Chronic Stress: Why You Can't Switch Off

[00:00:00]Stress is a bit of a vague topic. We all roughly know what being stressed feels like. Sometimes it's a kind of excitement that makes you sharp.

[00:00:08]Sometimes it is like absolutely crushing and it makes you feel helpless. And sometimes it's just a kind of low-level anxiety that's always there in the background. Your body is designed very well to handle stressful situations.

[00:00:20]There's a threat or some kind of danger or challenge and your stress response will get activated. Your heart rate will increase, your blood pressure will increase, you'll become more alert, basically just getting you ready to deal with that threat, whatever threatening situation you're in. So, you deal with the threat and then the stress response stops and you go back to normal. At least that is how it's meant to be in a state of nature. But in the modern world, we switch on the stress response and then often we don't ever get back to baseline. Like we never stand down. We get stuck in this switched-on threat detection state for weeks or months or even years. And this failure to switch off really damages you. The stress itself is not inherently bad for your health. when your stress response is never able to switch off, that is when you have a problem. So, this video is more about restoring your body's ability to switch off, to come back to baseline.

[00:01:08]Let me show you the most important study for this. You have two male rats fight each other for dominance. One of them wins and one of them loses. Now, you would assume that the loser is going to be more stressed, right? But that's actually not the case. When you measure their stress hormones, the peak of their stress hormones is basically identical.

[00:01:25]They're both just as stressed as each other. The difference is in the recovery from that stress. So, the winner comes back down to baseline very quickly and the loser takes about twice as long to get back to baseline. And the loser's body pays the price for that slow recovery. So, pay attention to this, right? We all deal with stressful situations. What we want is a quick spike. We deal with the problem and then we quickly come back down to baseline.

[00:01:50]Not coming back down to baseline is the problem. There's a name for the damage that's done by this chronically elevated stress and that is allostatic load.

[00:01:59]Allostasis means stability through change. So, the body changes things like blood pressure and blood sugar, things like that, to meet the demands in front of you, and that is healthy and normal.

[00:02:09]But, allostatic load is the wear and tear that builds up when these stress systems are activated too often or when they don't switch off. High allostatic load means you won't live as long. We have studies on this. There's about a 22% higher risk of dying from any cause when you have a high allostatic load and 31% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. So, allostatic load is one term that I would like you to remember. Allostatic load is not measured by just one hormone. It is not just cortisol. It's the wear and tear across your whole system, like your heart, your metabolism, immune system, and your brain. So, don't focus too much on just cortisol. What really matters is can your body, as a whole system, stand down once the threat has passed? We humans are unique in that we can a full stress response even when there's literally no threat in front of us. A zebra gets chased by a lion, and its stress response switches on to make it sharper and faster and give it more energy. Then, it manages to escape, and if the threat is gone, it calms down and it goes back to eating grass like nothing ever happened. But, we can be lying there comfy in bed, and we can fire off our entire stress response just with a thought, just by imagining things. There doesn't need to be a lion or a bear in front of us. Like, you can be in the most calm, relaxing, comfy situation and think yourself into an extremely stressed state, and the physiology is the same as when you're facing a real threat, and your brain doesn't know the difference. So, let's cover some of the neuroscience of this.

[00:03:37]When you're not focused on any task in particular, your brain drops into the default mode network. I've spoken about this a little bit before. This is basically the daydreaming or the lost in thought network. The brain activity that you see when you're not really thinking about or concentrating on anything in particular. And for a lot of people, the default mode network is not peaceful or neutral. Their default thoughts are negative, like threatened and anxious.

[00:04:01]And when they try to meditate or just do nothing or just think about nothing in particular, their mind gets filled with like fake scenarios of them getting into fights or getting into arguments or embarrassing themselves or they're remembering their past failures and embarrassments and they're talking negatively to themselves. So just from daydreaming and imagining things, they get themselves into a stressed state.

