stress
It had just gone 5:45 PM one Monday evening in mid-to-late 2017. I had just boarded my train home from Glasgow City Centre when I suddenly took what my gran would call "a funny turn." My chest was tight as I struggled for breath, my heart pounding so hard I thought my ribcage would burst open like that scene from Alien. My arms and legs were sore like I'd just left the gym, and I was breaking out in bouts of pins and needles all over my body. At just 20-years-old, I had self-diagnosed and began to treat the symptoms of a heart attack. Sweating, I tucked my feet up onto the chair, closed my eyes and assumed a wall sit position. It's all I could remember from my first response training. Truth be told, it's hard to think straight when it's you that you are treating! So there I sat for several minutes, breathing as calmly and deeply as I could and hoping to god that I was wrong. In a rush-hour train, jam-packed with business-types and students alike, I imagine I must have looked like a proper lunatic.
A few stops passed and the train eventually emerged from the labyrinth of tunnels beneath Glasgow and into the open air, plowing towards the suburban stops on the route. With the symptoms subsiding I opened my eyes, squinting in the Autumnal, low-glaring sunlight I was suddenly bathed in. The train, though emptying, was still full of people, old and young and all drawing me weird looks. Some of concern, as if the words "Are you okay, son" were on the tip of their tongues. Others were closer to "I'd better not stare too long at this lunatic in case he starts talking to me!"
I slid back down the seat till my feet planted themselves firmly on the floor. "You okay, kiddo?" I heard from behind me. A ticket examiner, a middle-aged woman with shoulder-length, deep red hair. She had clocked me acting strange from further down the carriage and came to my aid. "Yeah I think so, thanks" I said and she moved on up the carriage, "Any more tickets folks?" I nearly called her back to ask if she had any aspirin, but quickly decided against it. I'd came to the conclusion already that it could not, in fact, have been a heart attack. They don't exactly just stop.
Once home and with a cuppa in hand I Googled my symptoms. Turns out it was my first ever panic attack. Part of me was relieved, of course. Knowing you aren't going to die in your sleep is always good! But that elation quickly developed into concern. I'm not normally an anxious person, so what the hell had triggered it?
To understand the what, it's important to understand the why. In the words of Robert Sapolsky, a Neuroscientist at Stamford University, "A Warthog is not often wallowing in the sort of anxiety that we think of in an everyday sense. If you're a warthog... anxiety is about seeing a lion at the end of the field so you'd better be vigilant." The Warthog's Amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for processing emotion, identifies the Lion as a threat. This causes the brain to flood the body with adrenaline, preparing it to either fight or flee. So the heart rate and breathing increases, lung passages expand and blood vessels dilate to ensure maximum amounts of oxygen reaches the muscles. The muscles themselves tense in preparation for action, the pupils dilate and peripheral vision shrinks to help focus on the immediate threat. Blood is diverted away from the skin toward the major organs and all non-essential bodily functions, such as salivation, digestion and reproductive systems, are shut down to conserve energy. As Sapolsky said, when faced with danger "the body has better things to do than digest breakfast." All of these bodily changes are in response to a perceived threat and is what causes the symptoms many of us will be familiar with. The racing heart, the tense (or even sore) muscles, the stomach aches, pins and needles, dry mouth and loss of libido. To quote Sapolsky again, "everything that's going on in [his] body at the time is wonderfully adapted." In other words, anxiety evolved as a helpful mind-body response to threat. It's the mind trying it's best to optimise the body to help us escape danger with our lives.
However, unlike the Worthog, human beings are not being chased by lions anymore, or at least most of us aren't! Our triggers of anxiety come from other sources. So instead of a lion attack, we now experience anxiety over workload at the office, or the traffic we are stuck in, or how far away pay day is. Or maybe it's our 35-year mortgage, or how much we spent in the club last weekend, or how the hell we are going to pay off our credit cards this month. In fact anything which your Amygdala identifies as a threat will trigger a similar response. Even though we can't physically fight or out-run any of these threats, our bodies will still respond to them in the same way.
The Amygdala of humans with severe anxiety is particularly sensitive, causing it to identifying threats in every day situations. So much so that the Prefrontal Cortex, the part of the brain responsible for applying reason and logic, is unable to reign in the Amygdala. Unchained and unregulated, the Amygdala sends the body into emotional overdrive which spirals into an anxiety attack. Plus, people with clinical anxiety actually see the world differently. According to a study by Elsevier, people with social anxiety disorder are more likely to see emotionally ambiguous faces as seeming angry, which is another compounding factor.
Historically then, an anxiety attack could save your life. But not today. These days, anxiety is a plague that is both encouraged by and shunned from society. People in the West have a tendency to gravitate towards inherently stressful lives. We fill our time, our personal bandwidth, to the point of bursting. Even those without a tendency for anxiety will eventually suffer the long-term physical consequences of exposure to continually high-stress environments. Before long, the continual, perhaps daily bodily preparation for fight or flight starts to have long-term effects on our mental and physical health. The body was never meant to stay in this state for extended periods of time. It's intended to prime us to run for our lives when the occasion arises. As a result, on-going, chronic stress has been observed as the causation of depression, personality disorders, eating disorders, heart disease, high blood pressure, arrhythmia, heart attacks, strokes, obesity, menstrual problems, acne, psoriasis, eczema, permanent hair loss and gastrointestinal problems. Plus, conditions like asthma, diabetes, hypertension, insomnia and multiple sclerosis have all been observed as having worsened when under stress. It seems then that the mind-body connection is stronger than I'd ever had appreciation for.
So to come back to my initial question, what the hell had triggered my anxiety attack? Clearly it was a response to something which I subconsciously identified as a threat, but really that could have been anything.
