Stress Management Resources for Canadians During Coronavirus
Your heart’s racing so fast it feels like it’s going to leap out of your chest. There’s a hard knot in the pit of your stomach. Your palms sweat while your hands shake and your mouth goes dry. Your peripheral vision goes dark.
You feel like you’re dying.
The Benefits of Stress
As far as your body is concerned, you are dying, or at least you’re about to. You’re feeling anxiety, which is the stress response of the sympathetic nervous system preparing to either fight or take flight. In moments of real danger, this is the body’s way of redirecting blood from the digestive system to your muscles to help you deal with the threat. Your heart also pumps faster and your senses are heightened.
The body’s stress response, which increases the release of the hormone cortisol in moments of perceived danger, makes sense if you’re facing a suspicious stranger in a dark parking lot. It’s there to help you defend yourself.
Acute stressors are good for antifragile systems.
What’s even more fascinating is that moments of stress actually make us stronger. The human being is part of a small class of systems that are antifragile, which bestselling author Nassim Taleb — who invented the term in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder — defines as follows:
“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.” [1]
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt likens our ability to get stronger from being stressed to bones, banks and the immune system:
“Bones and the banking system are two examples; both get weaker – and more prone to catastrophic failure – if they go for a long time without any stressors and then face a major challenge. The immune system is an even better example: it requires exposure to certain kinds of germs and potential allergens in childhood in order to develop to its full capacity. Parents who treat their children as if they are fragile (for example, by keeping them away from dirt and potential allergens, such as peanuts) are depriving their children’s immature immune systems of the learning experiences those systems need to develop their maximum protective capacity.” [2]
So stress in this sense is a good thing, a very good thing.
Even during this time of pandemic. Has news of the coronavirus made your stomach drop and your palms sweat? Do you wake up in the morning with a racing heart because you have reason to believe your job might be in jeopardy? Are your eyes swimming with yet another big event being cancelled?
Good! These stress responses are a natural response to a real danger. Drink in the knowledge that your body is functioning as it should! The cortisol flooding your system will make you pay attention to the threat, and drive you to take steps to face it. Haidt continues,
“brief periods of normal stress are not harmful; they are essential. A 2013 review of stress research titled “Understanding resilience” made the analogy to the immune system explicit: “Stress inoculation is a form of immunity against later stressors, much in the same way that vaccines induce immunity against disease.” [3]
Experiencing stress during the pandemic in this way could be an opportunity for humans to revel in their natural resiliency, their antifragility.
But there’s a catch. Stress only makes us stronger if it has a clear beginning and end, and is of short duration.
The Risks of Prolonged Stress
Chronic stress triggers a storm of mental and physiological problems.
It’s been two months, and if you’re anything like me it’s difficult to even remember what life before quarantine was like. Watching people on TV casually gather in crowded restaurants makes you feel like you’ve been transported to a bygone era. You find yourself avoiding the activities you engaged in when quarantine first started because even though you enjoy them, they remind you of how long we’ve been socially isolated and now leave a sour taste in your mouth.
If the sympathetic nervous system’s response to stress is prolonged, our minds and bodies can become weaker. And during coronavirus, our stresses are not brief, and they certainly are not normal.
We find ourselves seeing the timelines for social distancing and economic disruption reaching further and further out into the future. What we were told would take weeks has turned into months, and months are now turning into years when it comes to how long the ramifications of the virus itself as well as the shut-downs will be seen.
And if you were already suffering from prolonged anxiety and chronic stress before the pandemic, you are now in the unenviable position of being thrown into what quite possibly might be the most momentous period of your life with a handicap. That’s like getting an injury at the beginning of the Stanley Cup finals, and still having to play the remaining seven games!
So if brief periods of stress are good and actually make us stronger, what’s so bad about prolonged or chronic stress?
If your sympathetic nervous system doesn’t get down-time after being activated, not only will you feel like you’re dying from morning til night. As Vancounver-based integrative physician, pharmacist, and author Dr. Bal Pawa explains, your mind and entire body will be affected negatively. Chronic stress can have a harmful impact on your digestive, circulatory, and immune systems. In fact, 75% of all doctor visits relate to issues and conditions related to stress hormones, for example insomnia, mood disorders (anxiety and depression), gut (heartburn, IBS), and heart (hypertension)[4].
