Picture this for a moment. You reach out your hand right in front of you, open the car door, plop your belongings in the passenger seat, and sit down as quickly as possible. “Ahhhh,” you sigh with relief as your head hits the back of your headrest ever so slightly, and you close your eyes. It’s finally the end of your workday, and you’re about to make your way home.
“Today was rough,” you think to yourself. You shake your head as you try to understand how you got through it, and just as you’re– “HONK!” A car slams into the back of your car, leaving the horn playing repeatedly, jolting your eyes open abruptly.
Just when you needed a well-deserved break now needing to tend to yet another thing. Life is like this sometimes – it can feel really tough and chaotic to cope with. But at the end of the day, you still somehow have to manage everything.
The world is fast-paced, and stress and challenges meet us around many corners. Our ability to cope with these things as they arise is crucial for our wellbeing. Coping mechanisms vary from person to person, but one thing we all share is that our brains are wired to help us cope.
Have you ever wondered how our brains do this? Well, in this post, we’ll dive into the fascinating world of neuroscience to explore how our brains cope amidst adversity, and we’ll discuss some strategies you can implement to help you cope more effectively.
The Stress Response and the Amygdala
First, what happens when we encounter a stressor in our environment?
When confronted with a stressful situation, our brain activates what is known as the stress response. Let’s take the example described above: a car tail-ends you out of nowhere, and the car horn is stuck playing. Your sensory system (the parts of your brain that interpret sounds, sights, touch, etc.) sends this information to your amygdala, a small almond-shaped structure in the brain mostly responsible for detecting potential threats, initiating a fear response, and emotional processing. The amygdala essentially interprets the sounds and images and searches for potential danger. If it perceives danger, it then sends a signal to another brain structure known as the hypothalamus, indicating that we should be distressed.
The hypothalamus operates as a command center and communicates with the rest of your body via the autonomic nervous system, which is broken down into two systems: the sympathetic nervous system (the pedal) and the parasympathetic nervous system (the brakes).
When we’re distressed, the hypothalamus signals the sympathetic nervous system that it’s time to fight, flee, or freeze by releasing adrenaline and cortisol into our bloodstream. This enables us to act and respond quickly to potential threats and dangers.
When we’re no longer in danger, cortisol levels fall, signaling that the threat has passed, which allows the parasympathetic nervous system to become active and lower our stress response. This allows us to calm down, relax, and return to baseline or homeostasis.
Sometimes, though, we can struggle to dampen our stress response, or in other words, put the breaks on our stress. This is because we may be exposed to highly stressful situations consistently. Over a long period of time, this requires our sympathetic nervous system to remain active, making it so we can’t calm down. This is known as chronic stress.
Research has shown that chronic stress can lead to an overactive amygdala, causing individuals to have a heightened sensitivity to stressors. This means they would be more likely to interpret situations as stressful, and remain on high alert at baseline versus in a calm, relaxed state. If your baseline is hyper-alert, it will affect your ability to cope as well as you could if you weren’t in this hyper-aroused state, making it more difficult to think things through. Therefore, it’s essential that we take precautions towards managing our stress because it will directly affect our ability to cope with life’s challenges.
The key principle is this: when you’re on autopilot, you want to be in a state of calm. If your autopilot is in a state of stress, something’s not right, and you’ve likely been exposed to too much pressure. This will make it harder for you to cope because when we’re under stress, we often are in a state of reacting: i.e., fight, flight, or freeze. We’re not in a state of control. It’s when our nervous system is calm that we can cope with things in a more thought-out way. It’s the key between reacting to life or being in the driver's seat of your life.
Coping Tip #1: If your sympathetic nervous system is activated and you’re trying to deal with a stressor, you want to activate your parasympathetic nervous system. This will help calm your physical stress response so you can get ahold of your emotions to act using your prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain where high-function decision-making occurs). Below we will go into more detail on the behaviors you can engage in that activate your parasympathetic nervous system.
Coping Mechanisms
Coping mechanisms are the strategies we employ to manage stress and adversity. There are two broad types of coping strategies: problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping. Problem-focused coping involves taking direct action to solve the problem causing stress, while emotion-focused coping aims to regulate the emotional response to the stressor.
This means that when faced with a stressor, it is ideal to remember that we have two main approaches to dealing with it. We can either go directly into problem-solving mode or regulate our emotional response to solve the problem. It will depend on the situation, but sometimes acting on a stressor can be enough to lower our emotional trigger. At the same time, we may need to manage our emotional response before we’re able to actively problem solve.
Coping Tip #2: The main way to decide which strategy to employ is this: if you’re having trouble problem solving because you’re too emotionally reactive, tend to your emotional response first, and then problem solve. This can include employing techniques that activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the system that calms your fight/flight/freeze response, to become more relaxed and then going into problem-solving mode.
