Chronic stress and your brain

Farm Life Psych Podcast: Episode 5 - Chronic Stress and your brain

Is your brain constantly predicting a storm on the horizon? Find out how to calm the whirlwind of chronic stress and reclaim a little peace of mind in this week’s episode!

Join me, Steph Schmidt, a farmer, psychologist, and mum of three, as I unravel why our brain and mind does what it does during times of stress, and a few ideas of what we can do to manage the never-ending demands of modern farm life. With deep insights and practical strategies, I bring a unique perspective on tackling real-world mental health challenges that every farmer faces.

Reference Points:

• Check out Lisa Feldman Barrett and her books, "How emotions are made" and "Seven and a half lessons about the brain"
• Ask Steph Question: "How do we survive the dry unseasonable conditions that is wide spread across SA at the moment?"
• Submit your own Ask Steph Question

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Listen Now and Take Care of You.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Our brain and our body is keeping us alive. But when we start to get caught up in this chronic stress, or we're getting really caught up in these stories and thoughts in our mind, this chronic stress really starts to impact our brain. And we're not getting those messages back into our brain to say, hey, you're safe. If you're new here, I am a farmer, a psychologist, a farm wife, and a mum of three small but mighty boys in South Australia. I run a sheep and cropping farm with my husband and wear multiple hats. And this podcast is all about bringing to life accessible strategies to take care of our mental health and our well-being every day on the farm. Today I'm diving into some more aspects of mental health and well-being, in particular, really starting to explore stress and the impact of prolonged or chronic stress and what happens in our brain, how it affects us, and a couple of things of what we can do to start managing it. I had some great feedback from last week's episode. So if this week's episode resonates with you, please send me a DM on Instagram or LinkedIn. Pop me an email at steph at stephschmidt.com.au. I would love to hear from you. For now, let's get started. Following from last week's episode on taking a break on the farm, had so much feedback from a lot of you, and it definitely resonated a lot. I think the current conditions across a lot of South Australia, the mix of stuff going on in Western Australia, kind of just farming in general, means that yeah, taking a break is not always doable and practical. So just a quick thank you to everyone who reached out after listening to the episode. What I thought I would spend a bit more time exploring today is stress, prolonged or chronic stress, what it looks like in our brain, like what is our brain and our mind doing when we're experiencing stress, and then starting to look into well, what can we do to manage it? And I guess that comes from one, what I think is probably important for a bit of an exploration at the moment, but also one of the ask Steph questions that came through was how do we survive the dry, unseasonable conditions that is widespread across SA at the moment? What is stress? Like we all know stress, we experience it every day, and there are lots of different theories. One thing about psychology, medicine, science research is that what it's really based on is researching hypotheses and in a sense proving them wrong. And so, even though over the last kind of 10 years or so there's been huge advancements in neuroscience and understanding how the brain works and why our brain does what it does, we still don't know everything for sure, and the science is constantly changing, which keeps it pretty interesting as well. I think one of the things I find really great to remember is a little bit of science about our brain, and our brains really are truly amazing. They have evolved over time with one key function to keep us safe, keep us alive. And something I think that's really important to remember is although our world has changed significantly, our environment has changed significantly in what the last hundred but the last thousand or so years after industrialization, we are still our brains and our bodies haven't changed that much since cavemen times. So we still have these cavemen, cavewoman brains dealing with the modern world. And one of the models or theory of the brain, which has strong research behind it, is the information put out by a psychologist and neuroscientist, Sarah Feldman-Barrett. And she has a couple of really great books. One is Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain, and another one which explores emotions. Sarah Feldman-Barrett kind of identifies that our brains are really our command centre for our body and our body budgeter. So, in the same way as we probably have our financial budget for our farm and our families, our businesses, in the same way as that financial budget tracks the money as it's earned and it's spent, the budget for our body tracks resources like water, soul, energy as we gain them and as we lose them. And as a budget, a budget is making predictions about the future. It's not able to base that 100% on reality, on accuracy of what's happening right now. We do a budget ahead of time. And our brain is no different, it's making predictions and choices based on the predictions of