Generally curious..
In: Biology
There is a biological phenomenon known in modern psychology as “the mind body connection.” This is what you are talking about.
Your mind is the free floating entity of self-awareness that has thoughts and experiences – which are known as cognitions. These cognitions can be as elaborate as meditating on philosophy or as basic as seeing the color blue. They are the “actions and processes” of the mind. When you sleep and dream, the experiences you are having are being had by the mind – which often does not recall the presence of the body or even the existence of identity in these situations.
The body is the compilation of organs and systems that interact with the physical world and, over time, learn to master that interaction for the purposes of self-preservation and procreation. It has two basic classes of “meat machinery”, automatic systems that do not require intention from the mind and voluntary systems that do. Digestion is an example of an autonomic system that requires no participation from the mind, and motor skills (using a pen, for example) is a system that requires the mind to participate.
There is a sort of “computer network” that handles the signaling between all the organs and systems in the body, it’s the nervous system. It has wiring going all over the body that come back to the spinal cord and up to the brain. This “network” is made up of two basic classes of wiring: the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. These loosely correlate to the voluntary and autonomic systems of the body.
Very loosely put, the parasympathetic system allows “clocking” of these autonomic systems … using the signaling from the brain to tell the organs what to do and when to do them. Generally, this signaling comes in response to external stimuli, and changes to ANOTHER form of plumbing known as the limbic system, which sits at the base of the brain, underneath all the gray stuff, on the top of the spine.
This limbic system regulates the steady processing of all sorts of things going on in your organs, and it also has a means of “signaling” the mind – which seems to interact most readily with other parts of the brain.
Which brings us to the trickiest part of this – which is “where is the mind?” Does it exist as a result of the electrical firings of the big blob of meat inside our skulls known as the brain, does it exist apart from the brain and is merely choosing to experience the brain as a kind of computer monitor to the world (my favorite), or is it an illusion completely?
Well, setting aside debates that are thousands of years old and have spawned most of civilization, let’s just say that there is a lot of physical evidence that the most significant organ related to the mind is the brain itself; when physical things happen to the brain, the mind’s experience changes too – as a result of physical trauma people have experienced all sorts of changes ranging from basic motor function loss to complete personality change. So it would seem that the brain is the place that the mind “connects” with the body – both receiving input from the body (the senses) and giving instructions to the body (eyes track symbols, translate into the experience of spoken words, read sentences; all actions of the mind).
So the limbic system has the power to interact with the mind, as well as signal to the body. It’s primary purpose is to maintain health functions of the body and to trigger rapid changes when needed – eg, when there is a threat of physical danger.
That threat vector is determined by a primary and secondary set of senses. The primary is the core senses – it is a more primal response system – it triggers reflexes that will act before the mind even notices the threat. If you put your hand on a hot stove accidentally, these primal reflexes trigger faster than the elaborate brain process of the mind, which needs to perceive the heat, think about stove, identify ideas for best actions and then decide to move. That’s pretty slow in the reaction to danger world.
The reflexes, however just react – with “heatretreataction” singular signals. Then the mind reacts to that … usually with something akin to “whoa, that was close.”
So the other system monitoring for threats from the outside world is the mind itself.
Some argue that the ONLY purpose of the mind is to monitor for threats, and everything else we perceive and do (music, games, humor, etc.) is just what the mind does to entertain itself while constantly monitoring for threats.
But again, we sidestep the thousands of years of philosophy and just focus on the fact that the mind has just as much right to command the body in response to threat as the reflexes do … but the mind tends to be more focused on long term threat (perhaps a few seconds all the way to years from now) than the immediate reaction time of reflexes. The mind seeks out danger farther away.
So, this process of identifying threats is part of a larger mind process known as PERCEPTION. This is the thing the mind does to turn this letter A into something of a complex idea (cognition) and not just three straight lines. The perception of the mind is what makes your imagination “say” the “A” sound when it sees that symbol. Perception is the mind’s experience of external stimuli.
So, here we are, a billion minds, using the internet to co-exist in a perceptual space that doesn’t actually exist – the internet is pure human perception. Animals don’t even know it exists, for example.
So in this realm, of almost pure perception, are there threats? Can the internet actually reach out and kill you? No … it can potentially cause another human to come and kill you, but the internet itself is not a direct physical threat – but it sure can stress us out, right? Well, that’s the mind-body connection responding to the mind’s process of what’s called “hyper-vigilance.”
Hyper-vigilance is the mind being willing to consider even ambiguous perceptions as threats.
Going back to when we were living in the woods —- if we saw something move in the shadows at night (creepy), our mind didn’t say “I will wait for more information before considering that creepy”, it simply said “that COULD be a tiger, I’m scared.” This hyper-vigilant “semi-perception” is why your ancestors lived and the ones who said “nah, I’m not afraid of spooky night shadow movement” died off. Because even if you’re scared of nothing a thousand times, statistically for the entire human race, sometimes that shadow IS a tiger – and the thousands of false alarms are all worth it for the one time it’s right and we survive the attack.
