Stress Researcher: What Person A Does That Person B Doesn’t (Avoid Burnout) | Joana De Calheiros Velozo

0:00How stressed are we as a nation? We're incredibly stressed. Over 60 % of people report so much stress that it completely affects their daily lives. We've noticed that one of the things people struggle the most is identifying how they feel. People are not really able to name their emotions. The wheel of emotions that has like 200 emotions on it. And it's when I show them that you see their faces just go, wow, actually maybe I do feel this. Emotional granularity is incredibly important. Being able to really identify the emotion is already half the battle to being able to regulate appropriately. Stress can feel really overwhelming, but stress can translate into multiple emotions.

0:40Was there a moment in your life that got you super interested in this? I'm Joanna, a researcher in biomedical science with a background in mental health. In my life, I myself suffered tremendous amounts of stress, actually. I used to suffer from panic disorder and I had agoraphobia and it was so incredibly debilitating that I couldn't leave the house. I love this line, the dose makes the poison. Because a bit of stress builds you, too much breaks you and like weightlifting, it's the recovery that makes you stronger, not the strain itself. How important is recovery? That's really where we see the differences in people who develop health concerns over people who don't.

1:16What's person A doing that person B isn't doing in those moments to handle stress? I think the biggest thing that we talk about is this locus of control. I don't know if you've ever heard about that. No, what's the locus of control? The locus of control is... If you are a regular listener to this show or live well, be well, or this is your first episode you're listening to, I really want to ask just a very small quick favor. If you could please hit the subscribe button or leave a review, this helps the show more than you can imagine. It means the world to help growing this show. and you all know that I have a huge thing to want to hit 100 ,000 on YouTube this year and I can't do that without your support.

1:54I really aim to bring you the best guests possible out there and I pride myself in doing that for the show because it's so important but to keep the guests coming to get them to be bigger and to bring more helpful information to your ears and your eyes I really would love to ask you to subscribe to the show. Thank you. I want to start with a question on is there really such a thing as good stress or is it just clever branding? Yes, there is. Actually, stress is essential for you to do things in life. Stress is actually a sign of a healthy stress response system. It means that your body is regulated effectively.

2:35Okay, so that's interesting because I think a lot of us can talk about stress as the enemy. um i think one of the most common statements that i use is i'm just feeling very stressed many people will relate to that but then i was thinking like what if stress isn't the problem and it's actually like our relationship to stress itself and so how much of stress is what happens to us and how much is it that we interpret it first i think it's important for us to define stress um stress is your body's response to something that's destabilizing your homeostasis your normal equilibrium let's say it being destabilized is normal but how you respond to that disturbance is really what matters i think that's the thing right it's not being afraid of it and i think a lot of us especially having dr lisa feldman barrett on here the neuroscientist she a lot about how we have emotions and how it's predictions of past memories.

3:36And it really made me think a lot about our relationship to stress. So is it possible to be addicted to stress? Addicted to that like high feeling that so many of us can have when it comes to stress without us knowing it? I mean, stress can be confused with excitement and adrenaline, right? They all elicit the same stress response, but the feelings we associate with that response are different, right? When you're addicted to stress, you are excited all the time. You're always on the move, always wanting to feel. It's energy. Basically, stress is energy. And you can direct that energy into something really positive or something really debilitating.

4:18That differentiation happens in your mind, actually. Yeah, I want to decode that a lot today, like the mind and the body. And it's quite like a stoic saying, but I love this. We suffer more in imagination than in reality, but maybe the modern version is that we suffer the most when we don't understand the pattern of our own stress. So I think about like the landscape of stress today, like how stressed are we as a nation? We're incredibly stressed, to put it very mildly, but we actually see that the statistics are incredible, right? Over 60 % of people report so much stress that it completely affects their daily lives, right?

4:56About 30 % experience chronic stress, right? So we really see that it affects us all. Outside the statistics, you just know that virtually everyone experiences phases of more or less stress, but we all handle it very differently. And that's what's really important to recognize. Yeah, that's really interesting, actually. It's a question I was thinking about coming here. Why do two people respond to stress so differently? Because one person might, it might send them spiraling and the other person they seem to not collapse at all like why is there two different responses to stress from yeah so i'd like to dive a little bit into stress before answering that question because i'd like to explain a little bit what is stress in the sense that people often think of stress as specific events or behaviors you know things people think that things are objectively stressful this interview is stressful that accident was stressful that meeting, that feedback, you know, we have these objective events, right?

