The best way to find yourself is to lose
yourself in the service of others. - Mahatma Gandhi
How to Transform Stress into Courage and Connection
--by Kelly McGonigal, syndicated from Greater Good, Jun 29, 2015
Stress
doesn't always lead to fight-or-flight, says Kelly McGonigal. It can also activate
brain systems that help us connect with other people.
In
the late 1990s, two psychology researchers at UCLA were talking about how the female scientists in
their lab responded differently to stress than the men did. The men would
disappear into their offices; the women would bring cookies to lab meetings and
bond over coffee. Forget fight-or-flight, they joked. The women were tending and
befriending.
The
joke stuck in the mind of one of the women, postdoctoral researcher Laura
Cousino Klein. Psychology research has suggested that stress leads to
aggression, but that wasn’t her experience. And it didn’t fit with what she
observed in other women either. They were more likely to want to talk with
someone about their stress, spend time with their loved ones, or channel their
stress into caring for others. She wondered if it was possible that science had
gotten stress wrong.
Klein
decided to dig deeper into the science, and she made the surprising discovery
that 90 percent of the published research on stress was conducted on males. This
was true of animal studies as well as human studies. When Klein shared this
observation with Shelley Taylor, the director of the lab she worked in,
something clicked for her, too. Taylor challenged her lab to study the social
side of stress, especially in women. Looking at both animal and human research,
they found evidence that stress can increase caring, cooperation, and
compassion.
While
the tend-and-befriend theory began as an investigation into the female response
to stress, it quickly expanded to include men—in part because male scientists
said, “Hey, we tend and befriend, too!”
Taylor’s
team, along with other research groups, began to demonstrate that stress doesn’t
only motivate self-defense, as scientists had long believed. It can also unleash
the instinct to protect your tribe. This instinct sometimes expresses itself
differently in men than it does in women, but the two sexes share it. In times
of stress, both men and women have been shown to become more trusting, generous,
and willing to risk their own well-being to protect others.
Why
would stress lead to caring?
From
an evolutionary point of view, we have the tend-and-befriend response in our
repertoire first and foremost to make sure we protect our offspring. Think of a
mama grizzly protecting her cubs, or a father pulling his son from the wreckage
of a burning car. The most important thing they need is the willingness to act
even when their own lives are at risk.
To
make sure we have the courage to protect our loved ones, the tend-and-befriend
response must counter our basic survival instinct to avoid harm. We need
fearlessness in those moments, along with confidence that our actions can make a
difference. If we think there’s nothing we can do, we might give up. And if we
are frozen in fear, our loved ones will perish.
At
its core, the tend-and-befriend response is a biological state engineered to
reduce fear and increase hope. The best way to understand how the
tend-and-befriend response does this is to look at how it affects your
brain:
* The social caregiving system is regulated by oxytocin. When this system
is activated, you feel more empathy, connection, and trust, as well as a
stronger desire to bond or be close with others. This network also inhibits the
fear centers of the brain, increasing your courage.
* The reward system releases the neurotransmitter dopamine.
Activation of the reward system increases motivation while dampening fear. When
your stress response includes a rush of dopamine, you feel optimistic about your
ability to do something meaningful. Dopamine also primes the brain for physical
action, making sure you don’t freeze under pressure.
* The attunement system is driven by the neurotransmitter serotonin.
When this system is activated, it enhances your perception, intuition, and
self-control. This makes it easier to understand what is needed, and helps
ensure that your actions have the biggest positive impact. In other words, a
tend-and-befriend response makes you social, brave, and smart. It provides both
the courage and hope we need to propel us into action and the awareness to act
skillfully.
Here’s
where things get interesting. A tend-and-befriend response may have evolved to
help us protect offspring, but when you are in that state, your bravery
translates to any challenge you face. And—this is the most important
part—anytime you choose to help others, you activate this state. Caring for
others triggers the biology of courage and creates hope.
Whether
you are overwhelmed by your own stress or the suffering of others, the way to
find hope is to connect, not to escape. The benefits of taking a
tend-and-befriend approach go beyond helping your loved ones, although this, of
course, is an important function. In any situation where you feel powerless,
doing something to support others can help you sustain your motivation and
optimism.
The
tend-and-befriend theory doesn’t say that stress always leads to caring—stress can indeed make us
angry and defensive. The theory simply says that stress can, and often does,
make people more caring. And when we care for others, it changes our
biochemistry, activating systems of the brain that produce feelings of hope and
courage.
I
wrote my book The
Upside of Stress with that
purpose in mind: to help you discover your own strength and compassion. Seeing
the upside of stress is not about deciding whether stress is either all good or
all bad. It’s about how choosing to see the good in stress, and in yourself, can
help you meet the challenges in your life. Tending and befriend is one of the
best ways to do this, and to transform your own stress into a catalyst for
courage and connection.
This
article is printed here with permission from the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC). Based at UC Berkeley, the GGSC
studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches
skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society. You can
learn more about the science and power of gratitude at the Greater
Good Gratitude Summit.
The
author, Kelly McGonigal, PhD, is
a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University, and a leading expert
in the new field of “science-help.” She is the author of The
Willpower Instinct and The
Upside of Stress.
Be The Change: How can you
choose today to see the good in stress?
