Healing from Prolonged Stress
I’ve been reading a wonderful, timely new book about healing from prolonged stress and trauma, Widen the Window—Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma, by Elizabeth Stanley. I purchased it after hearing the author’s interview on an Insights at the Edge podcast, where she synthesized and clearly articulated so many of the things I’ve been learning from the top trauma experts and during my own healing journey.
The “window” Dr. Stanley refers to is our window of tolerance to stressors. When we’re “inside our window,” it’s much easier to function effectively during stressful times, as well fully recover afterwards. As Dr. Stanley explained, “People with wider windows are much more tolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity. They’re more flexible when life throws a curveball, when things don’t go the way they’ve planned and the way we want them to. They’re much more comfortable with difficult people and challenging situations.”
Myra’s son Jeff, and puppy Henry, getting some good rest and recovery through naps and cuddles, December, 2014
The size of an individual’s “window opening” can vary greatly and is largely determined by how we got wired during childhood, as well as our accumulated life experiences. This helps explain why we often see couples who experience the same challenging situation, yet one person appears to endure it with relative ease, while the other falls apart. The good news is that our “window of tolerance” in no way fixed, and there are many effective ways to train ourselves to develop more resilience.
Right now, while we’re dealing with the fears and challenges of COVID, a lack of compassionate and wise national leadership, highly-charged divisions in our country, social injustice, a faltering economy, physical isolation, schooling and working from home, the threats from a changing climate, plus whatever personal challenges we’re facing—all of us could use a little “window widening” to cope with more grace and ease.
Dr. Stanley explains, “Our conventional understanding of ‘trauma’ usually includes only the ‘Capital T’—traumas from shock— not all the accumulating ‘little t” traumas in daily life that are also extremely taxing on our mind-body system.” Stress and trauma exist on a continuum, and chronic stress and trauma result from countless situations, including health challenges, relationship problems, financial hardship and being a member of a marginalized group.
A big lesson I’ve learned is that stress and trauma are experiences in a person’s entire mind-body system, NOT the specific event that kindled the response. There are events that are so catastrophic that only a rare person wouldn’t experience a traumatic reaction, but there are also events that might not seem to qualify as highly “traumatic”—such as a teenager being teased about their acne for a minute at a party—that can result in a trauma response that impacts that young person’s entire life.
In general, the less agency we perceive we have in a particular situation, the more traumatic an experience will likely be for us, which is why learning to “widen our windows” focuses on building our capacity to access choice and personal power in any situation, no matter how difficult.
Humans all have what Dr. Stanley terms a “thinking brain” and a “survival brain.” Our thinking brain—the evolutionarily newest part of the brain—processes information slowly and deliberately. This part of our brain can pay attention, remember things, make plans and ruminate. It forms conscious and cognitive responses to our experiences.
In contrast, our survival brain—the evolutionarily older part of our brain—processes information immediately and unconsciously. If it perceives any type of threat, it turns on our stress arousal responses. Conversely, if it perceives us to be safe, it turns on our recovery functions. The survival brain controls our breathing, heart rate, digestion, elimination, and reproductive functions, so when we’re overstressed without recovery for a long time, we will often begin see symptoms of dysregulation in these systems.
Dr. Stanley points out that humans are still hardwired like our caveman ancestors—with a neurobiology optimized for short bursts of stress, like surviving a predator— rather than to cope with the modern world. In this day and age, we’re routinely overstimulated by such a constant stream of information and other stressors that we often don’t fully recover. Additionally, our culture admires and rewards people who push themselves past their comfort zone. Stress is often viewed as unavoidable or as a badge of honor—not as a call to slow down and deeply recover.
A common problem with our thinking brains is that they often devalue or dismiss how we are actually feeling, with thoughts like, “What’s wrong with me? I shouldn’t be stressed right now. This really isn’t such a big deal.” In my own life, buying into my thinking brain’s judgments led me to what Dr. Stanley calls, “thinking brain override,” which is a “powering-through” pattern where we suppress our physical and emotional pain, and ignore our body and mind’s needs and limits, until our symptoms are so bad we are in crisis. “Many people in our culture live in thinking brain override,” Dr. Stanley explained, “In fact, there is a fair amount of romanticization of it. The idea of grit is very much a thinking-brain override way of being, and it can work for a fair amount of time…until the costs started coming due.” The more the survival brain feels like its message isn’t getting through, the bigger the symptoms it creates to get our attention.
Puppy Henry setting a good example of getting his R&R as often as possible
One of the biggest revelations in my own healing journey that Dr. Stanley explains so well, is that recovery and healing processes are controlled by our survival brain, therefore they cannot be accomplished by our thinking brain. This explains why trying to feel less fearful or anxious through willpower or self-discipline aren’t effective strategies. In my case, it was only when I discovered “bottom up” approaches to healing that focused on calming my nervous system through my body—versus “top down” approaches, that focused on thinking, analyzing and trying to control my reactions—that I could begin to heal physically and emotionally.
Dr. Stanley has created an 8-week online course called Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training which starts next week. I am so impressed with her work that I’ve signed up. I will report on my discoveries early next year. But for now, the simplest exercise Dr. Stanley suggests to give our survival brain cues that we are safe when we begin to notice signs of stress building, is to take our attention away from our thoughts and place it on the points of contact our body is experiencing at that very moment, like the feel of our butt on the chair, our hand on the cup, or the hat on our head.
As Dr. Stanley says, “I think it’s incumbent on all of us right now to do what we can to keep our own windows wide, because our individual window contributes to the collective window, and the collective window today is very narrow. The challenges facing us need creative problem solving. They need clear thinking and wise choices, and that’s only going to happen if we can approach it with wide windows.”
