٢ ... The Body of Stress

— Intro

People often use the word stress interchangeably with anxiety, feeling anxious, fearful, nervous, overwhelmed, panic, or stressed-out. Stress is the body’s natural defense against real or imagined danger. It flushes the body with hormones to prepare systems to evade or confront danger. This is known as the “fight-or-flight or freeze” response. The body in this threatening situation is an intelligent operating system, but the body -as we know it- can not determine the difference between a real external life threat, from an imagined or perceived threatening stressor. This makes the neurobiology of stress a complex operating mechanism. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), there are three different types of stress: acute stress, episodic acute stress, and chronic stress. Where each requires a different method of treatment through interventions, management, and psychological modalities, due to the nature of the lived environment, developmental history, coping resources, and personality. Considering the vastness of this topic, this chapter focuses only on understanding chronic stress from a biological point of view, to better understand our inner environments and outer spatial ones. Different points are tackled here in regards to: How can we define chronic stress? How does it operate in the brain and body? How chronic stress is linked to experience dependent genes?

¶ Chronic stress

— The experience All of us are built for dealing with short term bursts of healthy stress. When the stressful event is over , the body normally returns to balance within hours, increasing its energy levels and restoring its vital resources. But in the case of chronic stress, the stress does not end within hours, and the body might never return to balance for hours or days. Because of our large brains, human

beings are capable of thinking about their problems, reliving past events, or even forecasting future worst-case situations and thus turning on the cascade

of stress chemicals by thought alone. We can knock our brains and bodies out of normal physiology just by thinking about an all too familiar past, present or trying to control an unpredictable future1 .

During intense waves of chronic stress, the hormones of stress overtake. Grasping air is mostly heavy, intense pain would shoot through one or multiple parts of the body, a deep hollow ache in the gut or chest could be felt. The neck and shoulders could instantly stiffen, as the mind frenetically races from thought to thought. The brain continuously wires the experienced event into the memory bank and the brain is anchored to the body of the past, by making it constantly prone to the hazardous stress effects on the body, mind and cognitive regardless of the scenarios. Chronic stress happens on different levels: chemically, emotionally and physically.

— Chronic stress in person A person’s body and mind can be a host environment for chronic stress when aversive experiences are experienced. Some chronic stressors or triggers stem from traumatic early childhood experiences that become internalized and remain painful and present. Early childhood experiences profoundly affect personality; often resulting in core belief systems that are created by causes of unending stress for the individual. Or some people might not have a traumatic history but still in later life experiences stressors and abnormal experiences that could put a person under the fatality of chronic stress. Nowadays, especially during health and economic crisis, many people are isolated, and more anxieties are popping on the surface and more people are anchored to chronic stress, when they already have genetic and psychological tendencies.

This can happen to many people. In some cases, People become addicted to the emotions of stress that are making them sick. The rush of adrenaline and the rest of the stress hormones arouses their brain and body, providing a rush

of energy2. In time, people could become addicted to the rush of the chemistry and then they use people and the conditions in their lives to affirm their addiction to the emotion, without realising it. They could become emotionally addicted to a life they hated. Science tells us that such chronic, long-term stress pushes the genetic buttons that create disease.

— Chronic stress emotions

— Understanding emotions chemically Emotions are chemical consequences of past experiences. Our senses record incoming information from the outer environment, and clusters of neurons form networks. When they freeze into a pattern, the brain makes a chemical that is then sent throughout the body. That chemical is called an emotion. The stronger the emotional quotient from any experienced event, the stronger the change in our internal chemistry. The combination of various people or objects

at a particular time and space from the stressful experience is etched in our neural architecture as an image. This is called long term memory. Therefore the experience becomes imprinted in the neural circuitry, and the emotions are stored in the body, and this is how our past emotions become our biology.

When we think a thought, those networks of neurons that fire in our brain create electrical charges. And those merge with the thought that created the electric charges to produce a specific electromagnetic field. Think of emotion

as energy in motion. And all those energies can be sensed and felt. As you might expect, different emotions produce different frequencies. The frequencies of creative, elevated emotions like love, joy and gratitude are much higher than the emotions of stress, such as fear and anger.