Now when that perception is right, our mind gets to instantly signal the body and say “warning! Tiger imminent, dump adrenaline! Increase heart rate, tighten all muscles, increase blood pressure, activate full ‘fight/flight/freeze’ mode (the sympathetic nervous response, btw).”
In a moment that is only slightly slower than the reflexes, the limbic system dumps all sorts of things into the body to affect these “readiness” changes, and the nervous system signals the body in a lot of ways to become self-preserving.
This readiness is awesome when the tiger leaps, because that split second of extra readiness lets us jump out of the way and, thanks to evolution and history, draw our sidearm and shoot it. Thus making a rug out of the situation and attracting better mates.
Good thing that mind.
Except for the thousands of OTHER times it falsely senses a tiger. The body is signaled to become ready to jump out of the way… of nothing. So the body doesn’t RELEASE the readiness and sits there, heart racing, muscles tense, waiting for a tiger that never comes – over, and over, and over… all day long.
So hyper-vigilance in the mind leads to a constant state of readiness to perceived threats that never come. We call this stress.
In reality, if you’re holding a phone or laptop, you are a hairless ape, sitting on some furniture on a giant ball of dirt that spins around a giant ball of nuclear fire in a vast empty space. That hairless ape is holding a complicated artifact made of metal, silicon and plastic and staring at it, often for hours at a time.
There is no tiger, just the possibility that there might be – as perceived by your mind. For those of us evolutionary survivors – that possibility is enough to justify stressing us out.
So we sit and stress for no apparent reason – because our mind perceived threats that aren’t there.
How do you address that? Use the OTHER nervous system (the parasympathetic) to return to a state of “bliss” … which is not active joy … it’s peaceful content. You do this by three simple things:
1 – train the mind to accept that if the tiger doesn’t show up in five minutes, vs 2 seconds of actual threat window, there’s no tiger.
2 – use your breath to focus your mind on the actual threat – the stress itself, and breathe into bliss
3 – believe that the threat is gone, and that you will notice it AGAIN if it comes back … you don’t have to monitor it constantly. Let it go, you’re good at this, if it goes bump again, you’ll know. So you can let go of the threat, breathe, and find bliss.
The fancy way for saying all this, just for fun is:
The cognitive processes of the perceptual mind, as a byproduct of hyper vigilance against perceived threats, will utilize the sympathetic nervous system to trigger autonomic responses to the perceived threats that result in an elevated change of state which is identified as stress.
The utilization of intentional parasympathetic responses through deep breathing allows the perceptual mind to release the perceptions of threat and cease perceiving the non-existent threats that generate stress.
Breathe, fellow monkey, after 5 minutes, there’s no tiger.
You know that fight or flight adrenaline rush? Well… stress is like a constant low dosage of that. That’s extremely hard on the body for all the reasons you listed above and more.
It’s forcing your organism to work over its regular 100% capacity – creating a debt: tissues that experience more activity than normal for them, and due to “material fatigue” suffer micro-injuries that must heal, toxins and metabolism products that must be removed and broken down at certain pace, and if you don’t give your body the time to get rid of them their accumulation starts poisoning you, supplies of all kinds of neurotransmitters, enzymes, other such reserves getting depleted and organs running without protections they may provide, body shutting down some, activating other functions in preparation of emergency for much longer than it’s healthy, staying alert and ready to react, losing sleep…
Short stress is a simple way to squeeze more out of the body than it can normally give, to deal with an emergency situation. Followed by rest, it allows replenishing all the supplies, repairing all the damage, cleaning up all the waste products accumulation, and no harm is done. But operating in stress for a long time causes massive wear&tear.
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So if you want to do some research on this, I’d check out Bessel Van der Kolk’s book “The Body Keeps the Score”. It’s an approachable look at how stress, specifically PTSD, manifests and affects people physically.
Simply put, stress triggers a system in our bodies that puts us into fight-or-flight mode. And like any machine, when you put stress on it for a long period of time, it wears down. Think of a set of brakes on a car. Over time, friction wears them away. It’s the same in our bodies. In particular, as certain connections are made in our brains due to stress, and our bodies respond to those connections, the stress reaction becomes our new normal. Constantly living in stress mode strains brain and nerve function.
The book gets more in depth, and is a reasonably short and easy read. It’s also fairly inexpensive; I believe the last copy I bought I found on Amazon for about $15.
None of these responses seem at the ELI5 level. Let me try:
“Stress” is your brain thinking there is a threat and telling your body “do what you have to so you can get through *right now* and we’ll sort it out later.” So your body floods itself with chemicals that it thinks will help you overcome whatever threat the world has thrown at you – this is when people talk about “super human strength” for example.
