Stress

In a recent article published on New Scientist ¹, Helen Thompson starts from a simple premise: how do some people float through life unfazed by overwhelming stress.

We all know that person who isn’t knocked down by life, work, relational difficulties, but instead, find the silver lining when most of us are groping in the dark. Why do some people manage stress better than others?

This is the question driving Helen Thompson, who has also tested a “stress vaccine” that might protect us from potential threats we can find on our path, often bumpy with breath-taking views.

One thing is for sure: if we’re late for a job interview or we’ve lost a loved one, stress is unavoidable. In 2018, the largest study on stress in the UK showed that the previous year three out of four people were so stressed they felt overwhelmed and unable to react ².

We should clarify here that stress is a human fundamental physiological response to prevent threatening situations and run health jeopardizing risks.
More precisely, stress is a chemical reaction from the brain, the amygdala, warning our body. If the alarm in our brain goes off, the amygdala sends a signal to the hypothalamus, a structure of the central nervous system located between the two brain hemispheres, which activates a typical response through hormone release, the so-called “fight or flight” reaction.
When we find ourselves in a potentially threatening situation, because there’s an external element that scares/upsets us, or because the amygdala associates senses to previous experiences, adrenaline and cortisol are released in our body, allowing us to either fight or flight through specific signals: increased heart rate, muscles activation, digestion and immune system block and inflammations throughout the body to release energy and focus all available resources to cope with the threat.
Now, the first thing we might think of is that our body reacts the same way whether we are being run over by a car or our boss is telling us off because we did an awful job.
That’s right, our body’s response is always the same: increased heart rate, sweating, temporary inhibition of digestive and immune systems. This is why we feel heartburn, joint and muscle pain when we experience prolonged periods of stress: our body is reacting to stress the only way it knows, by releasing cortisol and standing by for action.
In the long run, this exposes us to diseases and chronic fatigue. This triggered mechanism only works if we need to get away from a lion, something unlikely to happen in downtown Milan, while it can be dysfunctional or even harmful in other circumstances, for instance, when we argue with our partner or coworker.
An argument or a lion can trigger the same reaction: now, you can see why they call them urban jungles!
Un litigio o un leone possono scatenare in noi le stesse conseguenze, adesso forse capite meglio perché le metropoli si chiamano “giungle urbane, o metropolitane”.

Let’s go back to the main question: why are some people more resilient than others? What makes some of us capable of reacting to daily hardships better than others?

Trauma at a young age might affect the responses in adulthood, as proven by research by Katie McLaughin ³, who showed how children with troubled upbringing (136 kids raised in orphanages and living in institutions) would produce higher levels of cortisol than others. We should not make the mistake of thinking that happy children are necessarily going to become happy adults, and unhappy children are necessarily going to become unhappy adults.

What’s more to the story?

There’s a chemical substance the human body produces called neuropeptide Y (NPY) acting as a switch in response to stress. Several experiments have shown how effective this substance is even in quite challenging tests, like sleep deprivation or chases in military training. When we find ourselves in a high-stress situation, we are less likely to make the right decisions, and we are more exposed to mistakes. The higher the stress, the less our choices will be informed and rational; it’s not true that we work better under pressure. We might work more, but not better.

This substance is partially hereditary, and in part, it can be produced by the body if we train to think differently. This has been a significant breakthrough.
We are not destined to repeat past mistakes or react the same way if we learn how to see things from a different perspective. Irony can be an antidote to stress, so are psychotherapy and mindfulness practices. There is no recipe or personal profiles that react to stress correctly, we can change our approach and our response to adversity. Stress is like spices and needs to be used in the right quantity, but dosages are different for everyone.
Helen Thompson’s article highlights something interesting, and that is the relation between gut bacteria and mood: people with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression have high levels of gut bacteria, which cause inflammation that can lead to severe physical and mental damage.

Couples suffering from chronic stress in unhappy marriages have more permeable intestines than those in a happy relationship. But this also works the other way around ⁴.

What does all this tell us?

There is no universally wrong stress but different approaches to stress. The fundamental elements seem to be two: the perception of having adequate resources to cope and the quality of our relationships. Let's look back to high-stress experiences, such as an important work project or when our luggage got lost. What determined our reaction?
Definitely, the idea we could make it, that we were able to do without, or - about the project - the necessary competencies. The most significant difference lies with the type of relationship we have with the people around us; if we feel accepted, acknowledged, welcomed, or loved, all difficulties turn into the opportunity for exploring something new and find that every cloud has its silver lining.
This is what makes us truly human, which is not just the ability to survive, but to create something from hardships, and this is what we started doing thousands of years ago when we got down from trees to populate the Earth.

¹ H. Thomson, Don’t stress: the scientific secrets of people who keep cool heads, 19/02/2020.
² Internazionale, Sempre con i nervi saldi, 12/03/2020.
³ “Causal effects of the early caregiving environment on development of stress response systems in children” - 2015.
⁴ Internazionale, ibidem.