Stress, Rest, & PTSD

We mentioned earlier how deer shake after a big scare to metabolize the physical response of fear. And how (theoretically, at least) we can stay present with and process even big feelings in as little as 90 seconds.

But what happens when it’s a really adverse event or the adverse event keeps happening?

Our brains are beautifully designed with a kind of emergency override that can keep us alive when it senses extreme danger.

Just like the scared deer, our brainstem (sometimes called our primal or lizard brain) can kick in extra adrenaline and cortisol, our eyes widen, and we’re ready to fight, fly, or freeze in a split second if a tiger jumps out from behind a brush.

In a high-stress moment, our primal brain overrides our slower, more rational, and creative thinking brains so we can survive. 

In high stress, survival-mode moments, every millisecond counts. Our brains switch into this primal, survival, faster thinking mode that’s full of shortcuts and shorthand. Our senses become heightened. All our physical resources are diverted to immediate survival needs.

Instead of digesting lunch, we pump extra blood to the muscles so they can run faster, so we don’t become lunch, right? Good. Helpful.

In those extreme cases, that emergency system saves our lives.

But it doesn’t forget the experience. It learns from it.

After that first run-in with the tiger (literal or metaphoric) jumping out of the brush, our survival brain codes anything that looks like a tiger, jumping, or brush, or the music playing when it happened, as potential threats. Now when any of those triggers occur again, your primal brain/body may override your rational/creative brain and kick your body into a full, code-red response. This is also known as PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) when it stems from a one-time or event or c-PTSD (complex-PTSD) when it stems from ongoing adverse events. 

The primary way to overcome PTSD is to have repeated positive experiences with those triggers until your body is convinced it’s safe to walk by bushes again. ...And this has nothing to do with your rational mind. You can’t just tell yourself it’s safe. Your primal body has to feel safe.

Healing from PTSD is a long, slow process. Healing from c-PTSD takes even longer. There’s no way around it. Just buckle up and be gentle and patient with yourself.

We tend to think of our brains as just the thinking machine in our skull, but actually, our brains are connected to our whole bodies.

Your body has to walk past that brush enough times without a tiger jumping out to be utterly convinced there’s no need for alarm.

It has to have enough positive experiences walking past other bushes without getting attacked to become confident it isn’t likely to happen again. Or it has to have lots of positive interactions with the tiger to become convinced the tiger won’t eat you. It has to hear that song lots of times without anything bad happening. 

Each time your body encounters one of these triggers and nothing terrible happens, your override response will get a little more relaxed.

If, however, on the other hand, a hungry tiger jumps out from behind the same bush every time you walk by...or even just some of the times you walk by…the more heightened your body’s response becomes and the more it will urge you to stay away from it, understandably! 

Negative things that happen to us are more weighty than positive things. It’s called the negativity bias. It’s more important to your survival to remember and give more weight to that one time a hungry tiger attacked you there than it is to give equal weight to the three other times nothing bad happened there. Hyper “focusing on the positive” and ignoring the negative can be called toxic positivity.

It’s important to remember that it doesn’t have to be as extreme as a tiger attacking you to be problematic, as we’ve already heard from Dr. Maté. (Does it really matter if a person drowns in 7 or 70 feet of water? It’s not about comparison.)

And we know that this negativity bias phenomenon happens all the time within marriages. In longitudinal studies conducted by the Gottman Institute, they discovered, 

“The difference between happy and unhappy couples is the balance between positive and negative interactions during conflict. There is a very specific ratio that makes love last. That ‘magic ratio’ is 5 to 1. This means that for every negative interaction during conflict, a stable and happy marriage has five (or more) positive interactions.

If the positive-to-negative ratio during conflict is 1 to 1 or less, that’s unhealthy, and indicates a couple teetering on the edge of divorce.”

Is this making sense?

So if your marriage right now is feeling more like a minefield where you’re having more like 1:1 or less positive to negative experiences, your body is wired to tell you it’s not a safe place.

It’s important to examine these responses after we’ve cooled down, too. Was that really a dangerous situation? Or was it just something with orange and black stripes?

Either way, if you’re getting triggered that often, it’s not good for anyone…

From a physiological standpoint, you may remember the concept of the stress response: fight, flight, or freeze. When you were in school, you may remember learning about the sympathetic (stress) and parasympathetic (rest, digest, and heal) modes, like an on/off switch of the stress response. Now we know more…

The latest understanding, is called Polyvagal Theory. The Vagus Nerve is the one that connects your brain to a lot of your insides. This theory shows us how the parasympathetic system is more complex: 

The sympathetic system is more like a gas pedal, and the parasympathetic system/vagus nerve/autonomic system is more like the breaks.

But for a lot of us, a lot of the time, we live in a state where we’ve really hit the breaks and are basically in a state of shutdown. (If that’s you, here’s another good video to explain what it takes, from a neurological perspective to gently move out of shutdown.)

These next two diagrams show what’s called our window of tolerance. When we’re stressed, we have a narrow window of tolerance. We are hypervigilant, perceiving lots of things as threats. The goal is to expand our window of tolerance and learn to regulate ourselves enough to stay more in this green zone where we are applying the “gas” and “breaks” in more gentle and fluid ways.

The diagram on the top shows what’s called a dysregulated state; the bottom one shows a regulated state.

This regulation is essential not only to feel better emotionally but also for our mental and physical health. 

When we’re in the stress mode for more than a few minutes, our digestive systems are impaired, our bodies hold onto all the cortisol and all the other chemicals/hormones of stress, which cause inflammation and literally corrodes our cells and tissues. This prolonged stress-mode causes all kinds of digestive problems, cancer, autoimmune disorders, and disease.

Not only is it not good for your health, but it’s also not a good time to make important decisions or have meaningful and productive conversations. When we are in the fight, flight, or freeze mode, we can’t think well. We can’t access our more rational, creative, and nuanced brains.

Daniel Kahneman wrote a book called Thinking, Fast and Slow. You can watch a quick little YouTube summary of it here. It makes some great points about how our quick brain can really get us into trouble in decision making and how we want to, when we can, use our slow brain to make better decisions. 

Only when you are genuinely not feeling stressed can you think well, digest food well, rest, repair, and heal yourself.

So let me ask you, How much of your days are you spending right now in stress mode?

I’m not asking you to do anything about it yet. For now, just notice.

NEXT UP:

Breathing & meditation

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