People who never suffered anything have worse mental health than people who did
A University at Buffalo study found that people with zero lifetime adversity score worse on mental health than people who have been through some — the stress response itself has to be trained.
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Zero adversity is not the optimum for mental health
Mark Sears, a psychology professor at the University at Buffalo, surveyed roughly 2,000 people using a checklist of 37 major negative life events. People who had been through intense adversity did have the worst mental health — but the zero-adversity group was not the healthiest either. They scored worse on mental health than people who had been through some adversity. The data showed resilience peaking at around four major negative events, a kind of trained-up ‘stress sweet spot’; past that, mental health starts sliding again. An ice-water hand-immersion experiment pointed the same way: people with some adversity behind them reported less pain and were less likely to spiral into catastrophizing.
— Meryl VaughanWhat chronic stress wrecks is the cortisol switch
Normally cortisol rises in the morning to help you wake up, and after a stressful event it spikes briefly and then comes back down on its own — the stressor is gone, so the body should shut the switch off. But research finds that if stress is unrelenting and there is no recovery time, the switching system goes out of calibration: it fails to rise when it should and fires when it shouldn't, which in turn raises the risk of cardiovascular disease and of depression and anxiety. That is the real mechanism behind the claim that chronic stress damages the body — not that stress itself is toxic.
— Meryl VaughanThreat response and challenge response are two different kinds of stress
The same stress can send the body down two completely different paths. In a ‘threat response’ the heart beats faster but the blood vessels do not dilate, so blood fails to reach the limbs and the brain and the whole system is in disarray. In a ‘challenge response’ the vessels dilate along with the heart rate, blood actually gets where it needs to go, anabolic hormones such as testosterone rise, and cortisol is comparatively lower. Researchers say the same person can show both responses in different situations — it is not that some people are born stress-proof and others born to crumble.
— Meryl VaughanTell students stress is fuel and the pass rate changes
Jeremy Jameson, a psychology professor, ran an intervention with more than 300 community college students before a math exam, teaching them to reinterpret sweaty palms and a racing heart as ‘your body mobilizing resources for you’ rather than a sign you are about to fall apart. Those students failed less often than a control group told simply to ignore the stress, and were about 15% more likely to pass, with comparatively more testosterone and less cortisol in their bodies — an effect that replicated across several different groups of students.
— Meryl VaughanSaying ‘I am excited’ makes you sing karaoke more in tune
Another experiment had about a hundred people forced to sing Journey's Don't Stop Believing. Before they opened their mouths, half were told to say out loud ‘I am anxious’ and the other half ‘I am excited’. The people who said ‘I am excited’ not only felt more excited, they also sang more accurately and off-key less often when the recordings were analyzed with software — the same physiological racing heart, and which label you attach to it actually changes what the body does.
— Meryl VaughanThe influencer vagus nerve stimulators have manufacturer money in their evidence
The vagus nerve stimulators sold for a few hundred dollars each do have studies showing stress goes down somewhat after stimulation, and other studies suggesting they may help with PTSD and cluster headaches. But turn to the conflict-of-interest declarations in those papers and the people running the research are often funded by the companies that make the devices. Medical implanted vagus nerve stimulators have been approved by the FDA for treatment-resistant depression and some forms of epilepsy, yet in some studies the effect is not actually that good.
— Meryl VaughanStimulating the vagus nerve is free — it takes one long exhale
You don't need to buy a device: a single slow deep exhale stimulates the vagus nerve. Nerve fibers in the lungs sense the long out-breath and report the signal ‘we are safe’ to the brain, and the brain then brings the heart rate down via the vagus nerve. Anatomist Teresa Larkin suggests inhaling to a count of 4 and exhaling to a count of 5 — making the exhale a bit longer than the inhale makes the effect more pronounced. A meta-analysis pooling dozens of studies found that breathing training and mindfulness meditation are the two categories of relaxation technique best at lowering cortisol.
— Teresa LarkinExercise relieves stress because it has an endpoint
The evidence for saunas and cold plunges is in fact quite weak — the sauna studies had no control group, and in cold plunges the drop in stress hormones only showed up 12 hours after the plunge, with nothing detected at any other time point. What is genuinely well evidenced is exercise: running is itself a stress response, with heart rate and breathing climbing, but once you hit your target you can stop, the body receives the signal that it is already safe, the sympathetic nervous system comes down and the vagus nerve comes up. Systematic reviews and randomized controlled trials both support this.
— Teresa LarkinIn their own words · checked verbatim
But the really interesting part then is comparing people who are at zero adversity to people who are at like some adversity. And the people who are at zero were not the best off. They were actually worse off than the people who had experienced some adversity.
Meryl Vaughan5:12
The little cortisol spigot is like, okay, stressor is gone. I'm going to turn off now.
Meryl Vaughan11:22
It's called the threat response, where even though your heart is pumping blood faster, it can't get out to your limbs and your brain more easily because your blood vessels don't dilate.
Meryl Vaughan12:28
So the aim is like, I want you to take, I want you to approach the stressor because you think you can handle it. So your body is like, go, go, go. Like you can do it. Go get it.
Meryl Vaughan14:35
the ones who said, I am excited, they felt more excited. And not only that, they actually sang the song better than the people who said they were anxious.
Meryl Vaughan19:40
a lot of the time, the researchers doing these studies are getting funding from the companies that make the devices, the vagus nerve stimulators.
Meryl Vaughan26:54
So one of the easiest things people can do is just a breathe in for four but a breathe out for five.
Teresa Larkin29:07
So I think one of the best things about things like exercise is that it has an end point. You stop that stress, so then your body's like, oh, we just got the signal that we've stopped.
Teresa Larkin32:13
Figures
| Survey sample size | about 2,000 people | 4:12 |
| Items on the major negative events checklist | 37 | 4:12 |
| Intervention group's likelihood of passing the exam vs. control | about 15% higher | 17:39 |
| Studies included in the systematic review on exercise and cortisol | 31 studies | 33:15 |
| References cited in this episode | 63 | 37:26 |
Glossary
- vagus nerve
- A nerve running from the brainstem to the internal organs, responsible for bringing the body back to calm after a stress state.
- cortisol
- One of the stress hormones; under normal conditions it rises briefly in response to stress and should then come back down on its own.
- threat response
- A dysregulated stress response in which the blood vessels do not dilate and blood fails to reach the limbs and brain.
- challenge response
- A healthy response in which the vessels dilate and the body genuinely mobilizes its resources to meet the stressor.
- vagus nerve stimulator
- A device that uses electrical current on the neck or inside the body to stimulate the vagus nerve, marketed as reducing stress.
How to listen
Professionals and founders being ground down by chronic work stress who want to know which stress-reduction methods have science behind them.
The sauna and cold plunge section rests on weak evidence and can be skipped; everything else is worth hearing.