This expert breaks down how stress is harming you

Stress is a persistent epidemic – and not just in the current pandemic. Healthline reports that “Americans between 45 and 65 years old are experiencing more stress today than people their age did in the 1990s.”

A study from the American Psychological Association (APA) also noted that “those aged 18-33 years old suffer the highest levels of stress in the nation.”

Stress doesn’t discriminate, and with a broad range of causes, lengths and intensities, stress can overpower even those with the greatest mental fortitude.

Dr. Zach Sapolsky Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, clinical supervisor, and faculty member at the American Institute of Psychoanalysis, is an expert on stress, familiar with both neuropsychological and psychodynamic perspectives.

“I think whatever was distressing or upsetting to people before COVID could become exacerbated by the pandemic,” Dr. Sapolsky begins. “Especially in isolation, our thoughts can become more obsessional, more ruminating… we are social beings, and the more we’re isolated from each other without support, we can develop habits and patterns that can be more maladaptive.”

“I think whatever the go-to methods of coping were before, they’ve been constructed in a time when there are fewer resources,” Dr. Sapolsky says. Whereas we used to have a plethora of options for adaptively coping with stress, in quarantine, many of those activities are currently unavailable.

“Your gym isn’t open, you can’t just go hang out with your friends, and despite connecting through screens, it really doesn’t supplant or replace an in-person connection where you can reach out and hold somebody. We’re seeing much higher levels of substance use and much higher reports of negative or self-destructive thoughts.”

However, according to this expert, stress doesn’t need to be the enemy.

“Stress impacts the brain in a way that’s like a parabola,” Dr. Sapolsky says. “When you have very little stress, you can actually increase your memory, and with a moderate amount of stress, you can perform at a very high level. In an optimal level of arousal, we can be at our peak performance.” But too much of anything – especially stress – can be damaging.

Namely, the way Dr. Sapolsky mentions that we can measure this parabola is with Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome, the famous three-stage system that indicates the various ways that stress manifests biologically. In the first phase, the alarm-reaction stage, Dr. Sapolsky notes that “when we’re really stressed and our sympathetic adrenal system is activated, we get particular neurotransmitters like norepinephrine up and running to prepare us for a fight or flight response.”

“When the hypothalamus tells the pituitary gland to stimulate the adrenal glands,” Dr. Sapolsky continues, “which then secrete hormones like cortisol and other corticosteroids, the body is responding to a stressor to elevate the response.”

And while these neurotransmitters and hormones seem intimidating, especially with nicknames like “the stress hormone,” they can be helpful to give one the energy they need to endure a stressful situation.

Dr. Sapolsky mentions that stress can function as “an alert system to let us know that we need to change something up, that things are getting overwhelming – that’s all part of emotional regulation and overall self-regulation.” Rather than a screeching siren, stress can be more like a friendly tap on the shoulder, or a non-threatening reminder.

“When the stressor continues, as in a chronic stressor like COVID, the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in to bring you back down to homeostasis. But there is no equivalent mechanism for cortisol – the only way that shuts off is when the stressor goes away,” Dr. Sapolsky adds. That phase, where the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in and the cortisol supposedly decreases, is called the resistance phase. And if the stressor never dies down, well, you may just become exhausted.

“Our bodies want to use all that energy that’s made available. And unfortunately, if we’re not using all that energy, we’re just sort of sitting around on Zoom or staring at screens, that unused resources might start to take a toll on us. If stressors are prolonged and become protracted, you have an exhaustion phase. where the body becomes inflamed, and you end up with all the itises – rheumatoid arthritis, colitis, bursitis, all the inflammations.”

Especially during COVID, this has become a prevalent issue; the American Institute of Stress reported that, as of November 2020, “77% of people experience stress that affects their physical health.”

“The long-term effect of stress is that it wears down the immune system,” Dr. Sapolsky adds, “which ironically is the very thing we want to be working at its highest efficiency during a pandemic. It’s not that stress is causing us to have a disease, stress weakens the immune system over time to make us vulnerable to different types of pathogens.”

Psychoneuroimmunology is the field that focuses on the response of the body to disease, and actually has an entire sub-field dedicated to the study of stress.

Exercise, socialization and connection, or other types of healthy coping mechanisms can help manage stress. But Dr. Sapolsky has an unconventional way to combat stress you may not have considered.

“I think that one of the main things we can do is get to know ourselves a bit better. One of the things we often do when we’re stressed out or anxious is that we try to interrupt the wave of emotion because we’re terrified of what it might turn into – our anxiety, our stress is rising, so we jump off that wave by having a drink of alcohol, distracting ourselves with social media, or with our phone.” But these methods of emotional numbing can only make our stress worse.

“It would behoove us in the long run to learn – and this is a very difficult process that we might even need someone like a therapist or a psychologist to help us with – is to learn to sit with ourselves and learn how to contain our anxiety. If we were to become less frightened of our emotions or stressors getting out of control, we could reframe stress as a signal.”

These, Dr. Sapolsky concludes, are the emotional regulation techniques that therapy can help us with.

“Emotions don’t have to be something to run away from, and stress is not something we need to be afraid of. When we can sit with ourselves, what happens eventually is that we build up some self-efficacy or a sense of mastery. Whatever comes up in life, we can handle it using the lessons we’ve learned from prior experiences we’ve had.”