the world around us. So every action that you take or you don't take is an economic choice. So your brain is predicting when to spend resources and when to save them. It does this by predicting the energy needs that we're going to have before they actually arise. So that it's making the most efficient choices and the most worthwhile investments in our movements in order to survive. So basically, our brain is continually investing our energy in the hope of earning a good return, such as food, shelter, affection, physical protection. And ultimately, the aim of that is to perform nature's most vital task, passing your genes to the next generation. And so I think when we think about our brain making those economic choices and those withdrawals and those deposits, it can help us to make so when we are in high stress or chronic stress situations, we are often making withdrawal after withdrawal after withdrawal on our body budgets. If we're not getting enough sleep, if we're not topping up that budget with nutrition-rich food, but even things like social connection, satisfaction, exercise is one that is a little bit of both a deficit and a deposit. In the short term, it can be a withdrawal from that body budget, but it can also help to boost it as well. And so just keeping that in mind of where is your body budget at the moment? If we think about stressful events, in everyday life, our body and our brain is constantly looking out for danger. In short-term, like kind of acute stressful situations, our body responds to this by priming our body with the hormones, the chemicals, the oxygen, everything that it needs to either fight or flee from the danger. So, say for example, I don't know, shifting sheep, we've got a highway that runs through the property, so a shifting sheep from one side of the road to the other. You put the signs out, you're doing everything right, but sometimes the trucks don't pay attention. And we don't always have enough hands on deck for having someone waiting on the rover to slow them down. So thinking about this particular situation, I'm trying to shift the sheep. The dogs aren't exactly doing what they are supposed to do, and one the mob slips the mob breaks in half, half going one way and the other half heading towards the gate. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I see a truck potentially getting close to us coming down the highway. So my brain sees that this is a dangerous situation, and it makes the decision to significantly tax my body budget right in that moment. My heart starts beating a lot, my blood pressure increases, the blood runs to my arms and my legs, ready for a fight or flight response. My digestion system kind of gets slowed down because that's not particularly important in that situation. And so, in that moment, suddenly I can run across the paddock a whole lot quicker than I might normally do. My senses also become quite heightened and focused on the stress at hand. My responses to where the sheep are might be quicker than what they normally be. I'm a lot more aware of what the truck's doing and where the dog is. And then thankfully, we get the sheep in order, we get them across the road into the next paddock, the dangers pass, the truck's gone, everything settles back down again. And because I've kind of had that sudden run and rush across the paddock, I can also see that the sheep are away safely. My brain then sends messages to my body to say, hey, the stress has passed, everything is okay, you are safe now. And so while I may feel a little bit shaky, I've used up some extra glucose and energy from my body, I've come back to a somewhat level field. I had that heightened stress response, it's come back down and it's balanced again. And it is, there's been a brief withdrawal from my body budget. Um, but what I might do is go home and have a couple of extra drink of water, have lunch, do some little things to top up that budget again. In contrast to this, when we are in chronic stress, it's almost like there's withdrawal after withdrawal on our body budget without ever giving it that opportunity to recover or make deposits. So we're faced with this ever-deepening deficit in our body budget. And an example I think about for this, particularly in times of stress, often what can become the stresses are those uncontrollables, those things we can't do a whole lot about, but we become really focused on them. So in ongoing dry times or drought, our brain becomes really fixed on that potential threat. Let's listening out for the weather reports and it's reading any different weather update that it might see in the paper and the predictions. And our brain becomes fixed on that in that same way as my brain became fixed on the truck coming. But it's not a short-term acute stress, it's really quite a chronic ongoing stress. But what can happen is my brain senses and perceives that as the same type of danger. So what happens? It sends messages to my body where my heart starts beating more rapidly, my blood pressure increases, the blood runs away from my digestive system and into my arms and my legs, ready for a fight-flight response. I get really charged up, ready to face this stress. But there's never a physical acute stress to face. Instead, it's a stress that kind of just keeps on simmering around in my body. And so we can start to see how this kind of stress and anxiety response can be incredibly helpful. Like, in fact, it's