Closing the stress cycle
Stress is a fact of modern life, but the last year has been something else. When stress is unavoidable, what are we to do?
Nearly everyone has been enduring chronic stress of unimaginable levels. And like many, last year I started to feel the pressure physically.
The stress of a newborn, stress of figuring out school for a kindergartner, stress of running a startup, stress of political unrest and being gaslit by the government, stress of wildfire smoke streaming into our apartment, stress of living 5,000 miles from my family during a global pandemic… And while I didn’t have to worry about where we’d get food or whether we’d have a roof over our heads, my blood pressure rose to unhealthy levels.
Stress is a psychological response that triggers physiological changes within the body. It operates at the intersection of mind, body, and microbiome — a painful reminder of how interconnected our bodies are. For our ancestors, stress served a legitimate purpose: it was a powerful motivator for survival, helping them avoid the physical threats of a wild world.
While this fight, flight, or freeze instinct still helps us avoid the occasional dangerous situation, these chemical changes that prime our body for action are rarely proportionate in modern life. The problem is that our brains can’t differentiate between something that’s a real and present danger and a perceived threat that will never actually materialize as an acute physical danger.
We’re left with this soup of chemicals coursing through our veins, and nowhere to vent them.
The traditional advice is to work to remove stressors; to try and structure your life such that your body isn’t triggered into reaction. But how is that possible when so many things in the modern world are out of our control? We can sometimes reduce stressors, but we can’t really eliminate them.
The other piece of advice is to embrace mindfulness techniques such as meditation. These practices are valuable and can help attenuate reactions and calm the amygdala — the part of the brain responsible for stress response — but again, this isn’t a cure-all.
The trick, as outlined in Drs. Amelia and Emily Nagoski book Burnout, isn’t to try and eliminate stress entirely — or to become an unflappable zen-master — but to ensure you complete the stress cycle. You don’t need to wait for all the stressors to go away before you can feel better. But at the same time, if the stressors do go away you can’t expect to just feel better, you still have to address the stress that remains; like downed trees after a storm.
Early on when I was working on Gmail, the two week on-call rotation was notoriously stressful. We were struggling to push releases out, and scaling to 10s of millions of users was putting pressure on the infrastructure. It was a running joke (a bad joke) that after your rotation you’d get horribly sick. While the stressor had been removed, we weren’t dealing with the stress in our bodies, so we crashed. We weren’t completing the stress cycle.
The most efficient way to close the stress cycle is physical activity. Walking, running, cycling, dancing, whatever. The second most effective method is breathing exercises. Box breathing, for example, allows CO2 to build up which stimulates the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic system, producing a calm and relaxed feeling. And the third way is positive social interactions and laughter.
For me, the takeaway from learning this have been two-fold:
- Given that stressors are unavoidable, being intentional about how I structure and plan my week, such that I have regular outlets for accumulated stress. Embracing windowed work, biking Lyra to/from school, and making time for hot baths have been key.
- Be more aware of the tension I’m sitting with. Feel the tightness in my chest and jaw that indicates that while a stressor may have been removed, my body is still holding the stress. And when I feel this, make time to go for a run.
These changes have (so far) managed to keep my blood pressure down, even as parenthood, startup-life, and pandemic-life remain challenging.
“The good news is that stress is not the problem. It’s how we deal with stress — not what causes it — that releases the stress, completes the cycle, and ultimately, keeps us from burning out. You can’t control every external stressor that comes your way. The goal isn’t to live in a state of perpetual balance and peace and calm; the goal is to move through stress to calm, so that you’re ready for the next stressor, and to move from effort to rest and back again.”
— Excerpt from Burnout