[00:04:23]And then the stress response itself turns down the prefrontal cortex, which is the brain region that could have stopped this whole negative spiral by imposing some top-down control. So you ruminate on negative situations or you speak harshly to yourself or you remember something stressful, you get yourself all worked up, all stressed, and then that stress makes you less able to snap yourself out of that negative spiral. So a lot of guys can be doing everything right, like working out properly, sleeping well, and eating clean, but if they haven't gotten their minds right, they're still not going to be in good health. The mind is such an important part of the entire health puzzle and it cannot be overlooked. So what actually makes something stressful?

[00:05:03]Well, it's not just how big the stressor is, it is how we interpret it and especially how much control we have over the stressor. Here's another study for you. You can take two rats and give them the exact same electric shocks, like same intensity and timing and everything. But one of the rats has got a wheel that it can turn to stop the shock, and the other has also got a wheel, but the wheel does nothing at all. So they both get the same physical stress, but one of them has control over its situation, and the other one is helpless. And when you examine the rats afterwards, the rat that had control was basically fine, but the helpless rat had bleeding stomach ulcers and it's lost weight and things like that. So the thing that protected the first rat was the fact that it had agency, it had some control and power over its situation.

[00:05:49]And this absolutely applies to humans as well. You might assume that the big executives and CEOs and high-level managers and stuff who have like huge responsibility and they work long hours, you'd think they would be the most stressed and the least healthy. But that's actually not the case. The lower down the hierarchy you are, the worse your health and the higher your risk of dying. And this holds up even when you account for like smoking and cholesterol and blood pressure, all the usual health markers. So, the total like workload and responsibility and difficulty of the job isn't what matters. What matters more is control. Low job control predicted disease. Like if you could be fired any minute or made redundant any minute, that is what damages you. But if you are more secure in your job and you had some control, even if that job was incredibly demanding, your health outcomes tend to be better. So, you should look at your life and see where you feel helpless, where things are like happening to you rather than you being in control of them. You know, your finances, your schedule, your job security, all of that stuff is very important. And if you can claw back some agency and predictability and a sense of control, your health is going to be better. Whether you have control over the stressor is more important than how extreme the stressor is. There's also a big mindset factor in this. If you believe that stress is harmful, it will do more damage to you than if you believe that stress is helpful. If you believe that stress helps you and it prepares you and it makes you sharp and ready for a challenge, that actually changes your physiology. It's like you're willingly facing the challenge rather than being a helpless victim of your circumstances.

[00:07:24]This is something I try to tell people all the time. I want you to advance towards the object of your fear, towards the challenge rather than backing away and shrinking away from the thing that makes you uncomfortable. You yourself should be acting upon the world rather than being acted upon. You should be active rather than passive, advancing rather than retreating, and choosing to face the challenge rather than shying away in favor of comfort. So, not being able to switch off is a real problem, but we can actively build our ability to switch off and recover from stress. I covered a lot of this in my video specifically on cortisol, so that is definitely worth watching after this one. I won't go over all of it here, but a lot of the typical stress relieving interventions like breathwork and meditation, they are actively training your body's ability to downshift on demand, to switch off that stress mode.

[00:08:17]So, the more you practice these, the better you are able to switch yourself off and get into that normal like baseline recovery state rather than being chronically stressed. A good metric that people use to track this is heart rate variability or HRV.

[00:08:29]Basically, a rough measure of how flexible your nervous system is, how good it is at switching from on to off, sympathetic to parasympathetic. You don't need to obsess too much about HRV.

[00:08:40]A lot of people will like obsessively track it, and then they'll get themselves worked up and like worried and stressed when it's not where they want it to be, and that is the exact opposite of what we're trying to do. The single highest leverage thing that you can do to train your off switch is slow breathing, and that sounds very boring, but breathing is a lot more powerful than you might think. Ideally, you should be getting about six breaths per minute. So, long slow exhales, and this rhythm of about six breaths per minute really calms your nervous system down.

[00:09:10]Especially when you're doing dedicated breathwork, this is about the rhythm that you should be aiming for. Now, breathwork and biohacks are all great, but there are some even more important things that are arguably upstream of all of that. Loneliness is a physiological stressor and a very serious one.