2.1 Scale of some emotions with different energies. © Book: Becoming supernatural, Dr Joe Dinspenza, 2017. Hay House, INC.

¶ What does chronic stress do to your body?

Stress begins with something called the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis (HPA-axis). The HPA-axis consists of the series of communications between the hypothalamus, the pituitary and adrenal glands. When the hypothalamus receives information that there is a threat in the environment, it relays a signal via the pituitary gland to the adrenal gland, which releases cortisol1, as well as other hormones such as norepinephrine and epinephrine (adrenaline). The resulting stress response causes physiological changes which include increased respiration, heart rate, blood pressure, and blood glucose levels. The immune system initially dials up and then dials down as adrenaline and cortisol flood the muscles. Circulation moves out of our rational forebrain and is instead relayed to our hindbrain, so we have less capacity to think creatively and instead rely more on our instinct to instantly react2 .

In a short term stress can be advantageous, but when activated too often or too long, the primitive fight or flight stress response not only changes your brain but also damages many of the other organs and cells throughout your body. With chronic stress, the body has no energy left in its inner environment for growth and repair, compromising the immune system. Where high levels of cortisol can also cause deep belly fat. This type of fat is an organ that actively releases hormones and immune system chemicals called cytokines3. That increases your risk of developing chronic diseases, such as heart disease and insulin resistance, and slow the rate you heal. Chronic stress has even more ways it can sabotage your health, including acne, hair loss, sexual dysfunction, headaches, muscle tension, difficulty concentrating, fatigue, and irritability.

1 Cortisol is a small (molecular weight, MW, 362) and highly lipid-soluble molecule, the unbound hormone can pass easily through the lipid-bilayer membranes of nucleated cells. This allows free cortisol to appear in all bodily fluids, including blood, cerebral spinal fluid, urine, sweat, semen, and saliva. Cortisol bound to carriers is usually excluded from these body compartments. Source : C. Kirschbaum, D.H. Hellhammer, in Encyclopedia of Stress (Second Edition), 2007 2 Becoming supernatural, Dr Joe Dinspenza, 2017. Hay House, INC. page 2 3 Ibid. page 3

¶ What does chronic stress do to your brain?

Chronic stress can affect brain size, right down to the level of your genes. Chronic stress increases the activity level and number of neural connections in the amygdala (the brain’s fear center), and as levels of cortisol rise, electric signals in the hippocampus -the part of the brain associated with learning, memories, and stress control- deteriorate4. The hippocampus also inhabits the activity of the HPA axis, so when it weakens, so does your ability to control your stress. Cortisol in specific can literally cause your brain to shrink in size. Too much of it results in the shrinking of the prefrontal cortex5 (the part of your brain that regulates behaviours like concentration, decision making, judgment and social interaction). And also sets the space for more serious mental problems, like depression, or heart attack, stroke and Alzheimer disease6 .

Coherent brain waves Uncoherent brain waves under

the hormones of stress

2.2 The difference between coherent and incoherent brain waves. © Book: Becoming supernatural, Dr Joe Dinspenza, 2017.Hay House, INC.

4 TED talk: How stress affects your brain, with Madhumita Murgia. source: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuyPuH9ojCE&ab_channel=TED-Ed 5 The prefrontal cortex is a sign of human cognitive skills. It differentiates human self-awarness and cognition from other species. Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-are-the-structural-differences/ 6 TED talk: How stress affects your brain, with Madhumita Murgia. source: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuyPuH9ojCE&ab_channel=TED-Ed

— Somatic marker hypothesis The somatic marker hypothesis is formulated by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio -a Portuguese American neuroscientist.- and associated researchers. “Somatic markers” are feelings in the body that are associated with emotions, such as the association of rapid heartbeat with anxiety or of nausea with disgust. According to the hypothesis, somatic markers strongly influence subsequent decision-making, where emotions, consequently, are hypothesized to guide decision-making. Within the brain, somatic markers are thought to be processed in the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala1. According to the hypothesis, two distinct pathways reactivate somatic marker responses. In the first pathway, emotion can be evoked by changes in the body that are projected to the brain – called the “body loop”. For instance, encountering a feared object like a snake may initiate the fight-or-flight response and cause fear. In the second pathway, cognitive representations of the emotions (imagining an unpleasant situation “as-if” you were in that particular situation) can be activated in the brain without being directly elicited by a sensory stimulus – called the “as-if body loop”2 .