5:56But actually that's not the case at all, right? Stress is entirely subjective, right? It is really in the eye of the beholder, if you will. Anything can be stressful or not. And what is stressful to you might not be stressful to me and what's stressful to me today might not be stressful to me tomorrow. The first thing that's important to recognize is that stress is actually not external to us. Stress is entirely internal to us, right? It is our perception, our experience of things that dictates whether something is stressful or not, right? Yeah. So actually, we're going through this two kind of phase approach in that you first appraise a stimuli as being, one, important to you and posing some type of threat to you.

6:44So there's something that can happen out of this that might affect me. It could be a physical threat or it could be an emotional threat, like my self-esteem will be hindered. And two, I appraise, is the situation something that I'm able to handle or not, right? And it's in the second part that it's really important, right? In the second part, if you feel that you can handle it, you approach it quite differently. But then what I want to go into is once you've established that, okay, this situation is quite stressful and it's triggering my body to respond, right? To allocate a lot of resources into handling this.

7:17you can this is stress response has two dimensions let's talk one is the physical dimension right your body responds to the stressful yeah like the fast heartbeat the sweaty palms like the shakes yeah you feel it in your body yeah but then you have the emotional response to the stressor and it's the emotional response to the stressor that will dictate how it will shape you and how it will affect you. Wow, there's so much about mindset with stress, isn't there, that we don't see. Do you think a lot of this is like tied to how we're brought up from a young age, like how we've perceived our parents to understand stress?

7:56Or do you think that as the world's feeling more heavier, there's more demand, there's less time to switch off, the constant pressure, the financial constraints, like all of these other ways that we're living in a very stress-dominated world, that. I mean, we never turn off. Unlike my parents who would come home after work and there wasn't a phone and there was no way to contact you, like you would have stress at work in one isolated area and then you'd come back and then you would just be at the family because there was no way to contact you. So with those two dimensions, like how do you think it's shaping our stress today with that emotional response as it seems to be a real mindset approach than with like a physiological a cool reaction.

8:36It's really interesting that you say that because a lot of people do associate work as stress and home as not stress. But like I said, it's actually not that objective. And actually, yes, we are in an environment that is more stimulating than ever. But actually, if you look at previous generations, there was tremendous amount of stress as well. You know, the shaping of our mind comes in. It's not so much in the environment that we're in, but It's something that we call this diathesis stress model. So if you think about the fact that when you are born, you actually already have a higher or lower predisposition to experience, to be more or less sensitive to stress.

9:14That's the first thing. Wow, just from the moment you were born, it's like genetics. Yes, of course. Genetics play an important role. If your parents are more sensitive to stress, you're also more likely to be more sensitive to stress. That's normal. That's the first thing. The second thing is that can either be exacerbated or minimized by your environment, right? If your parents not only are more sensitive to stress, but they also exhibit these types of responses in their behavior, and if you go through events that can be traumatic or difficult and you're witnessing around you certain ways in which people respond to stress, you will also emulate that.

9:50So that will exacerbate. The thing is that if you start at a place where you're already a bit more sensitive, It means that daily stressors will, you will experience more things as stressful and that in turn will play a heavier role on you, right? So it's kind of a loop, right? So when you see people going through similar events and some of them coming out fantastic and other people coming out with all kinds of troubles, there's already that whole background there, right? On how they have learned and grown to be more or less sensitive to stress. Now, the great thing about it is that you can cut that, right?

10:26You're not a victim to that situation. You have a power to kind of cut that loop for yourself. I love that you just used the word victim because I think that's so important when thinking about the word resilience. Yeah. And stress and resilience to me kind of go hand in hand. I think some of my hardest moments, and even speaking to a lot of people, people that listen to the show and write in and tell me their stories, the resilience is built through stress. But like, how do you balance that? How is, how important is stress to building resilience? And when is it too much? And resilience kind of then just becomes broken.

11:05So first I'd like to ask you, maybe, how do you define resilience? I define resilience in the sense that each time that you step into the moment of not letting a situation define you and you can have a more of a reflective process, you can have the strength and courage to move forward. And each time you take those learnings and each time the situations appear smaller and smaller and smaller, it's like approaching a mountain. Like at the beginning, you can see the mountain that feels so humongous and terrifying and that you've got to climb this huge peak. But each step of that journey, it becomes a little less hard and a little bit more manageable.

