Can Mindfulness Help Stress be Used for Good?

As we learned in the previous blog, our bodies have a built in reaction to perceived threats. Tension builds and we have an enormous storehouse of energy that can be used to fend off immediate danger.

But in today's world of stress, we rarely have the need for the physical strength we accumulate, and unless we physically expend that energy, our bodies remain bathed in chemicals and reactions that can actually cause harm to us in the long run.

How then can we make stress be a force for good in our lives?

  

"How you think about stress matters." ~Kelly McGonigal 

 
In this TED Talk by Kelly McGonigal, Kelly asserts that stress is bad for you only if you think it is so. "When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response to stress."

This is mindfulness in action. In a stressful situation, our body is preparing us to meet the challenge. Increased heart rate energizes the body, rapid breathing oxygenates the blood. These can be helpful for your performance, says McGonigal and I agree. When subjects in a study were told that these were positive signs, they experienced less anxiousness and more confidence. In one study cited, the reaction of constricted blood vessels was not only lessened when the participants had positive beliefs about their body's reactions, but the blood vessels looked like those of humans experiencing joy and courage. This may explain why peak performers of physical endeavors experience a pleasurable high.

McGonigal is clear that it is not healthy for the body to be in a stressed state of being all the time, particularly IF you're NOT seeing the body's response as helpful for the situation. I concur for the reasons stated earlier--our bodies are designed to work off the stress physically and then let go back into a peaceful state of being. Rest in between stressful encounters it critical to allow the body to find healthy balance again.

Where does mindfulness come in? The practice of mindfulness trains us to insert a pause between receiving our experience and responding to it. We learn that we have more freedom to choose our response in any situation--that's far more choice than if we leave it to our instinctual responses.

In the case of a stressful situation at home or work, we can mindfully hold space with the physical response and not feed the excitedness created by the amygdala (the primitive part of the brain where fight/flight/freeze gets activated). This in turn calms the amygdala's reactionary state and increases our access to the pre-frontal cortex region of the brain. This area gives us greater access to our heart-mind, values and wisdom.

Even with taking this conscious mindful pause, we can trust that our body has the capacity, courage and strength to defend us to the best of its ability if we are in real danger. Just notice how quickly you respond to a car or animal swerving in front of your vehicle to know this is true. So we can relax if we're concerned about overriding these reactions at a critical time.

Mindfulness also gives us pause and choice to reevaluate how we think about things. I love how the studies Kelly refers to supports her ideas that how we think about stress changes how stress affects us. To me, this says more about our mind and thinking--what we think makes it so--than about stress, but applying it to stress where the studies reveal this connection and outcome is an important first step.

To me, this understanding about the mind and thoughts supports why conscious intention and conscious understanding of our values and beliefs is so important in co-creating a rich, vibrant, full and meaningful life for ourselves, and why in the courses I teach, I include these aspects almost equally with the compassion-based mindfulness work.

What we think about what is happening in our lives matters and mindfulness gives us more access to not only our thoughts, but the skills to have more choice and freedom in response to those thoughts. In the next post we'll explore how compassion-based mindfulness can support us even further in our working with modern day stress.

In the meantime, we can begin changing our thoughts about stress, inviting stress to become "a powerful driving force" for good in our lives.