The Psychoneurobiological Mechanics of Stress
A deep dive into how stress is accumulated and released.
Foreword: What follows is a narrative of the psychoneurobiological mechanics of stress—how it is accumulated and stored, and how it can be released. This narrative is based mostly on my years of training with my teacher, neuroscientist Thom Knoles, PhD, honored in India as Shri 1008 Mahamandaleshwar Maharishi Vyasanand Giri Maharaj, and his mentors, including the one and only Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Nobel Prize winning neurophysiologist Sir John Carew Eccles, and Dr. Hans Selye, known as the father of stress for his formative insights about stress in mice.
What Is Stress?
In today’s world, we are exposed to many more demands than at any previous era. With the advent of the Internet, social media, 24/7 news, and now AI, the world is more demanding than ever and moves faster than ever.
Things like our job, partner, family, traffic, emails, etc. are not stress. They are simply demands.
They can potentially be stressors, but whether or not they elicit a stress response in us depends on our reaction to them, and whether our body-mind reaches a conclusion that they are threatening to us.
Regardless of the size of the demand, we are capable of interacting (stay-and-play), or reacting (fight-flee-fawn-or-freeze).
In this way, whether something is stressful depends on the person, and also how capable that person is of interacting with the demand at a given time.
Demands can be physical, mental or emotional.
Stress is defined as the body’s reaction to an overload of experience—more demands than it is able to to effectively manage—and resulting distorted cellular memory of that reaction which affects all behavior negatively until it is released.
Being stressed is not a disease of a weak mind—stress is a physiological accumulation of maladaptive experiences that have not been metabolized.
Demands, Adaptation Energy, and the Accumulation of Stress
Whether or not we have a stress response to a given demand is dictated by something called adaptation energy (AE) and how much of it we have available to us at any given time.
Dr. Hans Selye, nicknamed the “father of stress”, who was a mentor to my teacher, discovered adaptation energy by working with mice.
Selye described what he called the “general adaptation syndrome.” In response to a stressful stimulus, the body first goes through an alarm reaction, then secondly a stage of resistance, and if the stimulus continues, it may result in the third stage of exhaustion syndrome. The alarm reaction occurs via the pathway of the cerebral cortex → hypothalamus (lower brain) → adrenal glands → blood stream (cortisol and adrenalin). In addition, there is the release of brain hormones and stimulation of the body’s sympathetic nervous system.
He found that the more he rearranged the items in the cages of the mice, causing them to have to adapt more and more and spend more time in the alarm state, the faster and more often they reached the exhaustion state, and the faster they died. He coined the term adaptation energy in 1936, which he defined as a general propensity for adaptation, discrimination, creativity, and stamina. Adaptation energy is like a bank account of rest accrued, which determines our overall stability and resulting adaptability. We wake up with a certain amount of adaptability energy, and each unexpected event takes some of it away from us. Once we reach the point that we have none left, our body goes into an alarm response, more colloquially known as a fight-or-flight response, which is when stress begins to accumulate. We can’t measure adaptation energy, but we can measure its effect. Selye demonstrated the existence of adaptation energy on humans with the ice-water test—people who had been sleep deprived had less resilience to the cold water.
At moment of encountering a demand, body must assess amount of adaptation energy available.
If the amount of AE we have is less than the amount that our expectation about the situation has changed, we’ll go into a stress response. It’s like not having enough money in the bank to pay for a purchase.
Adaptation energy (AE) > change in expectation (CE) = successfully meet demand and feel waves of joy
Adaptation energy (AE) < change in expectation (CE) = stress response, body goes into fight/flight
Having a backlog of accumulated stress also eats up our adaptation energy, so we must deplete that backlog, or else our adaptation energy will get eaten up even though nothing new is stressing us.
Eustress is stress that is not necessarily negative — for example, from riding a rollercoaster or partying all night.
Fatigue and boredom are also types of stress we can accumulate.
Drugs (whether recreational or pharmaceutical) are stressful because they are exogenous (made outside the body) and create dependency on them for something that we could ordinarily produce endogenously (inside the body), which weakens the body-mind.
When you’re stressed, you don’t pay attention to the present, so you miss cues about the future in the making, which causes you to be surprised by things that happen and uses up more adaptation energy.
In our society, change is constant. If your adaptation bank account is too low, every demand will trigger your fight-or-flight reaction and become a stressor—in this state, the world owns us, and we become a product of what’s happening around us.