11:49That's my understanding of it. And I think that's maybe my own personal journey with it. But I think you can't be resilient without having compassion connected to it. And that's a big part of it, because I think if you're constantly beating yourself up and then you're getting all the external resources of people beating you up or the environment or things feeling too much, like that will always feel very distant, that peak. But if you kind of got your own back, that helps you build the resilience. That's my interpretation. So that is not how I define resilience. That's why I wanted to ask, because then it also helps understand better your question, because the way that I look at resilience and actually the way that we define resilience in stress research is that your body exhibits the appropriate stress response for the appropriate situation.

12:39So that actually your body is regulating itself effectively so that in a situation that demands you to experience a stress response, that demands you to gather all of your resources and energy to face some challenges, it does so appropriately and then recovers appropriately, right? Or doesn't exhibit a stress response when there is no need for one. So resilience is really about having an effective regulatory system in a way. And if you have them, then you're also much more capable of handling these challenges, right? Yeah, I guess I totally can align with that. But I also think that unless you experience stress, you don't build resilience.

13:21I kind of see resilience as a muscle that you have to push, which is why I think about it as seeing a mountain because I think you know these people people have experience and I've had heard amazing stories of people that experience such hardships through their life and they have this amazing amount of resilience in them so if but I think the thing where it can go a bit wrong and I think I've gone into this before it's like the hustle culture you know like we're very much now in maybe there is a toxic resilience culture building where it's all about go go go go and burnout is a very common word now you hear that like all over social media and linkedin and you know a lot of people building companies or you know even like you know doctors and think about covid like the amount of people that were burnt out um how do we understand stress in this environment like the hustle culture yeah well the environment plays a really big role of course if we're always on we never have the time to recover i think what happens and i think that's where also social media and all of these new technology that we are lucky to have but that also play a big role in our our health they really disconnect us from ourselves in this in this hustle culture i think what we see happening is actually people stop tuning in, stop paying attention to the signs that their bodies are telling them, right?

14:47So people don't just wake up and are in the burnout, right? There's normal many signs leading up to that. And we just fail to listen and intervene earlier, right? And that's often because we feel that we should be always on, right? That the society demands that of us and that we should be capable, right? It's almost a badge that we carry, right? That we keep going despite the fact that maybe we shouldn't and it's not good for us, right? How can someone interpret if they're under chronic stress? How you respond to the small daily hassles. That's really the type of stress that we're looking at. And that really builds up, right?

15:26So if everything is causing you to respond and you're unable to recover after that, that piles up, right? That starts loading on the system. Eventually that can really overload the system. But as it builds up, what you will notice is, one, more things will cause you stress, right? So things that didn't feel important before now start causing you to respond, right? So you used to have your daily Monday meeting and now you're stressed to go there. Two, it will take you longer to recover, right? Things will be harder to manage, right? It means that your stress system is actually no longer resilient.

16:05It's struggling to regulate effectively. Three, you will start experiencing somatic things as well, right? You might get migraines, back pain. So, you know, the 9 out of 10 people that go to the GP, it's due to stress actually. And it's normally by the time that you get physical complaints, it's your body physically telling you, please stop, pay attention, something's going on. You'll be tired a lot more often, you need more to sleep, you're fatigued quicker. your emotions will be a lot more volatile. It will be harder for you to, you might feel that your emotions are more negative or that you go from positive to negative a lot quicker.

16:49And if you have a menstrual cycle, you really notice it in your menstrual cycle, right? You might feel more cramps, you might miss a cycle. So it really is intimately related to that. So there's lots of signs in your body that things are happening that need attention. and that's all in the build-up to burnout. And by the time you reach burnout, you've completely overloaded the system so much so that it sort of shuts down. As someone who has spent a long time studying the mind-body connection, I'm constantly asked, what do I use to track my health? Since April, you've probably seen, if you're watching the show, me wearing a piece of tech on my arm and that is no watch because I genuinely believe it has been one of the most thoughtful and mind-aware pieces of tech that you can wear.

