The Art of Taking It Easy: How to Cope with Bears, Traffic, and the Rest of Life's Stressors

by Brian King

Now let me get back to why our stress response would cause Sarah to suffer body pain and make my eye twitch. One of the things about our fight or flight response is that it represents a short-term solution to a short-term problem.

There are other downsides to long-term exposure, not from what stress increases but from what it suppresses.

If our body is under attack, then it needs all available resources to survive that attack. That means cutting off any irrelevant systems.

What is irrelevant when we are stressed? Well, if we think about this in terms of being attacked by a bear, we can identify a few things. For example, our immune system is not necessary. If we are being attacked, what difference does it make if we catch a cold? Sure, that bear seems dangerous, but I should probably get this cough checked out. Our digestive system can definitely be sacrificed. If we have any food in our stomach, we can probably wait to digest it (or just get rid of it altogether), and if we are being attacked by a bear, we probably don’t want to stop to make a sandwich. Healing from wounds or injuries and repairing the cells of our body are not priorities either. Sure, it is important for our long-term health, but if we don’t survive this current situation there may not be a long term. For that matter, growing and developing our body isn’t important either. Sex drive is definitely not important.

Part of the problem is the simplicity of our body’s stress response. We have lots of different types of stressors, but just a single response system. From your body’s perspective it doesn’t matter if you are being attacked by a bear or have an annoying boss, the response is the same.

We sometimes get a little irritated when we haven’t eaten, or haven’t eaten enough. Hunger is a physical state that can influence our emotions. Hunger and stress are very closely related. I would even suggest that we could think of hunger as a type of stress. From your body’s perspective, hunger certainly threatens its continued existence.

As with being hangry, one of the reasons that stress has such a huge impact on our lives is that it has a direct influence on our emotional state.

Emotions influence behavior, specifically by helping us react in a manner that is appropriate for the moment.

Fear is a negative emotion, and given this perspective, we can see how fear is an emotional response to stress. However, it is not our only possible response. The context of the moment also includes our own thoughts, and depending on what we are thinking we may react differently.

Emotions help restrict the range of potential behaviors our brain will consider. All of them do this to us, even the positive ones.

Negative emotions may have an even stronger impact on our behavior. Have you ever known someone with depression? One of the most difficult symptoms of depression isn’t feeling sad, it is feeling unmotivated. Anxiety has a similar impact on our behavior.

Just as hunger can sometimes lead to crankiness (spell-check recognizes “hanger” but still seems to take issue with “hungappy”), stress can lead to negative emotions.

Some people like to differentiate types of stress, stating that so-called good stress helps energize us to get the job done, meet a challenge, or overcome an obstacle. On the other hand, bad stress causes us pain and misfortune. However, remember that the function of all stress, good or bad, is to help us overcome or escape threat. As far as I am aware, all stress has the same effect on the body. It increases our energy, elevates our heart rate, and pumps the hormones adrenaline and cortisol through our veins.

Consider that whenever we activate our stress response, functional or not, we are inhibiting our immune system and preventing our body from being able to heal.

Don’t get stressed over the piddly, inconsequential events that seem to plague us on a regular basis. In other words, only get stressed when you are faced with a “bear.”

Nobody can tell you what your bears are. Only you can decide what is worth stressing over.

The things that I consider bears include direct threats to my safety and well-being, and the safety and well-being of my loved ones; threats to my livelihood and again those of my loved ones; and maybe threats to valued property.

Have you ever noticed that stress has a tendency to bring out our so-called “bad habits”? Whatever behavior you are actively trying to suppress or change, your inclination to do so seems to materialize immediately during a period of stress.

Whatever behavior your nucleus accumbens thinks is the best option in a given situation has an increased likelihood of being expressed. It isn’t my fault that I went off my diet, my nucleus accumbens just thinks chocolate is awesome (unfortunately, my prefrontal cortex agrees).

