Tina: Okay, so what do I have to do today? There's that paper I
have to submit. Have I heard back from the funding
application I sent last week? I'm hungry? Wait, have I eaten
today? Why is it so spooky outside? Okay, I have to submit
the paper. I need to respond to my students email- I need to set
up a meeting with Jessie— I need to find funding— I wonder how
Chadwigs doing— Why hasn't he called me? Did I remember to pay
that credit card? I really hope no one schedules a meeting with
me today because it's definitely a camera's off kinda today.
WILL, YOU PLEASE SHUT UP! Damn. Why am I so stressed?
It's because my body is trying really hard to keep me alive
whenever I encounter things that might be dangerous. Scientists
call these stressors. And these can be in our immediate
environment like seeing a bear or nearly getting run over by a
car. But they can also be abstract threats like a looming
deadline. Our body is so primed to identify and avoid stressors
that it sometimes makes a mountain of molehill, and it can
happen in an instant. Stressors disrupt your body's normal
functions. Every second of the day, your body is trying to keep
all of your biological systems perfectly stable and at all
the right internal settings. To do this, your body is
continuously balancing levels of hormones such as cortisol,
adrenaline and noradrenaline. However, these default settings
are thrown completely out of the window when we get stressed.
When we get upset over an ominous email, or when we worry
about how we're going to pay the bills, that sensation of stress
is because our body is sending some settings way up and others
way down. These changes are all thanks to two systems: the
fast-SAM response and the slow-HPA. The fast response
comes from our sympathetic adrenal medullary system, aka
our SAM system. When we're under short term stress, our
hypothalamus the area of our brains usually responsible for
keeping our body setting stable, sends hormones activating our
autonomic nervous system. The nervous system sends a message
all the way down to the center of your adrenal glands,
activating the adrenal medulla. The adrenal medulla then emits a
bunch of norepinephrine and epinephrine, hormones that
quickly circulate throughout your body. In response to these
hormones, your body increases its blood pressure, heart rate,
muscle blood flow, energy consumption, and more. What does
this all mean? Well, it means that when you encounter stress,
you should immediately feel more alert; have increased attention;
increased cognition; and increased physical capacity.
While SAM works fast, the second system is slightly slower. This
is the hypothalamic* pituitary adrenal or HPA system. When a
stressor is identified, your hypothalamus sends a signal to
your pituitary gland. The pituitary then releases a
hormone that targets a different part of your adrenal gland. You
may have heard of cortisol, you can think of it as your body's
alarm system and its main stress hormone. It increases your blood
sugar, suppresses the immune system, and it helps in breaking
down fat, protein and carbohydrates to mobilize
energy. When it comes down to it, cortisol and the other
hormones released by the HPA during stress spread across the
body to conserve and maintain energy supplies. These two
systems affect our entire body, from our cardiovascular and
respiratory systems to our gastrointestinal, nervous and
muscular systems. When we get stressed, they all feel it. This
response to stress is basically our body preparing a coordinated
effort to tackle whatever is stressing us out.
We need to talk?!
About what?!
Where's my laptop?
6%?! Where's my charger? I swear if one more thing goes wrong,
I'm going to lose it!
Clearly, stress can be bad coping mechanism or a
maladaptive response. But the vast majority of mammals,
reptiles, amphibians, and insects have stress hormones:
plants get stressed, even bacteria have a stress response.
Everything is just really stressed out, okay!
So why did evolution keep around such a negative reaction? Could
stress have been an evolutionary adaptation at some point? Some
evolutionary biologists frame stress as a state of arousal
opposite to rest. In that sense, the ability to switch between
being passive and actively responding to our environment
has been around since complex life. But looking a little
closer on the evolutionary branch at humans specifically,
our stress response would have been activated by any of the
dangers that our ancestors faced. Many of those dangers
would have been acute and physical. So the ability to
focus physical and mental resources on the stressor at
hand may have often paid off. Putting it more simply, we
evolved a stress response that prepares your body to fight our
stressors, or sprint away from them. But this leads to a little
bit of an evolutionary mismatch because today we face a lot of
stressors that can't be addressed with fisticuffs, or
fast footwork. Although, in fairness, I've never tried
punching out my student loans.
Why am I— okay, Tina, you're freaking out. Maybe I need to
stress nap? No, you can't you have a meeting soon. Okay, get
up and breathe and say some affirmations.
I don't know any affirmations!
What would Beyonce say? You won't break my soul. You won't
break my soul. No. Okay. Let me calm down and order some food. I
would like to order a hamburger. Okay, I can do this
Chef: Ayy, Why Am I Like This Grill
Tina: Hello I'm a hamburger!
Chef: Uh? Excuse me?
*inconsolable*
Whoa, whoa whoa, calm down. calm down, Sweetie.
Let's take a deep breath. Now tell me was going on.
Tina: *CRYING* I have a paper deadline on Friday. And I need to
check in with my students. My boss called and said goal is a
we needed to talk. And then my laptop diiiiieeeeeeddddd
Chef: Oh ho oof listen, listen. Ey, don't let that get you down.
Don't let that get you down. It's— you're gonna be just
fine. It's okay to be upset. I get it.
Tina: Really? You do?
Chef: Yeah! Of course I do. I mean, just last week, my house almost
burned down. And then yesterday, I almost got kidnapped. But then
they let me go. They just stole my car. They didn't steal me. I
was about to cry like you are right now. But then I remember
my morning affirmations, my deep breathing. And as you can see,
everything is just fine.
Tina: So clearly, some people are more sensitive to stress
than others. Since people don't have exactly the same DNA, there
can be some differences in genes that affect the production of
stress hormones and the receptors that they bind to. For
example, the COMP gene has been shown to impact stress
reactivity. This gene [protein] helps break down the stress
hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine. More calm can
mean that you can get rid of your stress hormones and your
stress response more quickly. And research shows that people
with different variations of this gene react to stress in
different ways. Beyond genes, our stress response today is a
direct result of how much stress we've experienced in our life.
We now know that people who've had stressful life events in
their past, especially during childhood can have significant
changes to their lifelong cortisol levels. In brief, this
can lead people with stressful childhoods to be more sensitive
to stressful stimuli later in life. But this isn't set in
stone research shows that it is possible to alter our response
to stress with various approaches from lifestyle
changes to medication and therapy. And in some cases, if
you face your stressor directly, you might find that it wasn't as
scary as you expected.
Unknown: Hey, Tina, you doing okay?
Tina: Oh, no, I'm good. I had something to eat. And I'm fine.
Now. I'm fine.
Boss: Well, thanks for meeting on such short notice. Hope I
didn't scare you with that text. I've actually got some great
news. You got the research funds you applied for!
Tina: Oh my god, this is awesome! I was so stressed about
this. We should definitely go and celebrate with the lab!
Boss: How about Friday?
Tina: Yeah. Sounds good. I'll see you tomorrow.
Boss: Oh Tina, real quick. How's that research paper coming?
Take five.
Tina: Clearly stress can be a bad coping meechan- wait. Sorry,
Chef: Where's my fat back. You seen my fat back? It's somewhere
I'm looking for my fat back. It's somewhere up here
Naw, that ain't my fat back.
Oh my gahd.
Tina: OW!
She broke the Rubix cube! *laughs* Oh my gahd! *laughs*
Chef: So what they call me here, how I'mknown in the streets is
it's the Lebron James of chefs, right?
Cut.