The goal of this is to fight off a bear or out run another predator. These chemicals that get dumped into our body are highly toxic to us in the long run, but what does that matter if you die to this threat *right now*?
The issue for public health is that your brain is setup for living in the wild and doesn’t know that an unexpected meeting with your boss is not a threat to your life. So now we have a situation where we are constantly dumping toxic chemicals into our bodies for prolonged periods which causes all the problems you mentioned.
High levels of stress trigger cortisol release in ur body, and as you experience prolonged periods of stress that cortisol is constantly flowing. Prolonged cortisol exposure like that actually kills immune cells, thereby weakening the immune system overall and that’s why you become more susceptible to diseases (Also! Ppl can experience stress in different ways, I know personally my stress is felt through my stomach. I lose my appetite and simply cannot eat, and I have to go to the washroom constantly. I notice this happens a lot when I’d be studying for an exam or prepping for a test that day, and then as soon as I’m sitting and writing I literally could feel the stress dissipate and my stomach unclenches and the hunger growls start). Others may experience that familiar chest pain feeling or just overall an unwell feeling. Stress is definitely a killer, it’s about learning to moderate the stressors in your life and working to manage it so it doesn’t run your life!
It’s kind of an evolutionary leftover.
Your stress response is part of your fight or flight mechanism. You come under attack and your body prepares itself to fight or escape: Your heart rate picks up, you breathe harder and faster, your blood pressure increases, your blood stream is flooded with adrenaline… all the things you need to make you more alert, more resistant to pain, able to fight harder or run faster.
The problem is our fight or flight response evolved to deal with physical threats like predators. Short term crises. As cavemen we were born, we hunted and foraged for food, we reproduced and died. Our stress response was perfectly suited to that sort of lifestyle.
Today, most of our stress comes from non-physical factors, things that last way longer than it takes to stick a spear into a wolf or run like hell from a lion… and our stress response can’t tell the difference between being physically threatened and getting an unexpected bill we can’t pay, or worry about losing our job because we heard our company is downsizing.
Basically, think of your body’s stress response as gunning a car’s engine and hitting the NOS. It gives a massive increase in performance, but the engine isn’t designed to take that amount of stress for long periods of time
So bodies and minds constantly work cooperatively and things like stress are an overlapping thing. For example, stress could be primarily triggered by a mental input (say I’m thinking through something and that causes me to realise I’ve got a major problem paying my bills) or a primarily physical input (I see and feel that I am being physically attacked) and in both cases stress (or, more helpful, a “stress response”) is triggered.
{Note that I said primarily because this distinction doesn’t really hold up beyond our own perceptions. I’ll return to this later}
So the stress response, however it is triggered, leads to changes in the hormones in our bodies. These guys are system-wide messages that impact brain and body. To get an idea of what that means, imagine the fire alarm going off in a large building with a good evacuation plan. Everyone hears the same alarm, but people with different roles react differently:
Many workers evacuate via the nearest exit.
The supervisor of each floor dons a hi-vis and sweeps the floor ensuring everyone is out before evacuating themselves.
A disabled worker with a evacuation assistance plan goes to the designated place.
Workers who are have trained in evacuation assistance go there also and assist the disabled worker.
The building manager goes to the alarm panel and analyses where the fire is.
Et cetera. They all hear the same sound but react differently. Likewise, the same stress-related hormone travels all around the body, triggering different reactions in different places. So whatever causes that hormone to be released, the effects will be the same, much like how the initial reaction to a fire alarm will be the same regardless of whether it was set off on first floor, top floor, by an automatic detector or by someone hitting the alarm panel.
So, why does a human have one alarm system in this way, and not a more nuanced reaction? Theres not a perfect answer there, but these are significant factors 1) Until recently, we had no need for it, because anything stressful needed this whole package of reactions. 2) It’s an automated system and there’s only so much you can complicate those anyhow. 3) {And this is back to the earlier point in curly brackets} the mind and body are much more joined-up than we feel like they are, so in reality everything is triggered by a mind/body combo. That realisation about my bills? Sensory input such as reading my bills with my eyes (even if it was at an earlier point in time) gave me the information that I thought through and got stressed about. Realising I was being physically attacked? My eyes and pain receptors only ever provided data, it was my brain that put together that I was being attacked, rather than feeling pain for another reason.
Sorry, I need to ask to clarify and put in simpler terms of what people are saying:
So the “stress” or pain in my chest area is not just me imagining it, but a physical reaction? (I don’t have high blood pressure and heart diseases, yet.)
Ex. When I feel hurt emotionally/breakup, my heart hurts literally.
Ex. When I procrastinate and can’t focus on finishing schoolwork, I feel a clenching feeling in my chest.
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