Stress Reactions in the Body: Fight-or-Flight Mode, Oxygen Kinetics, and Free Radicals
Once accumulated, all stress is stored in the body—and not just in one or two places.
In a fight or flight reaction, the body-mind reacts as if there is a predator. The body is flooded with 20-30cc of epinephrine/adrenaline and other stress chemicals like cortisol in order to help us fight or flee danger. The adrenalin then goes to all of the body’s organs and prepares them for fight or flight. Consider that 1 drop of epinephrine has 1,000x the stimulating effect of 1 shot of espresso. This triggers a cascade of physiological effects as well. A few of these effects are outlined below, though there are countless others which unfold from these, especially as we subject ourselves to this type of reaction regularly.
Our heart rate increases to supply more blood and oxygen to red blood cells. The heart can only pump so many times before it fails—and stress accelerates that process.
Blood vessels in the brain constrict, as the brain tries to engage in rational thinking while stressed by squeezing muscles in the stem trying to divert blood/energy from it to other areas, which is why people with chronic stress get headaches.
Our brain shifts focus to the brain stem for survival, which limits access to other functions like rational or creative thinking and subtle perception.
Immunosuppression begins—virus detection and killing goes down, and antibody production goes up, which is problematic because the antibodies have nothing to kill, so they start killing the body’s own tissue, which is the basis for most autoimmune diseases and heart disease.
Antibody overproduction also interferes with digestion by killing flora and fauna and flooding the stomach with hydrochloric acid, which creates G.E.R.D., acid reflux, etc. in order to shove food into the lower intestine so it can be eliminated quickly. This is why people often soil themselves in traumatic situations.
Our digestion slows as other physiological processes are prioritized.
Digestive motility halts
The body gets dehydrated from urination / perspiration.
Our palms get moist.
We start to get tunnel vision to block our unnecessary things.
Our skin gets more acidic and less elastic to make it taste bitter to predators, which is what creates wrinkles.
Hormonal changes and shifts in metabolism and mineral balance take place
Sodium and water are retained in the tissues
Blood supply to the stomach lining is decreased
Hyperacidity and over-production of digestive enzymes occurs, resulting in ulceration, of the weakened stomach lining
In some cases, the reaction to chronic, abnormal stress may cause a failure to produce hydrochloric acid or enzymes, resulting in chronic indigestion and poor nutrition
The heart, blood vessels, and kidneys may go through damage resulting in hypertension and/or coronary disease.
If stress continues unabated beyond the capacity of the body’s coping mechanisms, eventually they begin to fail. The state of adrenal exhaustion sets in. The body’s defenses have become too weak to counter the effects of stress. There is suppression of the immune system. The body’s organs begin to show pathologic changes due to the long exposure to stress hormones. The body’s energy stores have become depleted, leading eventually to disease, and finally death of the organism.
Nearly every bodily function imaginable is disrupted by a stress reaction, and the resulting distortions are stored in the sub-cellular memory. Even as cells die off and are replaced by new cells, the stress memories are still there. This is why, even though nearly our entire body regenerates every so many years from the perspective of the cells, tissues, muscles, bones, and so on, we still remember things that were stressful.
Stress is eventually responsible for strokes, heart attacks, and hypertension, all of which are major causes of death in the United States. In fact, the American Medical Association says 98% of illness is caused by stress.
One of the resulting effects of a fight or flight reaction is that an excess supply of oxygen is created. Oxygen is critical for bodily function, and so our stress reaction causes us to breathe more heavily in order to ingest more oxygen; but oxygen is a double-edged sword. Too little oxygen, and we can’t function, but too much oxygen, and the body can’t process it. In a fight or flight response, we tend to breathe too much, and body has no way to process all of that oxygen.
Blood is the main carrier of oxygen, and excess oxygen combined with the iron in our red blood cells combine to form iron oxide, oxidating (rusting) the blood. The body only knows physical danger, and since there is no actual physical danger from which to fight or flee, the excess oxygen is not burned off, and instead creates oxygen globules in the blood called free radicals, which bond to our DNA, change its structure and disintegrate the body.
Free radicals are known to cause cancer by working in concert with carcinogens like nicotine. Cancer is more prevalent today than it used to be, despite advances in modern medicine and technology, because people are more stressed, so more things are carcinogenic to them. The reason why some people smoke for a lifetime and don’t die young is because they’re not stressed—stress is a bigger factor than carcinogens. Free radicals attack immune cells and disease begins. Free radicals created by excess oxygen are what cause almost all disease.
