Boost Your Resilience Quotient (RQ)
In this month’s post:
The HPA Axis and Stress Response: What happens to your brain under stress?
Comfort in Discomfort: Expanding resilience with challenging experiences.
The Problem of Chronic Stress: Impaired bodily functions and memory processing.
Balancing Stress and Growth: The fine line between too much and too little stress.
A Unique Approach to Resilience: Counterintuitive processes that bolster resilience.
(3 to 5-minute read!)
You may have heard that if you want to develop resilience, do hard things.
Your Resilience Quotient (RQ), is much like IQ or EQ—you can increase it. But is it just as simple as doing hard things? Not exactly. We shouldn’t overlook the functional processes that reinforce resilience in our brains.
Have you ever heard of the Hypothalmic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) Axis?
Your HPA axis is a region of the brain that regulates the stress response and works alongside the autonomic system to activate the fight, flight or freeze response. When exposed to stressors or challenging stimuli, the HPA Axis engages, overriding our ability to think clearly and impacting our decision-making.
Under duress or in a threatening situation, your executive functioning (the prefrontal cortex) shuts down. You may feel inclined to fight back or flee the scene, or the freeze response can feel paralyzing.
The way to increase your capacity to manage stress and adversity is to have more experiences at the edge of your comfort zone while maintaining the engagement of your rational and logical mind.
The edge of your comfort zone is where stress, fear, anxiety, uncertainty, learning, progress, growth, and the magic of life coexist. Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone, and we must experience a sense of unease to live the full human experience.
Talk about a valuable reframe for uncertainty!
Here’s What Happens to Your Brain When You Are Stressed
When you experience an event viewed as challenging or threatening, like a difficult conversation with a co-worker or your boss, trying to meet a deadline on a high-pressure project, an argument with a loved one or friend, parenting challenges, important life decisions, legal issues, danger, or something as simple as heavy traffic (the list goes on), a cascade of hormones in the HPA axis triggers the production of adrenaline and cortisol in your body.
Stressful situations are highly emotional and rich with sensory stimuli.
So, your brain responds by engaging the amygdala, the brain’s emotional processing centre.
The amygdala signals the hypothalamus command centre to activate your stress response by releasing corticotropin-releasing hormones (CRH), which travel to the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland releases adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) into the bloodstream. Once those hormones reach the adrenal glands above your kidneys, a surge of stress hormones is produced.
Cortisol and adrenaline prepare your body for action or inaction (depending on the situation–fight, flight, or freeze). You may notice increased energy, heart rate and breathing or find yourself shutting down.
The Problem with Chronic Stress
One problem with experiencing chronic stress is that it diverts valuable bodily resources away from healthy functioning, impairing the body’s immune system, digestion, growth, genital function, and other autonomic functions.
If left unregulated, stress impairs the hippocampus’s ability to process, store, and retrieve useful memories. After significant stressful events, exposure to similar stressors triggers the amygdala, encoding emotional memories and making them hard to forget. The prefrontal cortex becomes impaired, leading to difficulties regulating emotions and making decisions.
Ultimately, stress disrupts normal memory processing, contributing to fragmented memories, intrusive thinking, and stressful memories becoming more readily accessible than non-stressful ones.
Sounds bad, right?
Regulating Your Stress Response
So, how do you learn to regulate this system?
The answer is to raise your tolerance and have more experiences at the edge of your comfort zone to learn to keep the prefrontal cortex engaged when experiencing stressful stimuli.
We need more stressful experiences. We need practice.
The takeaway should be that you can increase your resilience to stress by leaning into discomfort, forging ahead, and maintaining a calm presence of mind in stressful situations.
You end up increasing your RQ, which functions like IQ or EQ. Like your intellectual and emotional potential, you can raise the level of your resilience with practice.
A Quote:
“The only road to true greatness is through suffering.”
- Albert Einstein
Controversial, yes or no?
A Thought:
Embracing stress and increasing your capacity for resilience (RQ)
amid turbulence is the essence of a fully-lived life.
Balancing Stress and Growth
Knowing what is too much stress and what is not enough is essential. We should not aim to avoid or withdraw when the going gets tough. Living within your comfort zone does not let us access the beauty of the full human experience. You risk living a life filled with complacency.
Pushing too far over the line is also not ideal. When the fear is too significant, you won’t be able to regulate your stress response and activation of the HPA axis.
You need to gradually increase your exposure to risk and fear. When you do, your comfort zone expands.
This process defines what it means to get comfortable being uncomfortable. When you find comfort in discomfort, you maintain your brain’s ability to call the shots and stay in control when under stress.
Gratitude as a Secret Weapon
I’ll finish with one vital strategy that I use to help regulate the neurochemistry involved with stress. It involves gratitude (no surprise there if you’ve read my previous work). You cannot feel stressed and thankful at the same time. So when life throws you a curve ball, focus on the gifts, not the gaps.
Gratitude is not just something you hold in your mind’s eye; you must feel it. When you do, your brain produces neurotransmitters (e.g., Oxytocin and Serotonin) that counteract the stress response in the HPA axis.
Activating gratitude during distress is a unique approach to resilience because it challenges conventional thinking and human nature. It is counterintuitive to focus on gratitude when the going gets tough. However, embracing gratitude in difficult moments is undervalued for improving self-regulation, maintaining presence, and staying in control in stressful situations.
This, my friends, is the way we become resilient. Lean into discomfort, know your limits, and play around them.
If you enjoyed this post, why not help others become more resilient? Share this with anyone needing a boost when facing stressful situations.
With gratitude,
Mike Shaw
References:
Lindholm, H., Morrison, I., Krettek, A., Malm, D., Novembre, G., & Handlin, L. (2020). Genetic risk-factors for anxiety in healthy individuals: Polymorphisms in genes important for the HPA axis. BMC Medical Genetics, 21(1), 184. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12881-020-01123-w
Rosada, C., Bauer, M., Golde, S., Metz, S., Roepke, S., Otte, C., Wolf, O. T., Buss, C., & Wingenfeld, K. (2021). Association between childhood trauma and brain anatomy in women with post-traumatic stress disorder, women with borderline personality disorder, and healthy women. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 12(1), 1959706. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2021.1959706
