We Are Our Own Worst Enemies
Growing up in the 1970’s I vividly recall Sunday evenings with my family gathered around our small TV watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins. Marlin Perkins was the Steve Erwin of the 1970’s…but much more dapper…he looked like Walt Disney’s older brother. Marlon had snow white hair and a distinguished Disney mustache, and he always wore an old school safari suit. My most vivid memories were of the African episodes when we were treated to various chase scenes on the savannah: lions chasing wildebeests, cheetahs chasing gazelle, leopards chasing monkeys and other small game. It was always interesting to watch the chase, but it was even more interesting when the prey decided to stop, stand its ground, and fight. I would always wonder about what was going through a creature’s mind at that moment….why would they decide to stop running and fight? Did they really think they had a chance? Occasionally the prey animals would win these standoffs…they would often fight with such fury and viciousness that it would scare off a pride of lions or a pack of wild dogs. It was from these early nature shows that I first heard the term “fight or flight” response. It wasn’t until many years later that I really came to understand that the "fight or flight" response is also a part of being human.
In humans we refer to the fight or flight response as the "stress response", but the underlying physiology and biological mechanisms of the stress response are exactly the same as what an animal experiences during the fight or flight response. Although the fight or flight response is an extremely helpful survival mechanism for animals, it has become a serious liability in humans. Chronic stress and stress-related disease is one of the most pervasive public health problems in America today. Stress has become a hallmark of modern society and it pervades every aspect of our lives. Every year the American Psychological Association conducts an annual survey of "Stress in America" which demonstrates that, since 2007, stress levels in the U.S. have consistently been on the rise. We have come accept that unhealthy levels of stress are a normal part of our every day life. We find a perverse joy in telling friends and family that we're "stressed out", and we wear our busy-ness and stress as a badge of honor and importance. We overbook ourselves and rush from one appointment to the next (and some research shows that we do the same to our kids), we overpromise and underdeliver, we strive for impossible levels of productivity and we find a twisted satisfaction in our stress-induced exhaustion every evening.
Within that past few weeks you have probably told someone that you are feeling "stressed out", or that you are dealing with a "stressful situation", or that you are under "a lot of pressure". Statements like these reveal a linguistic and cultural bias towards viewing stress as an emotion or some external force that acts upon us. We tend to view stress as something that is out of our control and something that others do to us. Although external events can certainly contribute to stress, they are merely stimuli that trigger the actual stress response. Like the fight or flight response in animals, the stress response is an internal biological response to a real or perceived threat. The stress response is a complex set of biochemical and physiological interactions that occur within our body, and although everyone experiences stress, very few people are aware of the amazing series of events that occur within the body when this response is triggered. Even fewer people understand that we can control the stress response and its effects on our body and brain.
When the stress response is triggered, a whole cascade of physiological events occur in rapid succession in order to prepare you for an immediate and intense expenditure of energy. There are plenty of exceedingly detailed articles that break down the step-by-step process of the fight or flight response, so I'm not going to go into the minutiae of the process, but when we are faced with a stressor our body prepares itself for a huge expenditure of energy. In the brain the HPA axis is activated, the region responsible for ensuring our survival, and that triggers all of the major systems in the body to prepare for a fight or flight situation. The stress response affects every major system in the body; the body releases hormones (primarily adrenaline and cortisol) , our heart rate increases, our blood pressure goes up, our muscles tense, and our brain becomes focused on our individual survival. We feel anxious, unsettled, and tense because, whether we run or fight, our bodies will need to exert a lot of energy to ensure our survival.
When we are "stressed out", most of us are rarely facing an actual physical threat; we are often just sitting at home on the couch or at our desks at work worrying about things that we have no control over, but our bodies are ready to run or fight for our lives. Unlike animals in the wild, our more evolved brains allow us to trigger the stress response when we aren't actually facing a real danger. Years ago a biologist named Robert Sapolsky wrote a book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, where he explores these important differences between the stress response in humans and other animals. Sapolsky points out that animals in the wild aren't in a constant state of stress. In general, animals live a relatively simple and stress-free life in the present moment. The fight or flight response is only triggered in an animal when it is facing real danger, like a predator. The fight of flight response helps the animal respond to that immediate danger, but then the animal goes back to grazing or whatever it was doing before. For example, a zebra grazing on the savannah is surprised by a lion. The zebra responds to the danger by either running or fighting, and it either escapes or is eaten. If the zebra escapes, it will typically rejoin the herd and just go back to eating. Zebras don't escape from a lion and then go sit in the shade of an acacia tree and worry about the next attack, or how they could have responded better to the attacking lion, or whether the rest of the herd still likes them, they turn off the stress response and return to the business of being a zebra.
Humans are different from zebras and other animals because we have the ability to keep ourselves in the stress response much longer than other animals. Unlike the zebra in my earlier example, we can keep ourselves stressed out for days and weeks at a time! As humans, our brains are slightly more complex than other animals and we can use our brains to relive the past and worry about the future. This means that we can manufacture elaborate alternative realities where we tell ourselves stories about how horrible out past was and how terrible our future will be. In fact, you can stress yourself out right now if you simply think back to a conflict you had at work within the past year, or how you are not prepared for that meeting that you have later today, or by simply thinking about a person that you have had an argument with in the past. Our brains are unique in their ability to manufacture elaborate, often fictional stories, that cause our blood pressure to rise and our stomach to knot up with worry and we have a tendency to ruminate and relive these stories which keeps us stressed out for much longer than our bodies can reasonably handle. In the wild the stress response is vital for survival, but for modern humans the stress response has become a liability and a very real threat to our health and long-term wellbeing.
The dangers and stressors that we face in our day to day lives aren’t lions, tigers, or bears that are trying to kill us; our modern day stressors tend to be more intellectual and less physical, less life-and-death and more existential. We will often say, half-jokingly, that we are “our own worst enemy”, but the truth of the matter is that this is more true than we would like to admit.