Because oxidized tissues and cells don’t function normally, the process can render you vulnerable to a slew of health challenges, which partially explains why people with high levels of oxidation, which is often reflected by high levels of inflammation, have an extensive list of health challenges and symptoms ranging from a low resistance to infection to joint pain, digestive disorders, anxiety, headaches, depression, and allergies. Reduced oxidation lowers inflammation,
which in turn helps limit oxidation. Antioxidants are important for this very reason, and meditation is one of the most powerful antioxidants available to man, due to its ability to help the body burn up free radicals, as described in more detail later in this paper.
Stress Reactions in the Mind: Premature Cognitive Commitments
While these physiological processes are happening in the body, the mind is taking note of all aspects of the situation at hand, in order to help us better identify and avoid similar situations in the future.
The mind takes a mental snapshot of everything the senses can perceive — if there is a certain smell in the air, or a certain song playing, or another person proximal to us, or a pair of red shoes we can see, or the taste of certain food, or anything in between. Most times, we don’t even remember these details, but they’re stored in the subconscious memory as a protection mechanism.
In certain cases, where a given situation was actually dangerous for us, these snapshots can protect us from similar danger in the future. In most cases however, since there was no actual danger in the first place, but rather just a demanding situation for which we didn’t have enough adaptation energy, these snapshots subconsciously predispose us to be threatened by anything associated with the previous situation, should we ever encounter it again. This phenomenon is called a premature cognitive commitment (PCC), a term that entered into neuroscience parlance in the early 1980s—the mind is prematurely committing to a conclusion before actually evaluating it in the present moment.
This is why certain situations, people, smells, sounds, or environments “trigger” us—because at some level, whether conscious or not, we’ve accumulated stress associated with those situations, and haven’t released it yet. The more of these PCC’s we accumulate, the scarier the world looks to us, and the less able we are to “stay-and-play” or navigate demands in a healthy way. Someone who is easily triggered is someone who is carrying a lot of accumulated stress.
It’s important to note that PCC’s are not stress themselves; they are artifacts of stress. PCC’s cannot be measured or located in the body, in the same way that the mind or consciousness can’t, but it is estimated that the average person, having lived a well-adjusted life in a developed country, has about 100,000 PCC’s by the age of 20.
The Compounding Effects of Carrying Around Accumulated Stress
Less than 100 years ago, nobody had ever brushed their teeth. They just accumulated plaque from the day’s food, went to sleep, and woke up the next day with the same plaque on the same teeth, only to add more from another day’s meals.
While this is a disgusting thing to think about, we do the same thing today with our minds—every day accumulating stress, and every morning waking up with more than the day before.
Overall, our mental and physical performance suffers more and more each day, in the way that the performance of a car suffers when loads of bricks are added to its trunk—the speed is reduced, handling suffers, gas mileage decreases, steering declines, and the ride becomes very noisy, clunky and uncomfortable.
At the mental level, science shows 98% of our thoughts are repetitive, irrelevant, derived from stress: “I wonder what this person thinks of me”, “Will I have enough time to do X?”, “Will I get that promotion?”
Trying to live our lives today while having so much of our mental faculties hijacked by stress from last week, last month, last year, or last decade is like trying to play the piano with only one finger, because the other nine fingers are being used to think about what notes we played yesterday. No wonder life seems so difficult—stress governs our behavior and makes us behave in socially irrelevant ways.
We are creating problems with 2% of our brains, then trying to solve them with 2% of brain. Albert Einstein famously said that no problem can be solved at same level of thinking which created it—we must reclaim a greater percentage of our total mental potential in order to see the solutions.
At the physical level, the body simply becomes what the mind is. When we repetitively think stress thoughts, we print out a stressed body, which defaults to fight-or-flight behavior as described above; over time, this behavior begins to deteriorate and break down all aspects of our bodily functioning—we have less energy, we get sick more often, we need more sleep, and we feel generally older than we should.
Sublimating Stress Chemistry with Bliss Chemistry
Getting stressed is not so bad for us, and it’s nearly impossible to completely avoid. It’s staying stressed that is the problem.
Stress expression is NOT stress release — things like screaming, punching pillows, venting our feelings to a therapist, etc. don’t change our body chemistry longterm or release the stress chemistry stored at the sub-cellular level.
There are myriad other relaxation techniques available today, many of which can provide some temporary relief from stress, but also do not get have an impact at the sub-cellular level.