Every moment of our lives our brain is analyzing and deciding which behaviors are in our best interest. We aren’t aware of any of this activity because it occurs outside of our prefrontal cortex, but it helps motivate our behavior, and influences our consciously chosen behavior as well.

This change is something we refer to as “neuroplasticity.” It refers to the fact that our brains are capable of structurally changing in order to keep up with the demands of our lives.

The nice thing about neuroplasticity research is that it shows that whatever behavior you wish to change about yourself, you have the capacity to do so. This is why therapy works.

We are notoriously inept when it comes to changing our behavior. Our brain gets used to the tried-and-true behaviors that served us well in the past, and is often resistant to putting forth the effort to acquire new ones. This is why we need therapy.

Interestingly enough, one thing that interferes with our brain’s ability to change is stress. Stress decreases the production of a hormone called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which is needed for neuroplasticity. Even more reason to learn how to get a handle on it.

Resilience is our ability to recover from adversity, to bounce back or return to equilibrium after experiencing an adverse event. It is a major component in coping with and recovering from stressful events.

Recovery time following an adverse event is often used as a measure of resilience.30

Resilience has been shown to be a function of the prefrontal cortex, which I previously mentioned is the part of the brain that we think with.

Psychological resilience is very strongly associated with happiness. If you are happy, you are managing your stress well, and if you are stressed you are probably not happy. It is hard to imagine being stressed and happy at the same time. Both experiences are functions of activity in the prefrontal cortex. However, it isn’t activity in the entire prefrontal cortex that relates to these experiences, but rather when there is more activity on the left side than the right side. When there is more left activity than right activity, people report feeling happy and appear calm. When there is more activity on the right than left, people report feeling stressed, anxious, and worried. In other words, the thoughts that help you cope with stress are the same thoughts that make you happy. Conversely, thoughts that make you happy help suppress stress.

When it comes to happiness, the genetic component is thought to be half. Fifty percent of how happy you are right now is attributed to your genes, about 10 percent is due to your circumstances, and the rest to your behaviors and thoughts.34 Happiness and resilience may be partially genetic, but we have a lot of potential to modify our emotional state.

Resilient people approach life by thinking and planning; they see their problems or adverse events as temporary and/or solvable.

Remember what I discussed earlier: negative emotion can interfere with our ability to think by restricting the range of options that we will consider. Sometimes being able to come up with a good plan requires creative thought, and is better accomplished when we are calm and thinking clearly.

Resilience is a state of mind, an attitude. Just to be clear, resilient people are not in denial. When the problem feels out of control, they get stressed. It just might take a bit longer and a much greater threat to push them over the edge. In other words, they will stress about bears but probably feel fine in traffic.

I bet nobody is suddenly comforted when told to just relax or take it easy in the midst of a full-on episode. Telling someone who is enraged, anxious, or hopeless to just relax could be perceived as dismissive at best, and at worst could stress them even further. Depending on the situation, I usually try to validate the person’s feelings instead.

The time to develop our stress-management skills is not when we are jacked up full of cortisol, that’s when we need to exercise them. We need to work on our problem-solving, planning, and other positive cognitive activities before we find ourselves facing that bear.

Resilient people approach their problems as if they are sitting in a Jeep holding a tranquilizer gun. The brain has connections between the prefrontal cortex and other areas that mediate the stress response, which effectively allows the conscious mind to shut off the stress response.41 It is as if the brain, after assessing the level of potential threat it is facing, suddenly says to itself: “I got this.” When you feel like a problem is something that you can handle, it no longer causes you stress. Again, resilience is an attitude.

It is worth noting too that when we feel in control, all of the negative effects of stress are reduced or eliminated. Feeling stressed is really feeling out of control, to put it very simply. Every stressful situation is really just a situation where the brain does not feel it has any control.