what keeps us alive. If we didn't have that stress response, that danger lookout response, then not only would it be the trucks driving along the road that threatening us when we're shifting a mob of sheep, but it would also be like when we're crossing the road ourselves, we wouldn't sense that danger. Our brain and our body is keeping us alive. But when we start to get caught up in this chronic stress, even if it's for reasons out of our control or we're getting really caught up in these stories and thoughts in our mind, this chronic stress really starts to impact our brain, and we're not getting those messages back into our brain to say, hey, you're safe, everything is okay. Um, and I think another really important lesson or reminder in here is that there is so much information in our world, sensory information, visual information, like if you just look around you where you are right now, there is an incredible amount of stuff going on, and that's not even taking into account all of the stuff you're not aware of, like your body needing to perceive where you are in the world to keep you upright, to keep your organs going, to assess whether it's hot or cold and how to regulate your heart rate and your blood pressure in that situation. So, because there is so much information in the world, our brain imposes order to be able to, I guess, so it's both predicting what's going on around us and then also categorizing this. And one of the downsides to this categorization is that it can get us stuck in suffering, in particular in thinking about our suffering, our challenges, the things that are going wrong, even just the fact that we suffer, like we can get really caught up in these categorizations and the idea that we might suffer in the future. So while our brain is so incredibly helpful, sometimes it can keep us hooked and stuck as well. A couple of other ideas that I just wanted to pull in from Lisa Feldman-Barrett's work. This idea of predicting and our body budget is our brain is doing this without our awareness most of the time. So our brain is this prediction organ which is guessing and preparing for future needs. So, usually, for example, when we're thirsty and we drink water, our brain is predicting that we need to be hydrated before we get to those physical effects of dehydration. Our brain is able to predict how we best manage that budget of going right to function for the next 12 hours, so I need to make sure I'm topping up water. Hey, let's give my body a sign that I'm thirsty, so I go and drink, and we can keep that resource topped up. But what's also happening is our body is paying attention and it's called introsception, this awareness of our body, of our internal state of our body, which is really crucial for maintaining that balanced body budget. So it's almost like the brain is perceiving and predicting the environment around us, but it's also constantly running a model of our body within the world. One of the factors in this is what our body's doing can impact both so how we feel impacts what our body's doing, but what our body's doing can impact how we feel. One of the simplest ways of really noticing this is to just move your body in different directions. So if you're sitting down right now, slump over your shoulders and kind of fold your body inwards and just notice any shift or feeling in the emotions or what that kind of feeling in your body is. And then in contrast, open your body up and sitting up straight. Again, just notice and observe that difference in the sensation and feelings in your bodies. And again, like I said, this is a two-way street. When we find ourselves ruminating over or thinking about the really tough stuff or the challenging thoughts or things that are going wrong, often we can find ourselves in that closing in, that slumped down, shut down position. But when we're having a really upbeat conversation or doing something we love, conversing with uh people or thinking about great memories, we might get more back into that upright open position. So, yeah, just a bit of an interesting experiment to highlight that idea of the two-way street between our body and our feelings. Okay, so coming to this week's Ask Steph question: how do we survive the dry, unseasonable conditions that is widespread across SA at the moment? And yeah, it's really freaking hard. Even though there has been pockets of rain, it is still only pockets. And if you've got rain, good on you. I'm so happy for you. We thankfully we're spread across two properties, so our Maui farm has caught some more rain, but at home it's dry, and it's kind of getting to that point where it it is tiring and it's exhausting, and seeing it all the time, it is hard. Once I finish recording this again, I'm heading off to feed sheep this afternoon, and it's it feels never-ending, and there's also that real pressure and uncertainty of how are the crops going to turn out? Are we going to make the income required to cover the costs for the year? Anyway, going into the pressures, it's not telling you anything you don't know already. So, how do we survive it? I think for one, thinking of surviving is actually okay at this point, it's not necessarily a time where you have to thrive, it's not necessarily a time where you have to be feeling amazing. Like it's okay if you're feeling shit right now, that is okay. But remembering that this too shall pass. Sometimes remembering this idea that our