stress | our stress mess

Stress & Evolutionary Mismatch

Over the last 50,000 years, the human body has undergone minimal evolutionary change. Its systems, functions, and organs have been predominantly the same for over 2,000 generations. Modern humans have ancient bodies and ancient minds that were built to thrive in a world that no longer exists. Our evolutionary design doesn’t work in the 21st century, and this is making us terribly sick. We believe the most misunderstood and under-researched part of this mismatch is our brain’s inability to adapt to the persistent stress created by our modern cultures.

​

Prehistoric people dealt with stress in their lives that was primitive and immediate—attack by wild animals, severe weather, or the death of a family or tribe member. In today's world, we encounter much more complex and persistent pressures. The modern challenges of overdue bills, work deadlines, political turmoil, and social media create new types of stress that our ancient brains are not equipped to handle.

While evolutionary adaptations are constantly taking place, anthropologists estimate that significant biological changes to our species would require thousands of years for the adaptation to spread throughout the human population. This means that, for the immediate future, we're stuck living in a world where we experience persistent stress that our brains can’t naturally process. Our bodies respond to this mismatch in ways that make us feel unwell and which usually leads to serious disease. But there is a way to change this.

Modern Stress and the Body's Response

If you're like most people you experience stress every day. No stress is an overused word applied to everything from anxiety to worry so we need to be clear about our definition. By stress, we mean the body’s physical and mental responses to challenging changes, events, or activities (called stressors) in which the brain responds to stressors with the familiar “fight-or-flight” response. This is a natural process your body automatically initiates when encountering something your mind perceives as a threat. Psychologists refer to this process as an “acute stress” response. When this happens, hormones are released that instantly prepare your body to defend itself from the perceived danger (fight) or run away from it (flight). These hormones increase your heart rate and elevate your blood pressure to flood your muscles with glucose and oxygen to prepare them for action. While the fight-or-flight response happens instantaneously, it takes about 30 minutes for your bodily functions and hormone levels to return to normal.

​

The acute stress response helped our ancient ancestors survive in a different and more dangerous environment than the world we live in today. When threatened by a wild animal, they needed to instantly fight or flee if they didn’t want to become dinner. While we may not encounter this type of life-threatening danger, our fight-or-flight response is still activated many times each day. When we experience events and situations that frustrate or intimidate us, our mind perceives them as equally life-threatening as a wild animal attack, causing our nervous system to activate our acute stress response. In other words, the daily social stressors in our lives—relationship challenges, financial problems, pressures at work—repeatedly activate our fight-or-flight response. It can become a never-ending cycle that is very damaging to our health. To understand why this is so harmful and its connection to debilitating ailments and chronic disease, let’s look at the physical changes that occur in the body during a fight-or-flight reaction.

​

The acute stress response is triggered automatically, outside our mental control. It starts with a part of your brain called the amygdala, which serves as a fear center for the nervous system. When the amygdala interprets something as a threat, it alerts another brain structure known as the hypothalamus to signal our adrenal glands to release epinephrine (also called adrenaline) and cortisol hormones.

​

Epinephrine accelerates our heart rate and constricts our arteries to increase blood pressure, accelerating the speed at which blood flows throughout our body. Cortisol causes more glucose (sugar from foods we consume) to be available in the bloodstream. Together, these hormones rapidly deliver glucose and oxygen to our large muscle groups, energizing them for immediate physical action—to fight or flee. When our body expends energy through this conflict or rapid retreat, the glucose is used up, and our blood sugar levels return to normal. Once the amygdala perceives that a threat no longer exists, it signals the hypothalamus to slow the release of epinephrine and cortisol. Heart rate, blood pressure, and hormone levels return to normal within half an hour.

​

Unfortunately, in today's world we repeatedly experience acute stress responses throughout the day. We are behind on an important work project, argue with a coworker, or read a disturbing post on social media. We cannot recover from one stressful event before the next re-activates our fight-or-flight response. In this continuous stress cycle, cortisol repeatedly floods our bodies at levels damaging to our health. This is where stress connects with inflammatory illness and disease. The primary role of cortisol in the fight-or-flight response is to increase blood sugar levels so that more glucose is available for muscle groups. The problem is that when the acute stress response is activated over and over throughout the day (called chronic stress) it results in flooding the body with excessive cortisol that keeps glucose circulating in the bloodstream. Ultimately, this glucose is converted into excess fat and stored throughout the body.

​

If enough of these fat deposits are present they will activate an immune response that causes inflammation in the body. We experience this inflammation as one or more debilitating symptoms, including weight gain, fatigue, insomnia, aches, depression, and digestive issues. The inflammation is created because the immune system has activated cells to defend the body, because the excess fat storage released signals similar to signals released when the body is under attack by a virus or infection. Finding no foreign bodies to fight, the immune cells causing the inflammation can become confused and attack healthy tissues and organs, leading to one or more chronic diseases.

Mismatch Method Active Relaxation Practices

As we worked with healthcare professionals and researchers to develop this program, we often asked them what percentage of adults they believe have some chronic body inflammation. Their most common response was that it’s likely that everyone is experiencing it at some level. This answer may be sad and sobering, but it makes sense when you examine current health data for U.S. adults.

​

Statistically, the average American’s unhealthy diet, sedentary lifestyle, and high-stress load almost ensure that most of us have or are developing chronic inflammation. Over 60% of the average diet is processed food, 4 in 5 adults report symptoms of prolonged stress, and 75% perform less than 30 minutes of daily physical activity. It’s no wonder that so many of us feel unwell and develop serious illnesses.

​

Many people exercise daily, others consume only healthy and nutritious foods, and some practice methods and techniques to deal with stress. However, few individuals understand the importance of or know how to focus on all three. The Mismatch Method provides you with the knowledge and tools to address these three areas. To help you cope with the persistent stress of the 21st century, the program uses an innovative system of active relaxation practices synthesized into daily Brain Training activities.

Mismatch Method Brain Training

As mentioned, modern humans experience one stressful event after another many times throughout the day, and our amygdala interprets them as dangerous events. Our fight-or-flight response is activated repeatedly and floods our bodies with hormones resulting in chronic inflammation and serious disease.

​

When we perform the daily Mismatch Method Brain Trainings we strengthen our brain’s resilience to stress. Using brain imaging studies, medical researchers have found that test subjects who use these practices displayed less neural activity in their amygdala than those that did not. As a result, they were less reactive to the fight-or-flight response when encountering stressful events. Additionally, these Brain Training activities build stress resiliency for those instances when we do experience a fight or flight response. This increases the speed of recovery from acute stress responses and a return to baseline brain and body processes. 

​

By lowering the intensity of our fight-or-flight responses, our bodies produce less cortisol, enabling more optimal functioning of our metabolic systems. Less fat is stored in the body, fewer immune responses are activated by fat cells, and chronic inflammation is reduced.

​​