Daily Brain Freeze: Training The Stress Response
“How do you train for stress?”
We asked this question to a group of students recently and it led to a great conversation. The definition of stress culturally is “everything and anything” uncomfortable. This makes it pretty difficult to train and prepare for stress effectively.
Stress physiologically is an increase in glucocorticoids-a stress hormone-in our body.
Stress drives adaptation-for better or for worse.
How we train for stress fundamentally alters our bodies response to stress. The cascade of chemicals that accompany an increase in glucocorticoids plays a role in our stress handling capacity as well.
Here’s a snipped from this paper on stress physiology and the role of cortisol. Full paper here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK538239/#_article-20047_s1_
“The human body is continually responding to internal and external stressors. The body processes the stressful information and elicits a response depending on the degree of threat. The body’s autonomic nervous system is broken down into the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). In times of stress, the SNS gets activated. The SNS is responsible for the fight or flight response, which causes a cascade of hormonal and physiological responses. The amygdala is responsible for processing fear, arousal, and emotional stimuli to determine the appropriate response. If necessary, the amygdala sends a stress signal to the hypothalamus.[5] The hypothalamus subsequently activates the SNS, and the adrenal glands release a surge of catecholamines, such as epinephrine. This results in effects such as increased heart rate and respiratory rate. As the body continues to perceive the stimuli as a threat, the hypothalamus activates the HPA axis. Cortisol is released from the adrenal cortex and allows the body to continue to stay on high alert. Acutely, cortisol’s catabolic mechanisms provide energy to the body.”
Leveraging cortisol and training the stress response isn’t something that can be accomplished in states of peace and relaxation. That’s why training is so important to train for stress in cultivated stress scenarios.
The Physiology First in Action segment below is an example of how we train for stress at our campus. Let us know how YOU train for stress and let’s build a stress training toolkit together.
