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Key points
- As the world moves into the next stage of the pandemic, how people manage stress and build resilience has never been so relevant.
- Stress can interfere with wellbeing in a variety of ways. It is also an opportunity to "stretch" beyond one's comfort zone.
- Technology, like smartwatches and rings, can help identify when stress becomes overwhelming and prompt behavior changes to improve health.
We’ve studied it for decades, but stress and how bad (or good) it might be for us has never been more relevant. If we can successfully find our sweet spot between stress, strain, and a healthy stretching of our capabilities, this can be helpful in building resilience and managing stress in the future as we enter the next phase of the pandemic.
What is stress?
In broad terms, stress is most often understood to be the feeling of being overwhelmed or struggling to cope with mental or emotional demands. We can often trigger a state of stress when we experience something new, an unexpected stressful event, or have little control over a situation. This can cause us to question our sense of who we are. Though it can be challenging when we experience it, learning how to manage stress, as well as the sources of stress, is a natural part of life.
How does stress show itself in the body?
When our body responds to this feeling of pressure or being overwhelmed, it produces a range of stress hormones that act as messengers telling us we should step up our level of alertness to be ready to fight or get away from the situation. This helps us respond quickly and effectively to dangerous situations.
The problem is that for much of the time, our bodies are responding to situations that are not actually life-threatening with responses that cause us to act as if they are. If we are not careful about how we manage ourselves, we can end up feeling stressed for much of our waking lives.
Is all stress bad?
Not at all. While levels of stress can reach unhealthy peaks, it’s also unavoidable in everyday life.
Stress usually occurs when people are operating at the leading edge of their abilities — when they are pushed beyond their level of familiarity into the unknown. And that can happen when we face pleasant events, as well as bad, such as bringing a baby home for the first time.
The good news is that by operating not too far out of our comfort zones, we can build our capacity to deal with new situations, and this can help us build stress resilience that helps the next time we have to deal with an unknown stressful situation. This is known as stress inoculation. Think of it as "stretching" ourselves, where we raise our performance and maximise our efforts. Where stress can do harm is if it becomes chronic, allowing no possibility for a break or to recover, or if it is a traumatic event or psychologically catastrophic.
What we need to avoid is feeling stressed about being stressed, and instead take proactive action to understand the effect it is having on our health and behaviors, and how we can control these stressful conditions better, and/or how we respond to them.
How does stress impact sleep, fitness performance, nutrition, and health?
One effect of stress is that it can not only make it harder for us to fall asleep, but it can mean that we awaken more frequently at night too, affecting sleep quality and the amount of sleep we get. And insufficient sleep can cause us to be not only tired but anxious about getting enough sleep, causing further loss of sleep in a destructive cycle.
Coupled with stress, lack of sleep can destroy your ability to reach your fitness goals. It can make the simplest of tasks feel more difficult, and it means that you’ll mentally and physically tire more quickly. This will affect your workout and ability to progress.
Stress can affect our food preferences and lead us to binge on foods that aren’t so good for us. When we release cortisol, a hormone that prepares us for flight-or-flight in times of stress, this can ramp up our motivation to take action — but it also ramps up our motivation to eat too. In particular, it seems to drive people towards consuming salty, sugary, and fatty foods. So, when we are stuck in chronic stress, it can really change our food preferences for the worse and ruin our diets.
Can technology help build stress resilience?
Technological advances through devices like smartwatches and rings can help us get even more information about what is going on in our bodies and spot trends. Used wisely, this can give us clues about the lifestyle behavior changes we can make to feel, and perform, better.
Although stress often has a psychological cause, it can affect several physiological processes in the body. Heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) seem to be sensitive to psychological stress and seem to change as stress increases and decreases.
Wrist-worn devices can track HRV, a measure of the time between each heartbeat. If a person’s system is showing stress, the variation between heartbeats is low. The variation between beats is high if you are in a state of relaxation. People who have a high HRV have better cardiovascular fitness. The encouraging news is that as you incorporate more stress-reduction measures in your life such as sleep, meditation, and physical activity, HRV seems to be responsive and change as well.
What are the most effective techniques for coping with stress and building stress resilience?
In the most general terms, effective strategies for reducing stress responses include maintaining a healthy social support network, taking part in regular physical exercise, and getting a good amount of sleep each night.
Relaxation and mindfulness can be effective ways to help reduce the effects of stress. There are many techniques, for example: yoga, tai chi, meditation, and massage. Learning deep breathing techniques, which can be done anywhere and take only a few minutes, can help to reduce stress and its effects.
Calming down our threat arousal system through breathing exercises then enables us to reduce the flow of stress hormones in our bodies and minds. We can do this effectively by simply slowly breathing in for a count of 4, holding it for another count of four, and then breathing out for a count of 6. We can then repeat this up to 10 times. This works because slowing our breathing allows our bodies to recalibrate and lower our levels of physiological arousal, which has a positive cascading effect in our bodies.
Learning how to deal with stress and adverse events is more important than ever. Stress is going anywhere fast. But we can change our approach and build resilience skills to deal with difficult situations when they come up. Technology can help us gain insight into where we can best focus our efforts.
References
Mental Health Foundation. (2020) Resilience across the UK during the coronavirus pandemic. https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/sites/default/files/MHF%20The%20COVID-1…