Think about work. Your boss or whatever authority you have to answer to is in control. People worry about world events, potential disasters, economic forces, political changes, being victimized, busted sewer pipes under their newly purchased Montreal condos, and all sorts of other things that they have no control over.

We all feel in control over some situations in our life, and we all have our breaking point. I refer to our stress threshold as the point at which we stop feeling as if we got this and start feeling a bit overwhelmed. I also refer to our stress tolerance as the amount of stress we can handle before being pushed over the edge. Resilience is not an either/or type of construct, but rather one that varies along a spectrum. We all have a limit to what we can handle, but some of us have a higher limit than others.

It is stupid and that is the entire point. The reaction was not a rational one made by the prefrontal cortex after weighing the pros and cons of each alternative course of action. It was a completely irrational response motivated by stress and anger, with the intention of retaliation. Retaliation for nothing happening.

I personally believe that nothing happening is our biggest stressor. Think about all the times you have gotten stressed or angry or upset and it turned out there was no good reason for this. The misunderstandings, the overreactions, and all the worrying over nothing. Nothing is our most common stressor, and it is neither traffic nor bears. It is literally nothing.

When we feel rage over an incident, such as road rage, it is important to reframe our thoughts by examining the actual outcome. We need to learn to react to what actually happened, not what could have happened or what we thought was going to happen. When it comes to our own health and safety, there is no benefit to allowing ourselves to be affected by things that did not happen.

As they say, there’s always money in the banana stand.

I often talk about members of the military as an example of people with a high tolerance for stress, as I imagine they would need to be exceptionally resilient to handle the job. Whenever I do, the image in my mind’s eye is a cross between Rambo, Nick Fury, and Chuck Norris.

serves as a good example of something I mentioned earlier that you may have forgotten: if you don’t like the way you feel, change your thoughts. This is probably one of the best pieces of advice I can share, so it is worth returning to. I felt frustrated and maybe even a little stressed so I took steps to change my thoughts. Sometimes a change in environment or activity is precisely what we need to kick-start different activity in our prefrontal cortex.

Okay, here is your recap: being resilient means having the right kind of activity in the prefrontal cortex so that your amygdala doesn’t react to everything in our world as a potential danger. In other words, being resilient means having the right kinds of thoughts in your head, and those thoughts relate to how well you feel you can handle whatever situation you are facing. I am sure you have heard the phrase “power of positive thinking” or something like that being spewed by so-called motivational gurus, but there really is a kernel of truth to phrases like that.49

One of the reasons that change is so difficult for us is that throughout our lives we have practiced behaviors that were gratifying, rewarding, or easy. Our brains have become accustomed to using them.

Who knows why you react this way—maybe you picked up the behavior after a lifetime of experiences or maybe it was triggered by a single event. Actually, it probably doesn’t matter why you react that way, only that you start actively choosing another reaction. In the same way, it didn’t matter why my ass liked being parked on the couch, only that I started walking it across the street to the gym. It might sound simple, but it is tough, and it is tough to remember to redirect your thoughts day after day after day. A lot of people attempt to make changes like that, and most of them relapse into their previous response, but remember that if Jon can teach his brain to love exercise then you can probably learn to not get so pissed at traffic.

As we head further into adulthood, far too many of us enter into very sedentary lifestyles where we sit at work for about a third of our day, sit in traffic, and then sit on the couch to decompress after all that sitting. Our bodies adapt to this lack of activity and we become flabby and our muscles atrophy. More Rocky Road, less Rocky Balboa.

Everything in the brain works this way; through repeated practice of a behavior, we develop the area associated with that behavior. Similarly, the more we practice resilient thinking, the more we develop the left side of our prefrontal cortex.

In order to change our behavior, we need to: Learn to assess our stressful situations to determine if they are actually threatening and if there is something we can do about them. Learn to redirect our brain away from worrisome or negative thoughts. If simply changing our thoughts doesn’t work, then we can change our environment or activity. Repeatedly practice the behavior we want to exhibit.