You must have come across advice more than once: you can’t change a situation that causes stress – change your attitude towards it. Easy to say! But it turns out that it can be done. For example, through the practice of mindfulness.
Psychologies: We all complain about stress, but we mean different situations. Do our complaints have a common denominator?
Anastasia Gosteva, psychologist: According to the classical definition, stress is a non-specific reaction of the body to excessive external challenges presented to it. Non-specific in the sense that for me, for you, for young people and for the elderly, for men and women, this reaction will be exactly the same. For example, if a person hears the sound of a shot, he will definitely flinch. This is a non-specific reaction.
Then the psychologist Richard Lazarus suggested that we react differently to the same external influence. He did the famous experiment with rats. Water was poured into the enclosures, and the rats, escaping, could climb out onto the site. But some on this site were shocked, while others were not.
The stress effect is the same: water appears. The primary stress response is to try to survive. But the rats that had been electrocuted no longer tried to escape. This is how the mechanism of learned helplessness is formed.
In a stressful situation, I just give up and say: “Well, what can you do, such a life”
Lazarus showed that stress is not a non-specific reaction. External stress factors can be the same, and then everything depends on what kind of reaction I choose consciously or unconsciously. Suppose someone was pushed in a transport: one started up, and the other thought: well, okay. The reaction strongly depends on whether you are in a resourceful state.
What is a resource state?
If you have the physical and mental resources to quickly adapt to a stressful situation, there is little that will stress you out. If you are exhausted, “not in the resource”, then the subjective level of stress will be noticeably higher.
How did the use of meditation for chronic pain, for example, begin? Biologist and physician Jon Kabat-Zinn suggested that there is real physical pain, but there is its perception. One thinks: it hurts me, it’s for a long time, but you can live with it and be happy. And his pain level is subjectively lower. Another thinks: life is unfair to me, I suffer the most. And subjectively the pain is stronger.
It turned out that people who came to Kabat-Zinn for the “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program” in a wheelchair suddenly got up. This is not a miraculous cure: the stress remained the same, but the attitude towards it changed. The pain was relieved by a decrease in the internal stress response.
Does this mean that the physical parameters of the body, say, the hormonal background, also changed?
Yes, including. There is a theory of five levels of protection against stress. The first level of protection is the central nervous system of an adult. A simple example: your boss said something harsh to you, but you are in a good resource state. And you think: probably, he got up on the wrong foot, well, God bless him. That is, at the level of the central nervous system, awareness worked, emotional intelligence worked.
The second level is the autonomic nervous system. If I am exhausted, protection does not work at the level of the central nervous system: whatever you say to me, I am in tears! But I can come home, walk the dog, complain to my husband, play with the children, go to bed, wake up in the morning – everything is fine!
What happens in a dream? The autonomic nervous system is activated, recovery mechanisms are activated. If I woke up in the morning and everything is fine with me, it means that the autonomic nervous system coped with stress. And this is not necessarily a dream: meditation, yoga, massage – any action when we go into a state of relaxation.
And if in the morning I feel that everything is still bad?
Then, most likely, stress moved to the third level, to the level of the immune system. For example, a person starts to get sick. Here he lives, lives, gritting his teeth, then once – and the flu. Or he went on vacation, and suddenly the temperature is 38. This means that stress is accumulating, but we don’t notice it, and when we relax a little, for example, on vacation, the immune system says: “Now I will start to deal with stress!” This is also, in principle, not bad.
But the next two levels are difficult. At the functional level, the work of body systems is disrupted
Neuroscientist Richard Davidson and his colleagues have established that both asthma and some inflammatory processes are precisely psychosomatic. And then the stress moves to the cellular level. There is a version that cancer is also to some extent a stressful cellular reaction.
It happens that we experience stress and at the same time do not understand its causes.
Certainly! There are very simple things: sound and silence. We live in a world where we are attacked by sounds we didn’t choose. We, the citizens, are in a situation where we are invaded on a very intimate level: in cafes, in restaurants, in elevators, anywhere, and we cannot protect ourselves.
The level of light and sound pollution of the environment is now colossal. And sound and light is an effect on the brain that works at the level of instincts. The baby screams that it is necessary to pay attention to it. Loud sounds directly affect the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with fear and anxiety. It’s the same with light.
So if you don’t want to meditate, please don’t meditate! But just being in silence, in nature is a must. Try to find a place where you can be quiet and see what happens to you. It is important to choose a physiological environment that can support the body at a basic level.
All psychotherapy is directed in the same direction: to notice what we are reacting to.
If we notice exactly how and to what we react, how will this help us?
There is a stunningly interesting approach – “Immunity to Change” by Robert Keegan. Keegan, a business development specialist, has explored why people don’t change, even when they really want to change.
For example, patients after a heart attack were told: “Your lifestyle is killing you. If you don’t quit smoking, don’t go on a diet, don’t move, you have 2-3 years to live.” But only one person out of seven actually made a difference. How is this possible? The other six don’t want to live?
Keegan’s hypothesis was that we often know very well what we want to achieve, but we know nothing about why we live the way we live; we have no idea what deep reasons we have for not changing anything. Just as our physical body has an immune system that responds to intrusion, we also have psychological immunity.
The fact is that there is a very deep, unconscious level of values
For example, at a deep level for me, life is joy, pleasure and steak. Steak is associated with family dinners, when we all sit together and talk. There are many different meanings, it’s not only about the steak, but about it too.
But I don’t know about my deepest values. And then the words of the doctor – to change the way of life – sound reasonable, but come into conflict with the unconscious value layer that I consider myself. In fact, for me to change the way of life is to die already.
And if I do not follow the doctor’s advice, I will die in three years, and if I follow …
…I will die today. And no one wants to die today. Keegan learned how to direct attention to this deep level where we never direct it. Most people don’t know where their attention is; they do not understand at all where they are, what is happening to them, why they are now on Facebook or why they are now on the phone. Until we turn attention to ourselves, we will not be able to change anything.
The practice you are doing also teaches you to direct attention to yourself. What does she give us?
The ability to take care of yourself. Therefore, in America, the practice of mindfulness is often used by psychologists as a support for therapy. It speeds up the process. It can also be used in its pure form, because directed attention changes the structure of the brain in a specific way.
Through neuroplasticity, we can actually calm the amygdala a bit, strengthen the connection between the prefrontal cortex, for example, and the insula of Reil, which is associated with body awareness. If I notice that I have been sitting on a chair for a long time, then I will go out for a few minutes, take a walk.
This is how we train the basic quality – self-knowledge.
And then on this foundation, you can do whatever you want. Work with a psychologist, study according to the method of immunity to change, go to training for personal growth.
The current dominant model of dealing with stress is that if we can’t choose our external situation, we can begin to change ourselves and how we deal with stress.
About expert
Anastasia Gosteva — psychologist, meditation teacher, founder of Mindful Business, which offers corporate mindfulness programs. Her .