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18:49And this little gadget helps you on your journey. Do you see from your own research, because you've done a lot of research on stress and I kind of want to get to you in a second about why we're here talking about this but do you see a lot of people that are just disengaged from noticing how stressed they are I think there's a couple things I think people are not so comfortable thinking and talking about stress that's the first thing and there's a lot of misunderstanding around stress and two I think they're not so much disengaged with how stressed they feel but actually I think they're disengaged with how they feel periods so actually we noticed that one of the things people struggle the most is identifying how they feel right people are not really able to name their emotions or you know recognize what's happening in their body so I think there's really a disconnect between people and themselves yeah I think that's a really big thing that the vocabulary around language and emotions because if you think about when we're at school we're never taught how with how we feel so we kind of go into this weird emotional landscape of beno brown always says you know and i don't know if this is scientifically completely correct but that we only really have language for three emotions sadness fear and happiness and we kind of put them into that one bucket where actually there's so many there's like 200 emotions but we don't have the literature and our own language to be able to describe that so that creates a big block and I give my patients in clinic this the wheel of emotions that has like 200 emotions on it and it's when I show them that you see their faces just go wow actually maybe I do feel this yeah and it's that moment of like feeling seen and all of a sudden you just see their shoulders like relax because they themselves have understood it yeah and I think about that as a child you know when you're a child, you're very frustrated because you can't have the vocabulary to tell your parents or tell your caretakers who's looking after you, how you're feeling.

20:58And it feels like that's very similar to what you just said around stress. Absolutely. And you know that emotional granularity is incredibly important, right? Being able to really identify the emotion is already half the battle to being able to regulate appropriately, right? And that's intimately connected stress. So stress can feel really overwhelming, but stress can mean, can translate into multiple emotions. It could be excited, scared, frustrated, happy. You know, it could be a multitude of things and helping pinpoint exactly the emotion associated with the body is feeling really helps. But we don't take time for it.

21:39No. How can you get people on here to connect to understanding their emotions a bit more in relation to stress. Actually, a lot of my research was actually on that. Also, how to track emotions of people throughout the day. And one of the big things that we actually notice is just by starting to ask people how they feel throughout the day, it already helps them feel better, better mood. Like overall, there's a tremendous amount of health outcomes by just stopping the question for yourself. So that's where we start, actually. And when we actually ask about how do people feel, we want people to think of emotions in these two dimensions.

22:18I don't know if you've ever heard of the circumplex model of emotion, but really emotions are not just emotional, but they also have very much a physiological component, right? So when you check in, we think, okay, first think, how is your body feeling, right? Does that mean that you're connecting more to like the interception? Absolutely. Which I think people might not know, but it's more about connecting internally to the bodily sensations. Yeah, absolutely. So that's the first level. Indeed, interception. What is my body saying? And two, what is the valence associated with that? What is the specific emotion associated with what my body is expressing?

22:55And that's where you can start understanding stress better. Because stress is not just, I'm afraid of this. It's also, I'm excited about this. It's sometimes a mix of both, right? And that will help manage it. And also use it as a resource because stress can be a fantastic and powerful resource, right? If you don't experience stress, you're also not engaged with life. You're not motivated. You will not go out and do the things that you actually really want to do. So it's important to also harness that energy. I love that. It's like using stress as a compass, basically. So I was just thinking about what you were saying there.

23:32So I guess like somebody could interpret this because journaling is such a big thing now. Everyone's, you know, which is great. Everyone's, you know, doing morning pages or journaling. And a lot of people write to me and say, well, I just don't quite know what to journal about. This could be an amazing way that to help you understand your stress response better, I guess. It's like, how am I feeling? Could be the first question. What am I feeling? Which is the interception. And then the third question, which was, remind me, what's my body telling me yeah those three things could be quite a good indicator because i think sometimes we always try and demand an answer yeah you know um we kind of we're all problem solvers at the end of the day we kind of really want to get to the solution and also you have to think that there's no right answer right uh it's it's whatever makes sense to you in that moment and you become better as you practice it it also helps you being much more able to identify when things are okay and when things are actually not okay.

24:32When should you go visit the doctor, right? That's so true. I think so many people listening to this will connect to moments when, I don't know, maybe they've had like GI distress or they're feeling constant nausea or the migraines or, you know, they're so anxious that they're not going to sleep. There's all these signals and maybe they're in the wrong relationship, but they're like, no, I'm really going to push through this. Or they're really unhappy at work, but they're determined to not give up and they're like pushing against all these signals where their body's like maybe this isn't right for you yeah and that's your internal compass but it's so easy for the mind to override those signals yeah I think it's so interesting so I want to go a little bit into stress phenotypes but before I do you know I always find it really interesting when every guest who sits here as an expert in their field and I don't think people just walk into the job that they do especially if it's in research like normally there is such a passion behind why somebody is so interested in this area so joanna just give everyone a small introduction to like who you are and why you entered this field like was there a moment in your life that got you super interested in this well i'm i'm joanna i'm a researcher in biomedical science with a background in mental health and i actually got really passionate about stress because i really see it as the the linchpin to everything else.

