Stress Response and the Mind-Body Connection!

Good morning. My name is Dr. Jennifer Sweeten, and I'm a licensed clinical psychologist in Kansas City, specializing in neuroscience applications to therapy and trauma and anxiety. One of the things that I talk a lot about when I give workshops and seminars or webinars is stress and the effect that stress has on the body and also the brain. So this is something that's oftentimes overlooked, or we think we know a little bit about how stress impacts us, but it's really a lot more extensive than most people know. So when we talk about the stress response, what we're really talking about is this mind body connection. And I know that kind of sounds like a cliche. We hear a lot about that in the news, or we think of it like maybe something that would be mentioned in a yoga class or therapists talk about this a lot. But to a lot of people, that's not really clear what that means. But when we talk about stress, we have to talk about this connection between the brain and the body, because the brain and the body are literally physically connected. And it's through this connection that stress gets experienced in both the brain and the body. And it's also through that connection that we can begin to heal ourselves and reduce stress. So a little bit about the stress response. You may remember back in maybe ninth grade or so, you might have learned about the nervous system, like the central nervous system, which is your brain and your spinal cord. And you probably also learned about the peripheral nervous system. So sometimes we might call this the pns. And what that is is your autonomic and somatic nervous systems. So these are the parts of the nervous system that are outside of the brain. So the CNS is mostly the brain. The PNS is mostly in the body. Specifically, the autonomic nervous system is broken down into two branches. We don't need to get super detailed memorizing all this, but it's just kind of good to know this peripheral nervous system. The autonomic nervous system can be broken down into the stress response and then also the relaxation response. So the technical names for this are the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. But usually I just call it stress and relaxation. So we have these two different branches of the autonomic nervous system in the body. And the way that they work most of the time is such that as one increases, the other decreases. It's not always true, but most of the time, that's what it is. So put in English, what that really means is that it's really hard to be both Stressed and relaxed at the exact same time. And that's good news for us because it means if we can on purpose put ourselves into that relaxation response in the body, we can not only calm the body, but we can also calm the brain. So let's talk a little more about what's going on in the body with a stress response. So when you go into that stress response, this would be called the sympathetic nervous system. It's that branch of the autonomic nervous system. When that happens, whole bunch of chemical reactions take place. I think it's about 1400 biochemical and psychophysiological changes take place in a split second. Things like adrenaline increasing, cortisol increasing. So there's a lot chemically that's going on in the body. But the tricky thing about stress and what can make it so insidious is that you don't really feel these chemical reactions. So when I'm sitting with clients in a therapy session, they're not saying to me, you know, Dr. Sweeten, when I'm talking about my family, I just felt my cortisol triple. Now, nobody picks up on that, really, but it is happening. So you have all these chemical reactions, but they're kind of taking place behind the scenes, and it's hard to really feel them as they take place. The good thing, though, is that there are some physical indicators of stress that you can pick up on, and everybody experiences this a little bit differently. But some common symptoms of stress in the body would include maybe like a tightening in the chest. So people, when they panic, they often describe it a chest tightening, faster, slower breathing, increased heart rate. A lot of folks also talk about something gastrointestinally going on, maybe a stomach flip, a stomach drop. All of a sudden you feel like you want to vomit, Kind of feel sick to your stomach, muscle tension. So these are just a few of the physical symptoms. And what's really important for people is to know their own specific stress profile. So how does stress manifest in your body? So I can tell you for me, where my stress is. It's sort of like at the pit of my stom. And when that adrenaline increases, I feel this sort of a drop. And that's a good indication for me that sick feeling that I've gotten really stressed. So we all pick up on these different components of the stress response in the body. And all of this, it's very, very distressing. When you feel stressed, it doesn't feel good. But know that all of it is really supposed to be good for you. The reason we were wired for this is for survival. So that we could essentially mobilize our resources and get ready to fight or to run away from whatever the threat. So we go into this stress response because it's supposed to help protect us and we think it has, as evidenced by the fact that we're still here as a species. So we know it does something good for us, but it doesn't feel very good physically. But each little piece of this physical response plays a role, it has a purpose. So for instance, that stomach drop that I was talking about that I feel, and then I mentioned the muscle tension, which what's actually happening with that is that when I get stressed, my blood very quickly exits my digestive system and it goes to my extremities and that's what causes the muscle tension. The whole logic behind this is that if you're going to fight a bear, you don't need to digest lunch because you need to fight the bear. You need to make sure that you can survive that situation. So this is all really adaptive, but again, it's distressing. And where it becomes actually harmful to your health is if you stay in this response. Because when you're not actually facing a life threatening stressor, which is most of the case in our lives, where we have these stressors modern day that no doubt that they're stressful, but they're not necessarily life threatening. So think about having a toxic boss, bullying co workers, or what about a bad marriage, how long does that last? We have these stressors that can last a really, really long time that are stressful but not really life threatening. But what you need to know is that your body and your brain are still responding to them a lot of times as if they are life threatening. So what it means is that we have this really heightened stress response in response to modern day stressors that we don't necessarily need to have because our lives aren't being threatened maybe in the same way on a daily basis as way back when.