However, sometimes, acting can be enough to help calm an emotional response because it can remove the stressor causing the emotional reaction in the first place. It depends on how pressing the situation is and the time scale of the stressor that you’re facing. For example, suppose you’re arachnophobic and trapped in a room with a giant spider. In that case, your emotional response will be extremely high, and your fight/flight response will likely be activated. This is a scenario where you could benefit from acting right away to remove the spider from your space so that you can then calm down.
Coping and Neuroplasticity
One amazing thing about our brain is its remarkable ability to reorganize itself in response to experience. This is known as neuroplasticity and is also the principle of the brain that underlies our ability to learn. Neuroscience research has shown that learning as an aspect of coping can change our brains. In other words, they found that learning during stress exposure can cause neuroadaptations that enhance emotional regulation and resilience, making it so we can better cope.
Coping Tip #3: Promote neuroplasticity to increase your resilience to stress and lead to positive changes in the brain associated with emotion regulation by engaging in activities like seeking social support, practicing mindfulness, and engaging in physical exercise.
The Mind-Body Connection
The mind and body are deeply interconnected, and this connection, known as the mind-body connection, plays a vital role in coping with stress. The great thing about connected systems is that one can influence the other and vice versa. That means if you’re experiencing a stress response such as elevated heart rate, quickened breathing, nausea, and/or racing thoughts, there are behaviors you can physically engage in to lower your physical stress response so that you can take care of your emotional one.
A recent study on mice found that when they stimulated (increased) the heart rate of freely moving mice, they engaged in anxious behaviors. Essentially, this increase in heart rate was found to drive the emotional state of anxiety. During this increase in heart rate, they also observed increased brain activity across several brain regions, especially the insula, which is involved in sensing your internal state, known as "interoception."
The insula is known to be active when people monitor both their heart and breathing rates. To examine if the insula was involved in creating this anxious behavior: they turned off activity in the insula, all the while stimulating the heart rate of the mice, and then found that the anxious behaviors stopped!
This suggests that the insula is responsible for listening and responding to your heart rate and drives emotion in response to it. This is an important finding because it highlights the link between the body and the mind. It indicates that both central (brain) and peripheral (body) processes may be involved in the development of emotional states, and they possess the ability to drive one another. Essentially, your body can drive your mind, and your mind can drive your bodily response.
Coping tip #4: if you're in a state of anxiety or stress, I recommend trying to calm your body first by lowering your heart rate. Bringing your body to a calm state can also help get your mind there. The best way to do this is by slowing down your breathing since breathing directly correlates with heart rate. Slowing your breath can slow down your heart, which communicates to your brain to calm your anxiety.
Research also shows that meditation and yoga can activate the body's relaxation response, reducing stress and improving coping abilities. These practices regulate the autonomic nervous system encouraging parasympathetic activity.
The Importance of Crying and Feeling Our Emotions
In a similar vein, there’s another behavior you can engage in that can lower your stress response: crying. Crying is natural and important for keeping us emotionally regulated. Although some people associate crying with a lack of emotional control, in fact, it's crying that allows you to gain control over stress so that you may better emotionally regulate.
Similarly to breathing, crying is connected to our nervous system. When we are under a form of stress, our sympathetic nervous system is activated. One way our parasympathetic nervous system pumps the brakes on this stress response is to bring our body back to homeostasis by crying.
Our tears are made up of endorphins and oxytocin, two hormones associated with relieving pain, stress reduction, improved mood, and trust/relationship building. Additionally, crying releases cortisol. This is why after crying we tend to feel relaxed and soothed. Crying is your body's way of getting you out of a fight-or-flight response.
Importantly, holding back your tears actually keeps your body in a dysregulated state; in other words, it keeps you in a state of fight or flight and under stress. So if you want to stay stressed, hold back your tears. If you want to calm down, let out your tears.
Coping Tip #5: Don't hold back your tears. Cry when you need to cry because that will help you get out of fight/flight/freeze and back to homeostasis: a state of calm. Holding back your tears only ensures you stay in an activated state for longer.
To conclude, it comes down to managing your stress response if you want to cope more efficiently. Allow your parasympathetic nervous system to do its thing! Ultimately, embrace the power of the mind-body connection. If you’re trying to cope with stress, embrace these tips to hack your body’s parasympathetic nervous system so that you can approach the world and its challenges head-on by getting yourself back to homeostasis as quickly as possible when facing stressors.
Coping is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and finding coping mechanisms that work best for us as individuals is essential. That being said, if you can harness the power of our brain's inherent neuroplasticity and the mind-body connection, you’ll certainly be in a better position to navigate life's challenges with greater ease.
