The insidious impact of stress on your clear thinking!

Understanding the difference between stress & eustress

Let’s look at an example.

Think about working out.  If you’ve set a goal to get stronger, you need to add weight bearing activities to your exercise routine.

Let’s first imagine you add in weights that are enough to tax your muscles during each rep, but not so much you can’t maintain form throughout your workout.  Each time you use these weights, you create micro tears in your muscles.  You then feed your body the nutrition it needs, offer it rest, and as those micro tears are repaired, your muscle gets stronger.  Over time you’re able to life more and more weight.

Boiled down to the basics, you need to put your body under some stress (in this case eustress) in order to get stronger.

Now imagine you walked into the gym and saw someone deadlifting 100 pound plates.  Chances are trying to start your exercise routine with something like that will result in tearing muscle or ligament, a major injury that will take A LOT of time to heal from.  Perhaps you’ll need surgery.  And you definitely won’t be back at the gym any time soon.

In this case, by not listening to your limits, you’ve crossed the line into distress and caused damage to your body.

So how do you know the difference?

In my yoga classes, I tell students that if the sensation is dull, broad, or achy, they’re probably right at their edge and it’s safe to hold that pose. However, if the sensation is sharp, pinching, or painful, they’ve gone too far and need to back out of the pose.

Now let’s take this off the mat and out of the gym. Hosting live webinars is something that always makes me nervous. It’s outside my comfort zone, and I always worry about the technology doing something crazy.

And yet, I continue to show up and host live webinars and workshops. I experience eustress leading up to the workshop – I’m stepping out of my comfort zone, but in a way that helps me learn and grow. By the end of the session, the metaphorical micro-tears in my comfort zone have been filled in with newfound confidence!

Key characteristics of stress & eustress

This distinction between eustress and stress can be applied in all aspects of your life.  Here are a few things to look for when you’re distinguishing eustress from stress. 

Eustress is short-term, stress is often chronic or habitual.  Additionally, eustress is marked by moderation while stress is often extreme, or something you might label as “too much”.

Eustress is a positive challenge where you can see a direct tie to something that will help you learn and grow.  Stress is connected to something that threatens us.  A few days after a eustress experience, you’ll be able to identify some way in which it’s enhanced your life.  A few days after a stress experience, you’ll feel like it’s had a negative impact on your life.

So if you came into this episode thinking stress was a good thing, do a quick review – were those situations and experiences that have helped you stress, or are they actually eustress?  While both will create a physiological stress response in the body, the outcome is really different.

Which leads us to the conversation about your nervous system. 

The role of your nervous system in the stress response

When you get stressed whether it’s because you’re in an actual life or death situation, or you’re running late for work your body responds the same way.  Our technology has evolved MUCH faster than our physiology, so your nervous system reacts to all stress as if you were coming face to face with a hungry bear or lion who wanted to make you dinner.

Your fight, flight, or freeze response

When you get stressed, it triggers your body to shift into a sympathetic nervous system response.  This is a great place to be if you’re in a life or death situation.  It’s often referred to as the fight, flight, or freeze response.  Your resources move to your extremities to prepare you to physically protect yourself.  Your heart and respiration rates increase, and your body is flooded with stress hormones that give you an advantage in physically difficult situations – think of stories of a mom lifting a car off their child. 

BUT, in order to mount this response, your body needs to divert resources from systems it views as less essential. That means it sidelines your digestive, reproductive, and immune systems among others.  If you get eaten by the bear or a lion, it doesn’t really matter if you finish digesting your lunch.  And if you escape the danger, you can digest once you’re safe. 

The impact of stress on your brain

All of this explains what happens physically and why chronic stress can be so unhealthy, however, today’s question is about clear thinking.  

So let’s talk about the impact of the stress response on the brain.  During sympathetic nervous system response – your fight, flight, or freeze response, the logic and reasoning centers of your brain go off-line and your amygdala – the fear center in the brain – starts running the show.  

Your amygdala responds based on instinct and it’s sole goal is your survival.  It isn’t interested in helping you thrive, but is happy to have you merely survive. 

What this means is that when you’re stressed, you’re actually LEAST able to think clearly. 

So if you’re looking to improve your mental clarity, the answer is to stress less.  But I know when you’re already stressed, the idea that you need to simply “stress less” can actually ADD to your stress, not reduce it.

And the last thing I want to do is add more stress to your life.  So let’s talk about tools and techniques you can incorporate into your day to reduce your stress and help you get to that goal of thinking clearly.

Using your nervous system to enable clear thinking!

Let’s go back to your physiology.  In optimal conditions, once you escape the bear or lion and are safe, your body shifts out of the sympathetic and into the parasympathetic nervous system.  This is your rest and digest mode.  

In the parasympathetic nervous system state, you see the reverse of what happened during the sympathetic nervous system response – your stress hormones decrease, heart and respiration rates slow, resources get pulled back to the digestive, reproductive, and immune systems, and your logic and reasoning center in the brain comes back online.

So if we want to be in tip top shape for mental challenges, it becomes clear we need to be in the parasympathetic nervous system state – or rest and digest.  However, just like saying stress less isn’t really actionable, you also can’t just decide to shift your nervous system.