25:56In my life, I myself suffered tremendous amounts of stress. Actually, I used to suffer from panic disorder and I had agoraphobia and it was so incredibly debilitating that I actually couldn't leave the house for quite a lot of time because it caused panic attacks. And it got me really interested in the topic and how, of course, I think when you suffer from something, you will search for answers on how to deal with it. So at the time it felt that my life was so tied to this disease really that I was looking for answers. And so as a researcher, I went on to research these answers and it's actually been very liberating because once you start understanding what's happening in your body and how your mind influences things, then you realize that there's actually nothing to be afraid of.

26:48So I always really looked at stress as something that's happening to me but actually I have a big role to play in this relationship what helped you kind of flip that and go from somebody who had panic attacks and I think so many people will relate to this yeah I think a lot of times people also don't realize how extreme their panic attacks can be and are just so confused and then to not leaving the house to sat here now as a researcher talking about it super confident you know working with an amazing company like how what what helped you get from that stage to stage two so i think one of the things with panic attacks i think with stress in general is this feeling that things are really beyond your control right that you don't have the resources to do something about it and it can be really really scary so no matter how much you can tell yourself well this is a safe situation and nothing is going to happen to me sometimes the body isn't listening also because this relationship actually goes both ways.

27:48The body sends signals to the mind, the mind sends signals to the body, right? So sometimes the body has received messages and has reinforced messages that are not correct anymore and we need to unlearn them basically. But in that process, it can be very scary because you don't have the tools. For me, what has been incredibly liberating is to, you know, it's a couple of things. I think one thing is actually just letting go. Like really that things are, yes, I do not have control over them and that's actually okay. So one thing with stress is that you are always trying to look for things that you can control and it's stressful because you don't have.

28:32And for me, the answer has been to stop looking for ways to control it, but accept that I cannot control it. And the second step is to recognize that no matter what happens, I will be able to handle it. So if you think before a big event, I used to ruminate a lot, right? And when you ruminate, that's actually a stress on its own. So you're actually already having a stress response before the event has happened. I'm interrupting for one moment to ask one small favor, please subscribe to the show this helps it grow more than you know and I'm so bad at asking this from you I'm so bad at thinking about this but you know my goal is a hundred thousand to get to on YouTube and I really want to bring you more content and better guests and bigger episodes and we can only do that with your help together so please do hit subscribe thank you I love this line, the dose makes the poison.

29:36Because a bit of stress builds you, too much breaks you. And like weightlifting, it's the recovery that makes you stronger, not the strain itself. It's kind of my interpretation of that. And it was really interesting hearing you talk about it, because a couple of years ago, I started introducing into clinic the word, how would you feel if you just let go? And so many people would come back to me and say, that's been so powerful. Yeah. Just to say to myself, like, just actually, like, letting go of it. Because I do think, and I might be completely wrong, and I might be stereotyping, I put myself in this category, which is why I say it as an opinion and anecdotal, but, like, I'm very type A and I'm very perfectionist.

30:18And I think those types of people tend to want to have more control. and so stress can build when we don't naturally see things fitting to place properly and I've always been quite jealous of those people that feel way more laid back and like are laying horizontal I have some friends where I just think wow you're so relaxed and realize that that was so much of my own interpretation about stress and so the word letting go and actually knowing that you can't control every situation is really, really powerful. And then I think, you know, going back to the resilience conversation that we had, there's those moments in our lives that like just hit us like a bus.

31:01And everyone will have that in their lives. But actually what I found is those moments are like the most defining moments of your life. Absolutely. And actually what you just described here, it's a very adaptive stress response system. It's a very resilient system. So if you experience something once that caused tremendous stress, but it works out well, the second time you actually shouldn't experience much of a stress response is actually called habituation. Your body habituates to that situation. Wow. Okay. So how, for any of those people that are listening and go, oh my gosh, that's me. I actually had a conversation with a friend yesterday where her sister is not leaving the house at the moment because she has extreme amounts of depression and anxiety and panic attacks.