What is Stress?
STRESS PHYSIOLOGY
People talk about stress all the time, and we know it when we feel it, but rarely do we have a clear definition of it. Simply put, stress is what you feel in your body and mind any time that your Autonomic Nervous System does not, in the present moment, have the Connection System (ventral vagal parasympathetic state) engaged. It’s that simple.
What, you then ask, is your Connection System?
Dr. Stephen Porges, PhD, developer of the Polyvagal Theory, explains that the Autonomic Nervous System is the neurological architecture of the mind-body connection. Through its sensory and motor components, it provides the physiological foundation of embodiment and the neural basis for feeling. When we experience a felt sense of safety, our nervous system activates the ventral vagal pathway (what we simply call the Connection System). This system supports the calmness required to foster connection. It unites the neural regulation of the face and voice with the heart and lungs, allowing us to attune to the faces, voices, and gestures of others. It is the prelude to secure attachment. Its engagement is the biological foundation of well-being.
At the level of physiology, we feel stress when our bodies shift out of the Connection System and into defensive states, of which there are three primary: fight/flight (Sympathetic), and shutdown (Dorsal Vagal), expanding to five when we include hybrid states: fawn, fight, fight, freeze, and shutdown. When we shift into defensive states, which occurs because we have a felt (often subconscious) neural detection of threat, our bodies and minds re-tune. This makes sense, because if we are in danger, the behaviors that make sense when we feel safe (being relaxed and connected) are no longer evolutionarily adaptive. When we detect danger, the vagal brake that slows the heart lifts, our bodies begin to mobilize (we want to move and respond), we initiate preparatory orienting responses to identify the threat, and we begin to polarize (figure out who is with us and who is against us.) Instead of prioritizing human voices (melodic, mid-range), our ears prioritize threat signals (bass- think of the theme song from Jaws). What we see, feel, and think changes. This is all autonomic physiology in realtime, enacted through the reptilian brain: the oldest deepest parts of our nervous system designed to keep us alive. These defensive systems are extraordinarily effective, and capable of mobilizing massive amounts of energy. (Think of stories about a mother lifting a car off her child. When mobilized, these systems allow us to do extraordinary things to survive.)
The systems that elicit the stress response are beneath cognition, and beneath emotion, though they drive both. They are, in fact, deep neural platforms of behavior, and our neurobiology is such that once they’ve become activated, it can take several hours for them to settle down. What activates them? Threat cues. What is a threat cue? Anything that tells the Autonomic Nervous System (your primal physiological self) that there is impending danger.
The paradox of the global pandemic, and the times we are living in, is that we are surrounded by threat cues. To use a crude analogy, it is as if we are suddenly living in a forest full of bears. For some of us (people of color, women) there have been bears throughout the proverbial forest all along. For others of us, there are sudden bears. In addition, these are bears we don’t recognize (COVID bears, let’s say). We don’t know their behavior. For example, what is the appropriate response in public when someone is standing four, not six feet from you? Or when someone passes you on a hiking trail without their mask? Yet, at the most primal level, our nervous systems have a sense of DANGER, which drives defensive states.
If you think of your Autonomic Nervous System as a learning system (it is), it has various thresholds of resilience and recovery set in place by your experience, history, trauma exposure, and interpretation of events. When you think your coiled garden hose is a rattlesnake, you jump back as your heart races, and then, once you realize it isn’t, your body re-settles. The rate at which it re-settles is a measure of resilience. If there are garden hoses you think are rattlesnakes everywhere, your rate of re-settling may be diminished. If you’ve in fact been bitten by a rattlesnake before, your rate of re-settling may be diminished. If your neighbors are posting to Facebook about rattlesnakes, your rate of re-settling may be diminished. And all of this is speaking about something that isn’t actually a threat. (A garden hose.)
COMMAND OF SELF
The next frontier in medicine and mental health will evolve along the lines of us individually and collectively harnessing applied neurophysiology and awareness training to train and condition our Autonomic Nervous System to develop what our training director Tiara Maldonaldo refers to as ‘command of self’. Command of Self arises when our self-tracking and other-tracking (inter-personal and nature-awareness) skills are refined enough for us to be able to track, moment-to-moment, our own changing internal landscape, know what is, have the equanimity not to react to it, and to know what is required to down-regulate it when we get out of balance. (This down-regulation will depend on how, specifically, it gets out of balance.) Command of Self is to train our Autonomic Nervous System to function within a range of resilience: a range where we are baselined in safety and connection, and to be able to get it back there when we deviate from that range.
Now, perhaps, you see the physiological paradox of this moment. Ordinarily, safety and connection come through attuned reciprocal relationships with others. Hard to do this when you are quarantined, without proximity to your loved ones, and unable to touch them. Hard to do this when you can’t see other people’s faces, the social engagement cues of which we are generally tracking in our social interactions.
“Whereas exercise was for many people the adaptational frontier of wellness before the pandemic, neural exercise will be that frontier going forward.”
Whereas exercise was for many people the adaptational frontier of wellness before the pandemic, neural exercise will be that frontier going forward. The reason our work is called Restorative Practices is because neural exercises are practices. You have to engage in practice, training, to develop new neural set points, and pathways. You have to work out your Autonomic Nervous System as you have been working out your core. Reading about it isn’t enough. As nature connection expert Jon Young points out, You’ll never get big biceps reading about working out. You have to move the weight. Similarly, you’ll never develop greater resilience without training your resilience muscles.
The first part of this training is self-assessment. You have to be able to track your deviation from Connection and regulation in order to be able to get back to it. You have to know how you, specifically, respond when you get stressed out. Do you get angry? Do you get anxious? Do you shutdown? The clues are all around us. What do our partners or children notice about us? What do we hear in our own minds when we feel stressed? Does everybody annoy us? Or are we thinking about everything that could go wrong? These are two signature thought clusters generated by two different defensive states. If everybody is pissing us off, it’s a pretty sure bet our system has gone into a sympathetic response on of the fight variety. If we find ourselves thinking of every possible thing that could go awry, it’s a pretty sure sign that our system is sympathetic on the flight side. Knowing this will give us information about what specific practices we need to do to down-regulate this defensive state.
In our work, our core advisors have, combined, 823 years of teaching experience in Polyvagal Theory, Peace-Making, Indigenous Lifeways and Culture, Anti-Racism, Contemplative Psychology, Deep Nature Connection, Integrative Medicine, Trauma Healing, Healing Touch, Systems Thinking, Ecological Conservation, Energy Management, Community Resilience, Violence Prevention, Educational Pedagogy, Tracking, Cultural Linguistics, and Connection Phenomenology. If you’d like learn more about how they can help you develop command of self, and increased resilience, visit our website: www.restorativepractices.com
