Session 5: Stress & Thought

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. 

—Viktor E. Frankl

Stuck in Stress Reactivity

Human being are actually remarkably resilient to stress. One way or another we manage to persevere, to survive, and to have our moments of pleasure, peace, and fulfillment. We are expert copers and problem solvers. We cope through prayer and religious beliefs, through involvements and diversion that feed our needs for joy and belonging and for stepping outside of ourselves. 

At the same time, however, our physiological-psychological balance, stable disorder that it is, can be pushed over the edge into disregulation and disorder if it is taxed beyond its limits to respond and adapt. Health can be undermined by a lifetime of ingrained behavior patterns that compound and exacerbate the pressures of living we continually face. Ultimately our automatic reactions to the stressors we encounter determine in large measure how much stress we experience. Automatic reactions, triggered out of unawareness, usually compound and exacerbate stress, making what might have remained basically simple problems into bigger ones. They prevent us from seeing clearly, from solving problems creatively, from expressing our emotions effectively when we need to communicate with other people, and ultimately they prevent us from attaining peace of mind. Instead, each time we react, we stress our intrinsic balance even more. A lifetime of unconscious reactivity is likely to increase our risk of eventual breakdown and illness. 

Nowadays, most of the time, we do not find ourselves encountering life threatening situations in civil society and everyday life. We are not running into mountain lions or other threats as we go to work or deal with family life and social situations. But we are still prone, if not hardwired, to go into fight-or-flight mode when we feel threatened or thwarted in our goals, feelings of safety, or sense of control even if we’re just driving on the freeway or walking into work and finding something unexpected that we are going to have to deal with. Our minds still perceive events in terms of mortal threats to our well-being and sense of self, even when there is none. When we go that route, then every stressful situation, even if it is potentially manageable in countless other ways, becomes a threat to the system. Our fight-or-flight pathways no longer shut down, even when there is no life-threatening situation. They can become chronically activated. And when they are, they change our biology as well as our psychology. We become primed, so to speak, for all the problems associated with chronic hyperarousal, right down to the level of which genes in our chromosomes get turned on and upregulated, such as the gene for the glucocorticoid receptors that make us chronically susceptible to stressors, and the genes that produce proinflammatory cytokines, which themselves promote a whole range of diseases of inflammation if chronically stimulated. Chronic arousal also shortens our telomeres, and thus accelerates the aging process at the cellular level. All of these consequences of chronic arousal may be avoidable, or at least reducible and ultimately resolvable, if we learn how to recognize the tendency to go directly into a full-blown stress reaction and modulate it with a more mindfully based response. 

Responding to Stress (vs. Reacting)

By definition, stress reactions happen automatically and unconsciously, even though, as we have seen, many different, highly evolved, integrated, and useful cognitive processes may be at play beneath the surface of our awareness. Still, as soon as you intentionally bring awareness to what is going on in a stressful situation, you have already changed that situation dramatically and opened up the field of potentially adaptive and creative possibilities just by virtue of not being unconscious and on automatic pilot anymore. You are now committed to being as present for it as you can be while the stressful event is unfolding. And since you are an integral part of the whole situation, simply by holding whatever is happening in awareness, you are actually changing the matrix of the entire situation even before you do anything overt, such as take action, or even open your mouth to speak. This interior shift to embrace what is unfolding in awareness in the present moment can be extremely important, precisely because it gives you a range of options for possibly influencing what will happen next. Bringing awareness to such a moment takes only a split second, but it can make a critical difference in the outcome of a stressful encounter. In fact, it is the deciding factor in whether you go down the path of the “Stress Reaction” in Figure 10 or whether you can navigate over to the path of the “Stress Response.” 

Let’s examine how you would do this. If you manage to remain centered in that moment of stress and recognize both the stressfulness of the situation and your impulses to react, you have already introduced a new dimension into the situation. Because of this, you neither have to react automatically with your usual habitual patterns of emotional expression, whatever they are, nor do you have to suppress all your thoughts and feelings associated with heightened arousal to prevent yourself from going out of control. You can actually allow yourself to feel threatened, fearful, angry, or hurt and to feel the tension in your body in these moments. Being conscious in the present, you can easily recognize and identify these agitations and contractions for what they are: thoughts, emotions, and sensations. 

This simple momentary shift from mindless reaction to mindful recognition of what is unfolding inwardly and outwardly can reduce the power of the stress reaction and its hold over you. In that moment, you now have a very real choice. You can still go the route of the stress reaction, but you no longer have to. You no longer have to react automatically in the same old way every time your buttons get pushed. You can respond instead—out of your greater awareness of what is happening, and the larger perspective and new options and openings that frequently accompany an expanded perspective, as with the puzzle of the nine dots 

This inner response would be an awful lot to ask of ourselves in a stressful situation if we had the expectation that awareness and centeredness should just come out of nowhere whenever we needed them or that we should simply be able to will our mind and body to be calm when they are not. But in fact, through the formal meditation practices, we have been training our mind and body to respond in this way all along, developing and deepening these very qualities. You have probably experienced any number of small emotional and cognitive reactions, including impatience or annoyance, at places in the body scan, for instance, or in the sitting meditation, or in the mindful yoga. Practically speaking, only through regular training to develop the “muscle” of mindfulness could we possibly hope that our calmness and awareness would be strong enough and reliable enough to assist us in responding in more balanced and imaginative ways when we find ourselves in stressful situations. 

Breath Practices

While these breath practices can be used anytime, they are particularly helpful in the moments of high stress, when we are stuck in stress reactivity. 

Ujjayi (ooo-jay-ee) breathing

To get the feel of the ujjai breath, open your moth and whisper "aaaah" as you breathe in and out slowly. You will notice a light constriction in your throat, which produces the sound. Now close you mouth, breath through you nose if able, and reproduce that sound, both as you inhale and as you exhale. Hearing the breath will help you to monitor it. Keep it slow, smooth, and deep. An added benefit is that the ujjayi breath has a strengthening effect on the bronchial system. 

Double breathing

Inhalation is broken into two segments: the first one is a long, deep inhalation through the nose if possible. Once your lungs are almost full take a short sniff to fill your lungs completely. The exhale is also two-part: exhale through your open mouth, saying in a audible whisper, "Ha-haaaaaah." About half-way through the exhale you will begin actively pushing the breath from your lungs all the way to empty. There may be some effort involved on the second part of the outbreath.