[00:09:26]Loneliness is worse for your lifespan than obesity. Loneliness is treated by your body as a threat to your survival.

[00:09:33]Here's a study that illustrates what I'm talking about. They put women in a brain scanner and they warned these women that they might get a mild electric shock.

[00:09:41]So, their brains' threat circuits will light up. And they have three conditions. In one, the woman faces the threat of the shock alone. In another one, she holds a stranger's hand. And in another one, she holds her husband's hand. And when the woman is holding her husband's hand, that visibly quietens down the threat circuitry in her brain.

[00:10:00]And the better their marriage, the bigger that effect. So, your brain treats a trusted person as a resource.

[00:10:06]It offloads some of the work of staying safe onto this other person. So, you don't have to carry the full load of vigilance yourself. We humans are wired to regulate each other. So, when you isolate yourself, you are forcing your nervous system to kind of stand guard all alone all the time. So, you need other people that you can depend on. You also need a sense of meaning and purpose in your life. There's research showing that people who have a strong sense of purpose have a lower allostatic load in the future. So, remember that term from earlier. These people have less physiological wear and tear because they have a strong purpose that keeps them going. For example, there are genes linked to chronic inflammation. And people who are living a life of meaning and service have lower activation of this inflammatory gene pattern. But people who focus on self-pleasure and self-care did not move this genetic needle. So, the thing that quietened that inflammation was pointing outward toward other people. Having a sense of meaning doing something that's bigger and more important than just yourself. And I think that's amazing that we have these biological correlates of basically how well we are like serving other people.

[00:11:15]Just goes to show how much we are social creatures. Our biology responds better when we are aligned with this way of being, when we're living a life of meaning and service to other people.

[00:11:24]We're not meant to spend our life self-soothing and just taking care of ourself. We are meant to be serving others and contributing more widely. And this brings me back to what I said in my cortisol video. Health itself is not the end goal. Health is just what allows you to do the things that are really meaningful. It allows you to go and do something that matters. And it turns out that having something meaningful in your life is precisely what allows you to rest and heal. Okay, let's put all of this in order. Starting as upstream as we can get, we want you to have some control and predictability in your life uh where you've previously felt helpless. You need to take care of your relationships and treat them just as seriously as you treat like your training and your diet and all of that stuff because relationships is just as integral as all of those things for your health. You need to get clear on what your life is actually for. Live a life of service to other people and contribute to something that's bigger and more important than just yourself.

[00:12:22]Next, you can train this off switch, switching off that stress response with things like slow breathing, six breaths a minute. Set aside 5 minutes a day to practice this slow breathing. And also get deep restorative sleep. Then if you're still struggling with stress and cortisol, I really recommend watching my video on cortisol that I made probably about a year ago now and using the targeted tools that I mention in there like the supplements, the specific foods, the adaptogens, all of that stuff. But supplements and biohacks really are kind of patching up the surface wound. If you're lonely, if you don't have a sense of control of your life or a sense of purpose, no supplement is going to fix that. You have to fix those upstream factors in order to fully correct what's going on.

[00:13:07]You need meaning and connection and control. You need some good recovery.

[00:13:12]Then the little nitty-gritty tools and biohacks. And do remember that you're not trying to eliminate stress entirely.

[00:13:19]We don't want you to be fragile like avoiding everything that might possibly spike your cortisol a little bit. Real health makes you resilient. We want you to be able to take the hits and come back from them stronger, antifragile.

[00:13:33]Okay, thank you for watching. I really hope this helped you. Obviously, I haven't covered every component of stress in this video. It's a huge topic, so I'm going to be making more videos on stress in the future. I'll probably make a playlist with all of my videos on stress, so take a look at that. There's lots more for me to go through. Sign up to my email newsletter to get more regular content. I send emails every 2 or 3 days. So, if you want more of my longer-form content in between my video uploads, that is the place to go. That is linked in the description. Thank you for watching, and I will see you in the next one.