From my colleague Jillian Lavender’s book Why Meditate:
Different techniques emphasise different levels. As we’ve discussed, not all meditation and relaxation techniques are the same. The mechanics of the different styles are different and the results and benefits vary considerably. Most notably, the starting point for these different techniques varies. For example, it’s not that a body-led practice doesn’t have an effect on the mind and consciousness. It’s a question of what’s the primary level of impact. Here are some examples of meditation and relaxation techniques arranged accordingly:
Starting Point: Action/Body (Physical Engagement)
Chanting
Hatha yoga
Breathing techniques
Walking
Qigong
Tai Chi
Starting Point: Thinking/Mind (Concentration and Open Monitoring)
Tibetan Buddhism
Prayer
Mindfulness
Vipassana
Guided meditation
Visualisation
…These are all great techniques for stress management, but why manage stress when you can release it entirely?
There are a few techniques, of which Vedic Meditation is one, which actually have their primary level of impact on the level of consciousness itself.
Starting Point: Being / Pure Consciousness (Automatic Self-Transcending)
Vedic Meditation
Transcendental Meditation
Primordial Sound Meditation
Art of Living: Sahaj Samadhi Meditation
Deep stress stored at the sub-cellular level of consciousness (and it’s all deep, once it’s been accumulated) requires deep rest to release. The amount of stress you release is directly proportional to the amount of deep rest you give your body. With all of the stressors we’re exposed to today, even a full night of 8 hours sleep is very unlikely to provide enough deep rest to release all of the accumulated stress from that day as well as everything we’ve accumulated over our lifetime—we need hypo-metabolic rest.
Vedic Meditation is not a replacement for sleep, but provides deeper rest than sleep.
Vedic Meditation causes the mind and body to de-excite by producing bliss chemicals, such as beta endorphins, which we experience as bliss or rapture; serotonin, which we experience as calm and readiness; dopamine, which we experience as motivation and inspiration for creativity and innovation; and endocannabinoids, which we experience as deep feelings of well-being. Enough bliss chemicals can disable premature cognitive commitments which are held as stress chemicals. These bliss chemicals act as a detergent and literally dissolve the stress chemicals, since bliss and stress cannot coexist simultaneously. This increase in bliss chemistry and decrease in stress chemistry can be observed in the excreted urine of beginner meditators before and after a meditation sitting (note: this is only true of beginner meditators, because regular meditators have built up enough “reserve” bliss chemicals in their psychophysiology to minimize the contrast between the two states).
When the stress chemicals are dissolved, the mind naturally de-excites, going into “zero-task mode” and the body follows. As this happens, the red blood cells get the message that the body has enough oxygen; activity is minimized, breath gets softer and slower, and the body begins to burn up oxygen and free radicals—since less new oxygen is being imported through the breath, the body is more able to deplete the accumulated backlog. Vedic Meditation is one of the best antioxidants available to man—this is why the immune status of meditators increases so much, and also explains the anti-aging benefits of meditation, increased longevity, etc.
Once the psychophysiology is de-excited and dissolving stress in this way, the activity associated with the release of that stress re-awakens the mind, preventing it from going any deeper and causing it to come back online and resume thinking whatever thoughts were recently top-of-mind. These thoughts are in no way connected to the actual stress being released, but are simply a byproduct of the release itself, and the subsequent re-awakening of the mind. In that way, we can say that when we experience thoughts, it means some stress has already been released. We don’t analyze or read into these thoughts anymore than we would look through the contents of our garbage bin or vacuum cleaner.
Sometimes, stress on its way out will have the same “flavor” or feeling that it had when we first accumulated it, and we may find ourselves temporarily experiencing that sensation. It’s important during these times not to re-invest in these feelings, lest we recycle the stress and create new stress that needs to be released. We remain witness of it, knowing that it’s leaving the body. At first, we may have a lot of these thought-filled meditations, as we’re finally starting to release our backlog of stress, but it’s important not to get discouraged by these experiences, which are not “bad” or “failed” meditations, but simply the natural course of what’s necessary for stress to be released. As meditators begin to clear more of their backlog of stress and pave the way for a deeper connection to our true nature, they will sometimes also experience thoughts which are cognitions, or profound realizations from deep within. With practice, one can learn to distinguish these cognitions from stress-release thoughts. For those new to VM, we can safely say that 100% of thoughts are byproducts of stress having already been released.
