Why Thoughts Can Trigger the Stress Response

I want you to close your eyes and imagine your favourite meal.

Remind yourself of the colours, the textures.

Think about the taste.

For a few moments, imagine that food is sitting in front of you waiting to be eaten.

Your body was ready and waiting to devour every single morsel.

You may even have noticed, your mouth begin to water. 

What you've just experienced is the mind-body connection.

Your mind has a thought and your body reacts.

The Body Responds to What the Brain Perceives

When we're thinking of what we're having for lunch, that imagination is harmless but what about when we're thinking about ...

the annoying colleague

the meeting that didn't go so well

explaining it all to the boss tomorrow

The principle is similar.  A thought can create a physical reaction.  When the brain perceives something as threatening, it prepares the body to deal with it. 

And that solution is the stress response. 

Our heart rate increases and our muscles tense up as the stress hormones mobilise us to act.

This makes perfect sense when the threat is happening in front of us.

But human beings have an extraordinary ability that complicates things slightly.

We can think about things that aren't happening.

We can remember yesterday's argument while making breakfast. We can imagine next week's presentation while lying in bed. We can anticipate a difficult conversation that may never actually take place.

And those thoughts can come with emotion.

The situation may exist only in our mind, but the physical sensations accompanying it can be very real.

The Brain Is Working With Information

We've all glanced at our emails out of hours.  Somehow, we think it will put our minds at rest.  But what about this subject line from our manager:

"Can we have a quick chat tomorrow?"

That's all it says.

Five minutes ago you were having a perfectly ordinary evening but now your mind is consumed with possibilities:

Have I done something wrong?
Is something about to change?  even... 
Am I losing my job?  

Nothing of any significance has actually happened, the brain is literally filling in the gaps.  And when there's information missing, our brains have a tendency to err on the side of caution.  

Your manager may want to

congratulate you, 

ask your opinion or

discuss something completely mundane.

But the brain doesn't have that information yet.

It has uncertainty, previous experience, memories and imagination. From those ingredients it begins constructing possible futures.

And if one of those possibilities feels threatening, the body begins to prepare for it. 

We don't have to be in any real danger to experience a stress reaction.  For our brain, perception is good enough.

Yesterday Can Have a Similar Effect

Yes it happens in both directions.

Instead of worrying about tomorrow, we can travel back in time to replay what's already happened.

Maybe someone was abrupt with us in a meeting.

It left us feeling embarrassed or angry.

The meeting ended, life moved on, but we are still back in the room.

We replay the words.  We picture their face.  We even think about what we should have said.

The memory hasn't changed what happened earlier that day, but remembering it has changed what we're experiencing now. 

Before we know it, we're irritated all over again.  And that irritation, is the stress response in action.

The power of thought is interesting.  A thought becomes so much bigger when it carries enough meaning or emotional baggage to alter what the body is doing.

This Doesn't Mean Thinking Is the Problem

Perhaps the solution is to stop thinking about difficult things.  

Apart from being almost impossible, that's not a useful approach.

We need to be able to remember; to anticipate problems, and to learn from experience.

We need to be able to plan and to make sense of what happens.

Thinking is a powerful tool, but sadly it's a terrible master. 

Thinking becomes unhelpful when the mind repeatedly presents the body with the same threat long after thinking has stopped helping.

It's something I explored in Why We Replay Conversations. Sometimes the mind continues searching because there isn't a satisfactory answer. It's searching for a sense of certainty that life simply doesn't provide. 

And while that search continues, so does our emotional and physical experience of the problem.

When the Situation Ends but the Stress Doesn't

This helps explain something that can otherwise feel puzzling.

Sometimes we're exhausted by a day that, on paper, doesn't look particularly exhausting.

Perhaps nothing dramatic happened.

But we spent the morning anticipating something difficult, the afternoon dealing with it and the evening thinking about what happened.

That one event occupied an hour of physical time, but how much mental time did it absorb?

Stressful situations have a beginning and an end. Our thinking doesn't necessarily follow the same timetable meaning Stress Lasts Longer Than It Needs To.

Awareness Gives Us Somewhere to Intervene

Luckily we don't have to try and control every thought we have.

What helps is becoming more aware of our thinking, so we begin to notice the moments when our thoughts are creating an experience we no longer need to have.

 Perhaps we notice we're rehearsing tomorrow's conversation for the tenth time.

Perhaps we realise our shoulders have tightened while remembering something from yesterday.

Perhaps we simply catch the mind returning to a problem that, for now, cannot be solved.

That awareness doesn't make the thought disappear.  But it does give us an opportunity to decide whether we want to continue engaging with it.

And that distinction can make a huge difference. 

Because we may not always be able to change the situation that caused our stress, but we can learn to recognise when our own thinking is keeping us connected to it. 

That's one of the principles behind the Stress Interruption Method: learning to notice those patterns earlier, interrupt them when they're no longer helpful and give the mind and body the opportunity to move on.

Stress is part of life. Living in it doesn't need to be.