Mind
over Matter:
All Stressed Up with No Place to Go
by Dr. Ellen Kirschman
Part I:
Our bodies are hard-wired since caveperson days when we were prepared to fight or flee at the first sign of a saber-toothed tiger or a malicious mastodon. Our sympathetic nervous system is truly sympathetic; when we perceive fear, it perceives fear; when we are angry, it gets angry too. The result is a reordering of our bodily priorities - our heart speeds up, blood is diverted to our extremities, we stop digesting food, we stop healing, and over the long haul our immune system actually breaks down. Trouble is, when you live your life like every thing is an emergency, you are in perpetual Code 3 mode, halting the bodily maintenance you need to stay healthy.
Much of our stress response is within our conscious control about 10% of stress comes from life and 90% from our attitude. Placebo studies where there is an intervention with no active chemical ingredient, consistently demonstrate that we can believe ourselves sick and we can believe ourselves well. People who are given a sugar pill get better because they believe they are receiving potent medicine. Placebo pills produced effects that were 75% as effective as the active drug given to the control group. People in "wait list" or no treatment groups made no improvements at all.
Even rats know about this. Rats get ulcers and rats have stress. (Hans Selye, the father of stress research had laboratory rats that were stressed to the max because he was such a poor rat handler and dropped them all the time). Classic research on rats has shown that perceived control, perceived improvement and having a pal in the cage can have profound positive impact on stress reactions. It's a case of mind over matter.
Our brains create our experiences. Our habitual ways of thinking literally lay down pathways in our brain creating distinctive patterns of brain activity that are as relevant to our daily health as are physical causes. We think in stories. Stories create reality and make sense of what happened to us. They are easy to remember and intuitively appealing to the oldest parts of our psyches - intuition. Stories last, even if they are totally wrong, they "stick". Law enforcement is a story culture, "war stories" are the main vehicle for passing on information and connecting to each other. Telling our stories, even just writing them down, may lead to a variety of health benefits.
Positive endings and stories of struggle and redemption are uplifting. Optimism protects us from depression whereas pessimism promotes it. People who can find the positive in negative life events show supervisor psychological and physical functioning over time. Here are some guidelines for creating positive endings to the stories you tell yourself or tell others, or for writing them down.
1. Ask yourself "What have I gained from this experience?" "How am I better person because of it?" What strengths have I learned from this experience?" Even for events that seem irredeemably bad, ask, "how is this experience a part of who I am now?"
2. Leaving a legacy is a happy ending e.g. "I won't let the bad thing that happened to me happen to others".
3. Be careful how and where you attribute responsibility for life events. Optimists explain negative life experiences very specifically: they attribute the bad stuff to things outside themselves and credit them with their successes. (This is very different from the egotistical type who NEVER does anything wrong. Happy people are not stupid people; they can give and take negative information when something isn't working).
4. Use comforting fictions. It is good to sometimes fudge a bit in our assessment of ourselves. Law enforcement professionals are often very hard on themselves and have unrealistically high standards.
5. Explain, but don't explain away. Stories are how we create meaning and make events personally important.
6. Look beyond the negative. What can you learn from positive life experiences?
7. Share your story. Isolation and rugged individualism are correlated with poor health outcomes.
Stay tuned for Part II. "The Greatest Stories Never Told"
The material for this article was adapted from a seminar presented by Dr. Laura King, Assoc. Professor of Psychology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas entitled the "Power of Belief".