It is thus apparent that the Buddhist monks are able to consciously create fundamental shifts in the architecture of their brains, thus affect their thinking.

If these Buddhist monks spend the majority of their time meditating, reflecting on themselves, and modifying their thought patterns, and have been able to successfully change their thinking to become drastically more positive, then we must seriously consider meditation as an extremely important skill for de-stressing.

Meditation

For the purposes of this article, I will outline the single most important rule of meditation: You can only think of one thing at once. This one rule may be the most powerful statement that you may ever hear. It may not be sinking in yet, and it may take some time before the gravity of the singularity of focus truly sets in, but it will. To take your mind off of the stressor, you must simply think of something else. That’s all there is to it. Put all your focus into something that does not stress you out, and that will obstruct any thoughts onto the thing that does. For the purposes of meditation, that thing is the breath. Simply sit or lie down, close your eyes, and focus on your breath. With each inhalation and exhalation, count one. If a stray thought enters your mind, acknowledge it, and then let it fade away. Try to get to twenty-four without losing your place, and then try counting backwards. You may be surprised how easily it is to forget what number you were at. If this happens, simply start again. Do this once a day, when you’re at your highest point of stress. Based on the phenomenon of neuro-plasticity, this ability to focus on one thing will only become better as your practice, and you will be able to use it constantly to ward away stressful thoughts.

There is a second, slightly less important rule: Thoughts are but fleeting messages that do not truly originate from your mind. Everybody gets completely random thoughts sometimes, that seem like they come from nowhere. They do not reflect you in the slightest; they are simply the by-products of a consistently active brain, which constantly needs to integrate sensory information with memories, and often comes up with some ridiculous results — dreams are a good example of this. A dream is simply the unadulterated playback of your sensory experiences throughout the day, mixed in with your memories and your ideas, all in the effort of consolidating memory. The important message to take away from this rule is that thoughts are meant to be acknowledged and then released; it is not right to brood or to ruminate over the same thing, because this leads to stress. Your brain perceives that which you are consistently thinking of as a threat, prompts a release of adrenaline—you know the drill.

Physical Activity

At least twenty minutes of cardiovascular exercise three times a week, simple as that. Exercising releases opioid chemicals into your bloodstream, “endorphins” and “enkephalins”, and in addition to relieving pain, they make you feel good. This is why some people get “addicted” to running – they are addicted to the endogenous opioids that their body produces when they run, much like a heroin addict is addicted to heroin (also an opioid).

Anyways, there’s not much to say about this one, other than that you have to hit the sweet spot with exercise. Too much can be just as stressful as none at all, for quite a simple reason: to the body, exercise is quite indistinguishable from stress. They both cause sympathetic nervous system activation, adrenaline release, heart pumping, hyperventilation, profuse sweating, etc. For twenty to thirty minutes, this is considered eustress, and your body is liking it, but overdo it, and it will turn into distress, with your body frantically trying to repair itself and prevent inflammation while you’re running it into the ground. It has also been found that moderate exercise increases the rate of “neurogenesis”; that is, the formation of new neurons, directly correlated to neuro-plasticity.

Sleep

Don’t sacrifice sleep to get more work done, in the hopes that by finishing said work, you will be less stressed. Sleep deprivation just stresses you out more, and simply aggravates the symptoms of stress. Not only that, sleep is when most of the neuro-genesis happens, and if you sacrifice that, it’s going to take a lot longer than forty days to turn an activity into a habit. Aim for 7 or 8 hours of sleep a night – that’s it. It is said that deep meditation mimics the brain wave patterns of deep sleep; REM and slow-wave, but to replace sleep with meditation has not been tried in any reputable scientific study, and therefore it is inadvisable.

If your sleep cycle has become irregular due to your consistently bad sleep habits, simply reset it by exposing yourself to bright, full spectrum light in the morning, and minimizing exposure to light within two hours of desired bed time. To aid in this process, over-the-counter melatonin is available in nearly every pharmacy. The pineal gland within your brain secretes melatonin to get you ready for sleep, and stops secreting it to get you ready for the day. If this rhythm of release, called the “circadian rhythm” is offset, you will be tired during the day and wide awake during the night. Using melatonin in concert with bright light therapy will be able to quickly bring you back into sync.

***

The above remedies against stress are easy to implement and require minimal amounts of time and commitment. The key is not to get demoralized after a couple days. The first week is the biggest hurdle – after that it’s relatively smooth sailing. If any of these remedies seemed to help you, make sure to comment!