Stress isn’t the problem. The problem is we don’t know what to do with it.
“Preventing people from moving when something terrible happens… that’s one of the things that makes trauma a trauma.” — Bessel Van Der Kolk, Psychiatrist, Author, Researcher on PTSD
We have forgotten that stress can be good.
Over millions of years of evolution humans have developed and sustained a powerful response to crises, which — although imperfect — has enabled our survival to this day. This response is the stress response, powered by cortisol.
Cortisol is a truly, profoundly, incredible hormone.
Cortisol’s synthesis in acute stress provides us with the necessary, increased energy required to mobilize into action to fight or flee the crises we are presented with.
Once we have used this increased energy and acted upon it then our cortisol levels return to a healthy baseline.
This “using-up” of cortisol is vital to our health as a sustained excess level of cortisol is neurotoxic (i.e. damaging to your brain).
In direct contradiction with this knowledge — the necessity of action in the face of danger — is the way that we are instructed to respond to crises: inaction.
Van Der Kolk, Author of NYT Best Seller The Body Keeps the Score (2015) observed this direction to inaction during Hurricane Hugo in Puerto Rico.
“FEMA officials told everybody to cease and desist until assorted bureaucracies could formally assess the damage, establish reimbursement formulas, and organize financial aid and loans […] People were suddenly forced to sit still in the middle of their disaster and do nothing.”
We are seeing this replay on a grander scale today.
Our world is facing unprecedented levels of crisis-induced cortisol and simultaneously we are instructed to “shelter in place,” “stay home to save lives,” and “lockdown.”
Just as Van Der Kolk observed the reaction to FEMA’s orders as “an enormous amount of violence [breaking] out — rioting, looting, assault.”
Perhaps the physical violence of anti-maskers, increased police brutality, and aggressive racist comments filmed in parking lots and grocery stores is an unhealthy channeling of this excess cortisol.
Ultimately, when cortisol levels increase in response to crises we have a choice: inaction which results in violence and increased neurotoxicity or action that heals and empowers us.
It frustrates me that our societal cortisol levels weren’t directed in a productive way by local government — however — I think that the fact that they weren’t might have contributed to the incredible (and Global) movement we saw galvanize around justice for black people’s lives in response to the public murders of Armaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd — amongst many more. May they all rest in power.
By June 2020, Pew Research Center calculated that over 20 million people had attended racial-justice related protests and for those who were fortunate not to have been victims of police brutality at the protests they were an uplifting and positive experience.
From a neuroscience perspective they certainly felt painful yet healing; to be in community and take action.
It should remind us that in times of stress and uncertainty we need to pull ourselves away from the screen and out into the street. In whatever way makes sense for you.
Helping people, standing up for what you believe in, and taking action.
If we don’t, we risk that stress manifesting in ways which purely exacerbate tensions, reduce our immune response and drive us further from the society we need.
