Short-Term Stress Reactivity: Why We’re Stuck in Overdrive

Some of us know that feeling so well we seek it out — the base-jumpers, the bull-riders, the NYC bicycle messengers. Others of us hate it but tackle experiences, at times bolstered by prescriptions or otherwise medicated, like cross-country air travel, removing a mouse from a child’s bedroom or climbing a ladder to clean out a gutter in the middle of the rainstorm, anyway.

Then there are those of us who simply can’t do it. We can’t move in the presence of a snake, soil ourselves in minor car crashes (yes, it does happen) or are relieved of all combat duty after our first day in the field, without ever discharging our weapon.

But when it comes to understanding the myriad of financial stressors impacting almost everyone, in some form or another, we’ve come to realize there’s little information available.

The Start of Acute Financial Stress

Two weeks ago, we released the results of our national survey that found nearly 1 out of 4 Americans have a condition we termed Acute Financial Stress (AFS). In short, AFS is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) induced by financial stress and trauma. Over this and the next couple of posts, I’ll describe the working of the human stress system as it likely relates to financial stress.

I find the human stress system so blazingly interesting because it not only involves some of the most primitive parts of our brain and our basic animal survival instincts, but also disorders of stress reactivity almost universally involve brain structures responsible for the most advanced cognitive processing humans can perform. But as we’ll see, the reptilian brain and the prefrontal cortex — the area of the brain capable of feeling gratitude, enjoying the music of Mahler and capable of striving for a better world — not only perform entirely separate functions, but also can co-opt each other with the end result being the perpetuation of an increasingly dysfunctional condition.

For me, it’s giving a lecture in front of more than 10 people.

I always feel my heart rate increasing and my blood pressure rising before I start a talk of any importance. But I’m okay with that feeling — I even kind of enjoy it. However, when the lecture gets into full swing, I feel my body on the verge of playing some real tricks on me.

I blame it on a time in sixth grade when I had to recite “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer, which, in and of itself, was not a difficult task for me. In fact, I regularly memorized several chapters of scripture at a time. So, the verbal learning circuits were fully intact. But for whatever reason, this shy, socially awkward Mennonite farm boy found the whole scene a little much. My vision turned into a tunnel, my mouth became as parched as a desert and my voice cracked on almost every word.

What amazes me most about that experience is how it has somehow managed to adversely affect me to this day. I rarely get through a lecture longer than 15 minutes without feeling my mouth go totally dry and my field of vision start to narrow. This is a situation where there is absolutely no realistic threat to me. Yet my brain has somehow been altered so I interpret the situation as stressful and my body starts to react like the audience is a streak of tigers.

Fortunately, I have been able to train my pre-frontal cortex to know I need to keep a bottle of water close by to avoid any Marco Rubio-type dives across the podium for water, and I’ve learned other tricks like making eye contact with someone who is highly engaged in the content to help me counter my automatic stress reaction.

What Stress Does

That example brings to light one of the most interesting aspects of stress, which is it does not require an external event to be initiated. In fact, it’s entirely possible for people to not only experience a stress response cycle solely in response to one’s own thoughts, but it also appears possible that significant stress disorders such as PTSD could develop without any identifiable physical threat or injury. The fact that stress can be generated from such a wide array of physical and psychological events and processes adds to the complexity of understanding this already complex system.

The stress response cascade is amazingly similar from person to person. This cascade — perhaps better described as an orchestration of hormones, many increasing exponentially, others all but disappearing — is probably the most dynamic physiological event humans experience outside of pregnancy.

And so many physical changes follow — tunnel vision enhances distance sight, heart rate increases, blood pressure spikes, glucose uptake increases and appetite is lost — all to save energy and put all available resources into use. And while our brain becomes primed for rapid, immediate processing, our prefrontal cortex, with all its high-level cognitive skills, is taken offline a bit. After all, when the bear is tracking you, philosophical arguments, unless transformed into clubs, count for nothing.

Yet when the bear decides it’s time for a nap, in most instances, not only does our body quickly and completely return to homeostasis, there are some people for whom stressful experiences can enhance their physiological robustness. This is not a trivial point. The fact that stress can be beneficial holds many clues for each of us.

In addition to understanding how the stress response cycle can be positive, it’s even more relevant to understand that each of us can do things to build up our response cycle when we’re not stressed out. This is, in fact, one of the most useful definitions of resilience — anything we do that makes it more likely we’ll be able to completely return to homeostasis in a timely manner the next time we face a major stressor. That’s where we are headed.

But not right now.

Financial Stress in 2016

Financial stress is primarily of the internal type.

Apart from verbally assaultive bill collectors and those situations where one’s financial situation is so dire the inability to provide food and shelter becomes a reality, most of us find our financial stress to be internal. And for a long, long time we find ways to ignore what we know is going on. After all, who really believes that taking out a new credit card with a 0% balance for the first three months and putting a couple of high-interest cards onto the new one, while not changing our income or expenses is going to magically change our long-term financial situation or our financial behaviors?

As financial difficulties build up, our avoidance so often increases at an equal amount. The juggling of credit cards, the concern about paying taxes, the worries about just getting the gas bill, the rent/mortgage, the kid’s clothes. Oh, forget it, please.

These never-ending stressors are relatively new phenomena for Americans. There certainly was no equivalent before the advent of credit cards. But the effect is devastating on our psychological and physical health. We all undoubtedly recognize that the severity of stressors differs hugely from what a warfighter experiences in a combat situation, but the unremitting constancy of stress when we are underwater financially is identical.

Just as the Marine never knows when and where there will be incoming fire requiring 24/7 vigilance, middle-class American in 2016 are worried each day about keeping the bills under their minimum with little or no assurance that if something goes wrong — the car needs expensive repairs, there is an uncovered medical bill, etc. — the house of cards will crash and our nightmares of homelessness and destitution will become reality.

This life never allows for the stress response to go back to homeostasis. Instead, the person lives with their stress hormones in overdrive, with the result being repetitive nightmares, irrational avoidance of financial decisions and loss of the ability to experience emotional intimacy, with immediate negative consequences. And these are just the short-term effects. The long-term ones, as we will discuss in a later post, are even more pernicious.

We Weren’t Meant to Live This Way

I’m proposing the first step for each of us is to commit to a journey of self-understanding and growth. How this relates to bringing down a hormonal stress system stuck in overdrive will become apparent quite quickly.

Humans were never meant to live under this constant stress. Our system responds marvelously to real threats, provided the threats are resolved in a timely manner.

But thanks to a financial service industry that has become solely focused on maintaining an ultimately unsustainable level of growth, our basic survival needs have become lost in their algorithms. But none of us are without power, especially if and when we work together.

But that’s a rant for another day.