feelings, our emotions are a bit like the weather, they do come and they go. We might have seasons where it is cloudy and overcast and gloomy and down for a fair while, but there are peaks of sunshine in there, and then the weather changes again, and then it's rainy. Maybe not rainy, but the sun comes through. Feelings and our emotions they do change as much as the weather does change as well, and we can kind of build our ability to be the sky and to watch and notice what's happening without getting caught up into it. I think just coming back to that survival question, really bringing it down to the practical, to the doable, also one thing that I really like to think about and remember is workability. So, how is this working right now? And when we think about workability, thinking about how well is what I'm doing working to take me towards what's important to us or what's important to me, and when you're thinking about that workability question, doing it in a way that is honest but also kind and caring and compassionate as well for yourself. So, for example, because my husband's been at other fuck a month and a half, we've been back and forth a lot, but when we are at home and I've got the kids, I often fall into a not so great habit of once they are in bed, I muddle through the jobs that I have to do, and instead of going to sleep, I often find myself watching at the moment it's New Amsterdam on Netflix, and so while in that moment, it is a way of kind of yes, it's relaxing, but it's also avoiding uncomfortable feelings or even just avoiding the fact of going to sleep. I needed to kind of really step in and check on how well was this working? Like it's sitting up and watching one or two episodes of New Amsterdam when I actually really needed to be heading to sleep. How well is that working? And in truth, not well at all. What I've been trying to do this week is being firm. Myself and heading to bed. Last night the boys were being a bit rowdy, so I actually just grabbed the three-year-old at eight o'clock. He was already almost asleep on my lap, and the other boys weren't listening, and I just went, right, we're going to bed. And Darcy and I went into our bed and I just lay there until he fell asleep. I almost fell asleep myself, and then I thought, uh, I'd better go and get the other boys sorted. But once I did get them to bed, I headed to bed soon after. And so for me, the workability at the moment is recognizing that I do need to get some sleep. And so even though I may feel like sitting and watching TV at night or watching Netflix, that's not what's working so well. And so when you're thinking about workability, really bringing that down to the smallest things that you might be doing, and just using it as a check-in for yourself. What are the things that you're doing that are working well? What are those things that are doing that are not working so well? And so, what are the smallest changes you can do? So, again, like you might find that okay, your body needs to be moving to get through some of the stress that's building up at the moment. So, can you just do seven minutes of exercise or just do a walk around the house or actually get out and and get active with the kids? What's the smallest way that you can bring in that workability? I think one recognizing that survival is okay. It is really, really tough. So, validating that experience for yourself, validating where you're at, leaning in with compassion and care to your partner. I think, particularly if you're in a relationship or a multi-generational farm at the moment, these types of stressful conditions, this ongoing stress and dry, can really start to take its toll. So lean in with curiosity and compassion and care for yourself and for the other person. And then checking in with that workability. How well is this working right now? In the same way as you do a workability check on what you're doing on the farm, you're probably checking in on your feed and your budgeting around feed or what you're doing with your seeding program and workability, checking in the workability on what you're doing day to day for yourself as well. Okay, I hope that helps. I would love to hear from you on what you are doing at the moment to survive, to take care of yourself, to take care of your family and your farm at the moment because it's tough. It really, really is. So one I'd love a few reminders. Um, but yeah, I'd really love to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening. Send me a DM on Instagram or a message on LinkedIn with any thoughts or reflections that you've had on today's episode. I'd really love to hear from you. Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode of Farm Life Psych with me, Steph Schmidt. I really hope you have enjoyed it and found it beneficial. If you have, I would love it if you could do three things for me. One, share it with a friend or family member who might also benefit from it. Two, make sure that you subscribe and leave me a five-star review which helps to spread the word. And finally, share it on social media as the more people who can hear about this podcast, the more of us that can really learn the skills needed to survive and get through the tough times as well as the everyday times on the farm. Thank you again for listening and don't forget, you can also send me your own ask step question that I will cover on the podcast. Alright, until next time, take care of you.