And because the human brain is so developed, we can experience stress just from our thoughts. That means we have to deal with not just the pandemic itself, but our thoughts about the pandemic. Our fears. Our worries. It’s all just too much!!
Resources for Canadians Seeking Help with Stress
There is help, you just need to reach out.
With all the busyness and expenses of daily life, it can be very difficult to find the time and money to seek help. I know so many people — myself included! — who wish they had some help to manage their stress.
But getting help requires taking the first step and reaching out. A person who is drowning will only reach for a lifeline if they believe they could be saved, and if they want to be saved. In other words, in the midst of despair, we need hope.
Unfortunately, a majority of Canadians suffering from chronic stress seem to be showing signs of despair without hope. A new survey from Nanos Research has found that while more than twice as many Canadians are reporting feeling constant stress as compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic, 63% of them are not even searching online to find out about mental health resources for themselves or their family.
With job losses, illness, fear, economic uncertainty, and the loss of insurance, it’s normal to despair.
But there is reason to hope! There are things you can start doing today to improve your chronic stress.
First, reach out for help. There are online mental health services that are available to Canadians, waiting to be made use of. As CTV news recently reported:
“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that the federal government will spend more than $240 million to support virtual care, with virtual mental health services a major focus.
The government has also created the "Wellness Together" online portal for mental health help. It includes self-assessment tools, education courses and information on where to find counselling. MHCC, which commissioned the Nanos survey, has its own resource portal.” [5]
These tools can help you find counselors and educational resources. They are there, just waiting for you to take the first step.
It can be so difficult to take care of yourself when you’re suffering immensely. If you’re sick in bed with a fever with no one to take care of you, it seems next to impossible to make it to the medicine cabinet.
But you do it because you know you will feel better. If you’re suffering from chronic stress, you just need to take that first step to get help. Your mind, and your body, will thank you.
Second, harness the power of your mind for good. The vicious cycle of
real danger → stress → imagined fear of danger → yet more stress
that comes from the human ability to induce physical stress responses with the mere power of our minds is a double-edged sword. Learn to wield your mind for your benefit, not your downfall!
We can reduce stress and get our immune systems back to the state of being strengthened by shock in part through harnessing the mind’s powers. Make the following practices a daily habit and turn that vicious cycle into a virtuous one:
Reestablish a healthy connection between your brain, gut, and immune system by stimulating your vagus nerve with meditation.
You’ve heard it before — now is the time to put it into practice. Keep a gratitude journal! Remembering what you still have to be thankful for will reduce your stress.
Take a tip from the highly studied and effective technique of reframing negative thinking patterns (a tool of cognitive behavioural therapy). Reframing your thoughts doesn’t mean burying your head in the sand or being naive. Yes, humanity is facing some real challenges right now. We can acknowledge those challenges. What it means is being realistic about how our brains work, and learning how to best hack our biological systems to get better outcomes.
Third, take care of your body by feeding it well. It’s normal to reach for comfort foods like ice cream, chips and other packaged foods during times of stress. And Canadians have been doing a lot of that. But ultimately, you’re going to make your life even more difficult if consuming junk becomes a habit. Your gut will suffer, and since over 70% of your immune system is located in your gut, your immune system will suffer too.
Instead of finding comfort in junk food, reach for whole foods. Grill up a mouth-watering steak, or take pleasure in the sweetness of a strawberry.
And pay attention to some of the lessons we’ve learned about the vulnerabilities of our supply systems and see this pandemic as an opportunity to eat more local foods. Local farms are suffering from the shock of restaurant closures, and buying from them direct will have the twofold benefit of building your body’s immune system with nutrient-dense fresh foods while supporting local businesses. You can find a list of Canadian farms here.
Apply these ideas to your life and you may find yourself back in the realm of acute rather than chronic stress. And acute stress is a good thing!
We are antifragile, and we can come out of this pandemic stronger.
[1] https://fs.blog/2014/04/antifragile-a-definition/