It could have been the late-running train. In Scotland, for a train to even be considered late, it needs to be 10 whole minutes late. For a guy that (most of the time) is pathologically punctual, a small deviation from my schedule like that is enough to set me off. I'd worry I would be late to the Scout session, coffee date or fancy meeting I was heading to after work. Or it could have been caused by other passengers. After all, the 'public' element of public transport is by far the worst part. The whole, having to deal with all the lunatics Glasgow has to offer, thing takes an element of tether that I don't often have at the end of a busy day. It could have been my workload. Monday's can be manic after all. Not least because I had a meeting with several directors and senior managers first thing the next morning. A meeting I had spent all day planning for and would spend all night thinking about - and often I still wouldn't know what to say when my arse hit the hot-seat. Sitting down with people I perceived to be so superior to me was a very terrifying prospect after all. Or it could have been the dread of my journey home. 40 minutes in a jam-packed sweat box, followed by a 10 or 15 minute drive from the station to the house in rush-hour traffic, where I was bound to flip someone off, or drop an F-bomb at some point. Then of course there was the nagging I'd all but become accustomed to. Staying with my parents at the time, I'd have but one foot in the door before someone would pounce on me. Sorry Mum, but you're a pain in the arse like that! Or it could have been my scrolling through Instagram, through the highlight reels of literally everyone I've ever met. Swiping and double-tapping my way past friends, strangers, celebrities and reprobates alike, with little distinction between which was which and no real idea of who I most aspired to be like. Maybe I identify with the tech geniuses of my social circles, the ones that make jokes I don't understand but pretend I do. Maybe I want to become an Instagay who's notifications are filled with gratuitous likes each week by people they don't know or care for - a weekly dopamine supplement. What about the uni graduates and apprentice joiners, the ones that park their brand-new Mercedes A-Class on their mum's driveway every day. And then there's the jocks whose lives are seemingly perfect because they have cum gutters they insist on showing off. And then there's the ads. They can get to fuck. Before I knew it, I could be passing through the Gymshark checkout, spending hundreds of pounds on kit I'd wear to the gym later that week. Once there, I'd spend an hour or so doing nothing but kidding myself on, leaving shortly after having barely broken sweat and subconsciously wishing that I were one of those jocks; to whom exercise and being ripped comes as second-nature.
I hadn't even left the train yet and I was neck-deep in a flash-flood of status updates from people I haven't spoken to in years - if at all! Yet there I was, sitting on my arse passing judgement and forming hideous opinions on people I don't even know. I'd become so engrossed that I'd regularly find myself scrambling to the door to make my stop on time. It was an exhausting, exhaustive cycle that I'd habitually insist on each day, a ritual that ultimately drilled into my head that I wasn't good enough. Or at least it's meant to.
So what do we do about it? Many will turn to alcohol and recreational drugs as a sort of consolation prize for having had the anxiety at all. Thing is, while that may treat the symptoms and improve your short-term contentment, it doesn't ultimately treat the causation. It's a coping mechanism. And like many coping mechanisms, the long-term affects can actually make you feel worse. So what else is there?
I'm by no means an expert, nor a severe sufferer of anxiety. Hell I've only ever had two anxiety attacks in my life. I'm most certainly not a scientist either. All the science gubbins you see here was quoted almost directly from a Netflix documentary, which I'll reference at the bottom. But I do know myself. After educating myself and reflecting on my own experiences, I came to realise my primary trigger is over-stimulation. Be that through social media, or thinking about too many things at once, or even being sat in a room where too many people are all talking to me at once. Any circumstance where too many streams of information are in play simultaneously will start to panic me. I'm not a multi-tasker is what it comes down to!
So just like Spider-Man, who had to engineer special lenses into his suit just to tone-down his super spidey senses, I too knew I had to start controlling my input. This wasn't really a big bang, let's change everything immediately approach. It happened over the course of a year or so where I carefully introduced new elements into my daily routine. I tried several things, throwing all sorts of ideas at the wall just to see what sticks. The ones that did became my go-to strategy for a clearer head. On the train both to and from work, I'd have a 20-minute meditation. I started out with guided meditation using Headspace, but in honesty, as strange as this may sound, keeping up with the guide was a hassle for me. So once I eventually had the basics down I cancelled the subscription and started going it alone. So these days I'll sit down for 20-minutes or so and focus on nothing but my breathing. When I find myself distracted, I acknowledge the distraction and refocus my attention once more on breathing. I'll also take a daily mindful moment, which varies from day to day but it might be something like taking time out to hand-wash the dishes, playing with the cats or taking a short walk. Things that some may call distractions are in fact welcomed mental breaks, provided they are intentional. When playing with the cats starts to interrupt your workflow, you should definitely turn it down a notch! Then I added in an exercise that I'll perform when I feel myself starting to build toward stress. It's a senses exercise where I close my eyes and identify four things I can hear, three things I can feel, two things I can smell and one thing I can taste. It takes all of 30-seconds to do and really helps to ground me. But really, the thing that made the biggest difference to my mental calm and clarity was my social media hiatus, which is a whole different story!
Obviously, there are only so many lifestyle changes that can be tried before people will need to resort to medical intervention. Mindfulness exercises are by no means the perfect solution for everyone, but it's a start. I'd wager that if I were to ask a room full of people when they last sat down, did nothing and simply breathed, the vast majority would say never. It's an underrated, under-appreciated practice. People know they need to eat healthily and exercise to keep their bodies healthy, but what about the mind?
For more, check out the Anxiety episode of The Mind, Explained on Netflix, the source of most of the base material used for this post. See also the articles below discussing the long-term affects of stress on the human body.
~ Aedan.