¶ Chronic stress and epigenetics

We know through the science of epigenetics3 that it’s not the gene that creates disease but the environment that programs our genes to create disease4. And this is affected not only by factors from environments outside our bodies but also by factors in the environments outside our cells.

1 Somatic marker hypothesis. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis 2 Ibid. 3 Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your DNA sequence, but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence. source: https://www.cdc.gov/genomics/disease/epigenetics.htm#:~:text=Epigenetics%20is%20the%20study%20of,body%20reads%20a%20DNA%20sequence. 4 Becoming supernatural, Dr Joe Dinspenza, 2017. Hay House, INC. page 39

To start with the environment within our bodies: When developing a disease, the gene itself does not physically change, the expression of the gene changes, and that expression is what matters the most because that is what affects our health and our lives5. In a very real way, the expression of proteins is the expression of life and is equal to the health of the body. In order for the cells to make proteins, genes must be expressed. When

the signal from the environment outside of the cell reaches the cell membrane, the chemical is accepted by a receptor outside of the cell. Then a gene makes a new protein that’s equal to that signal. So if the information that is coming from outside of the cell does not change, the gene keeps making the same protein and the body stays the same. By time the gene starts to down regulate; it will either shut off its healthy expression of proteins or it will eventually wear out like making a copy of a copy, causing the body to express a different quality of proteins. And here comes the role of chronic stress in pushing the expression of the gene into creating a disease.

— Experience-dependent genes If you’re living with the same stress emotions day in and day out, without breaking your habits or coping with stressful triggers, your body believes it’s in the same environmental conditions. Shouldn’t the chemical environment surrounding your cells change? Yes that happens but not all of the time. If you spend years conditioning your body to this cycle of thinking and feeling and then feeling and thinking, you become addicted to those emotions. So simply changing the external environment does not necessarily break the addiction. Because of the thinking and feeling loop, sooner or later most people will get back to their baseline emotional state, and the body believes it is the same old experience that created the same old emotions6 .

5 Ibid 39

By doing new things -new information- we activate experience-dependent genes. These genes are responsible for stem cells getting the instructions to differentiate, transforming into whatever type of cell the body needs at that particular time, to replace cells that are damaged. We activate behavioral state

dependent genes when we are in high levels of stress or arousal, or in alternate states of awareness like dreaming. When you change your emotions, you can

change the expression of your genes. When the genetic expression is the same; you stay the same7 .

¶ The mind - action - spatial environment

You use a specific level of mind to execute each of the daily functions (driving, showering, etc). Because you probably have done each of these tasks a thousand times, your brain turns on in a very specific way whenever you do any of them. Learning , un-learning means making new connections

in your brain, memories are when you maintain those connections. When you experience a highly charged emotional event that moment becomes embossed neurologically in your brain as a memory. This is how stressful (traumatic)

events shattered many emotions and turned them into memories. It’s safe to say that the only place where the past exists is your brain and in your body.

The book ‘This cognition’ by Steven Chavira, linkes our behaviour in physical spaces to the theory of extended mind; a philosophical concept stating that the brain and the surrounding environment can be seen as an indistinguishable coupled system. Every object, thing, place or situation in our familiar physical reality has a neurological network assigned to our brain and an emotional component connected to it because we’ve experienced all these things.

2.3 Outer world of physical reality. © Book: Becoming supernatural, Dr Joe Dinspenza, 2017. Hay House, INC.