When we meditate, the deep rest also replenishes our adaptation energy, which makes us more likely to react with a “stay-and-play” response instead of a fight-or-flee in the face of future demands, preventing us from incurring future stress and making us more capable and effective as friends, partners, employees, parents, and members of society.
In this way, Vedic Meditation is the ideal solution to the stress epidemic—it both dissolves accumulated stress chemistry, and simultaneously provides deep rest in order to increase adaptation energy to make us more impervious to accumulating new stress.
20 minutes twice per day is the prescription to provide the best bang for your buck in terms of releasing stress while allowing maximum time in your day for dynamic activity. Meditating for longer in order to try to release more stress is not recommended, as the psychophysiology simply cannot handle that much deep rest in one sitting at first. Meditating longer than 20 minutes twice per day would be tantamount to trying to mow your grass with dynamite—it will remove the grass, but in a way that’s not sustainable. After one year of regular meditation practice, meditators are eligible to receive their first advanced technique, with which they can meditate for up to 30 minutes per session.
The Innumerable Benefits of Releasing Stress
While stress can’t be directly measured, there are several psychophysiological markers which are used to indirectly assess how stressed someone is.
For example, there are two types of age—chronological and biological. Chronological age is simply the number that remains when subtracting one’s birth date from today’s date—like the number of miles/kilometers on a car’s odometer. Biological age, which is the marker physiologists use to determine the true age, is more like the amount of wear-and-tear on the car. Studies have shown that the biological age of meditators, compared to non-meditators, is about 5-12 years younger. That means that for two people who were both born 30 years ago, if one person starts a meditation practice and one does not, in 10 more years’ time, the meditator’s body will still look and feel something like its 30-year-old version, while the non-meditator’s body will look and feel 40. Obviously, the longer a meditation practice is sustained, the more adaptation energy grows, and the more these benefits compound—which is why so many aged meditators look almost unbelievably young.
The form of meditation that my teacher, Thom Knoles, PhD, honored in India with the title Shri 1008 Mahamandaleshwar Maharishi Vyasanand Giri Maharaj, now teaches independently and previously taught for over 25 years with the TM organizations as “Transcendental Meditation”, has been the subject of hundreds of scientific studies showing a wide range of benefits from regular practice.
These studies, which refer to this form of meditation using the name “Transcendental Meditation” or “TM”, support the benefits obtainable from regular practice of Vedic Meditation.
These benefits include:
Increased resistance to stress
Increased levels of energy
Relief from depression
Relief from anxiety
Relief from insomnia
Improved relationships
Improved learning ability
Reduced risk of heart disease
Relief from migraines
Normalization of blood pressure
Reduced cholesterol
Normalization of weight
Reversal of aging
Increased self esteem
Faster reaction times
Improved sports performance
Reduced use of harmful vices
Reduced number of doctor and hospital visits
Reduced usage of medical insurance
Reduced risk of nervous system disorders
Reduced risk of mental illness
Reduced risk of infectious disease
Reduced risk of ENT issues
Reduced risk of cancer/oncological issues
From improved sleep to heightened creativity and energy levels, increased vitality and immunity, balanced emotions and enhanced cognitive and physical performance, it would be impossible to list all of the benefits of VM in one place, since the technique has such a fundamentally transformational effect on all aspects of our life and being—but the list below offers a snapshot of additional benefits Vedic meditators frequently report:
Sustained baseline happiness
Enhanced creativity
Better sleep
Improved memory
Balanced emotions
Improved cognitive ability
Stronger immunity
More vitality
Improved circulation
Heightened focus
Clarity of mind
Deeper sense of purpose
Permanent flow state
Practicing meditation is also the most socially responsible thing you personally can do to make the world a better place. By removing a lifetime of stress and cultivating a permanent backdrop of supreme inner contentedness in our lives, we enable ourselves to be better friends, partners, coworkers, and humans, more capable of supporting those around us and more capable of contributing to the world. Our relationships improve, our performance at work improves, our family life improves, and people who come into contact with us generally have more positive experiences.
Quite simply, when we feel better, we’re better neighbors to those around us.
This is the true definition of being the change we wish to see.
Why make the rest of the world deal with us in our stressed state, when we have a technique at our fingertips that has helped hundreds of thousands of people to release decades of stress and reclaim their full potential?
The best part is it’s easy—all you have to do is sit comfortably in a chair for 20 minutes twice a day and close your eyes. The rest goes almost by itself.