Wray Herbert: Having Heart Can We Rethink Life's Stresses?

Eustress is the "good stress."

From Wray Herbert's blog
Author, 'On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits'

Imagine that you are at the top of a ski slope, about to make a run. It's a challenging slope, black diamond--steep and narrow, lots of trees. Plus it's windy, and there's that treacherous drop-off on the right. You're an inexperienced skier, not a novice but not at all confident that you belong in such extreme terrain. Your heart is pounding and your gut is tight.

Now imagine that you're on top of the very same slope, but you are a skilled downhill racer, an Olympic contender. You're sure you know how to attack this slope--you've done it many times before--but even so, your heart is pounding and butterflies are fluttering in your gut.

Both of these hypothetical skiers are under stress, and feeling the arousal that comes with stress. But one is experiencing good stress, the other bad stress. They are both looking at the same slope, but one sees it as a threat, the other as a challenge. The expert knows that his skills are more than sufficient for the situation. The nervous learner has no such confidence.

Psychological scientists are interested in this contrast, as are health professionals. We tend to think of stress as negative, and arousal as harmful, and indeed we spend lots of time and money--on vacations, fitness clubs, bar tabs--trying to minimize stress. But is it possible that stress is not all that bad, that in fact it may be tonic at times?

The key is how we think about stress and arousal. Those two skiers are in fact experiencing different bodily changes. Though both are feeling activation of the sympathetic nervous system, the fearful skier is feeling constriction of the vessels, which makes the heart work harder. The expert is actually experiencing more sympathetic arousal as he contemplates the challenge ahead, but the blood vessels are dilating, increasing cardiac efficiency. But they don't know or care what's going on inside them. They both simply feel edgy and aroused.

What if the learner's fear could be construed as a positive challenge? What a skier--or anyone--could be made to believe that the pounding and fluttering were actually a resource, tools for enhanced performance? That's the question that University of Rochester scientist Jeremy Jamieson wanted to explore in the laboratory. Working with UCSF's Wendy Berry Mendes and Harvard's Matthew Nock, he has run a series of experiments to see if bad stress can be transformed into good stress in the mind.

Here's an example. The researchers took physiological measurements on a group of volunteers, who were told that they would have to make a public speech--a stressful prospect for most people. Just prior to this event, some were instructed about the value of human stress response in high-level performance. They were encouraged to interpret any signs of arousal as a positive thing, a tool that would aid them in making a confident speech. The others were told to ignore their stress arousal, or they were told nothing at all.

The findings were clear. During the speech, those instructed in reappraisal were much more like the Olympian skier, showing what Jamieson calls "physiological toughness": They experienced less blood vessel constriction and more cardiac output, as if they were attacking the slope. What's more, immediately after the speech, these volunteers were less vigilant. In other words, they felt confident, not threatened.

Think about this. It wasn't an elaborate intervention. They were merely encouraged to reappraise their gut feelings. The scientists decided to test this simple idea again, in the context a high-stress real-life event: a high-stakes examination. They recruited students who were already preparing to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), guaranteeing that their performance was genuinely important to them. The students came into the lab to take a practice version of the exam. As before, only some were told that their nervous stomachs and pumping hearts were known to improve, not worsen, performance. Right before the test, all the students gave saliva samples for analysis.

Those who were taught to reappraise their arousal--to see it as a benefit--had higher levels of alpha amylase, an indicator of nervous system arousal, and they performed better on the practice GRE. But here's the really interesting part: One to three months later, when they took the actual GRE under regular testing conditions, these students had higher math scores than the controls. And they also reported that their test-day arousal had helped them with the exam. This brief and simple intervention had sustained effects on both stress appraisal and test performance.

These are just a couple examples on ongoing research that the Jamieson and his colleagues will describe in a forthcoming issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. The findings may change the way that clinicians think about acute, everyday stress and a variety of ills. Much valuable work has shown that we can regulate our emotions and mitigate our stress arousal--through mindfulness mediation, for example. But there are many times when it's impossible, or inadvisable, to dampen the body's arousal signals. Reappraisal may offer an additional tool to cope with bodily stress in an adaptive way.

Terror Management Theory

I'm enjoying Wray Herbert's On Second Thought, which explores the many "mental shortcuts" used by the "down and dirty," "low road," "quick processing" system of our "parallel processor" brains. From Wikipedia, "Heuristic ( /hjʉˈrɪstɨk/; or heuristics; Greek: "Εὑρίσκω", "find" or "discover") refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Where an exhaustive search is impractical, heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, or common sense."

In Chapter 19 Herbert explores the "Grim Reaper Heuristic," about how our mind copes and keeps at bay the existential pain that humans experience because of mortality salience (we're aware of our own mortality). In this chapter he mentions "Terror Management Theory."

Again, from Wikipedia, "Terror Management Theory (TMT), in social psychology, states that human behavior is mostly motivated by the fear of mortality. According to TMT theorists, symbols that create cultural worldviews are fiercely protected as representations of actual life. The Terror Management Theory posits that when people are reminded of their own deaths, they more readily enforce these symbols, often leading to punitive actions, violence, and war. Experiments have been performed to lend evidence to TMT, primarily carried out by Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski, and Jeff Greenberg, seeking to provide proof that mortality salience, or the awareness of one's own death, affects the decision-making of individuals and groups of people.

The theory purports to help explain human activity both at the individual and societal level. It is derived from anthropologist Ernest Becker's 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of nonfiction The Denial of Death, in which Becker argues all human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death. The terror of absolute annihilation creates such a profound -- albeit subconscious -- anxiety in people (called cognitive dissonance) that they spend their lives attempting to make sense of it. On large scales, societies build symbols: laws, religious meaning systems, cultures, and belief systems to explain the significance of life, define what makes certain characteristics, skills, and talents extraordinary, reward others whom they find exemplify certain attributes, and punish or kill others who do not adhere to their cultural worldview. On an individual level, how well someone adheres to a cultural worldview is the same concept as self-esteem; people measure their own worth based on how well they live up to their culture's expectations."

On Second Thought: Heuristics and Framing

Once again, the pioneering research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky serves as the foundation for this breezey Malcolm Gladwell-type book, On Second Thought, by Wray Herbert. I never tire of reading about heuristics and Prospect Theory. Check out the subtle visual pun on the cover design.

From the almighty Amazon, "Our lives are composed of millions of choices, ranging from trivial to life-changing and momentous. Luckily, our brains have evolved a number of mental shortcuts, biases, and tricks that allow us to quickly negotiate this endless array of decisions. We don’t want to rationally deliberate every choice we make, and thanks to these cognitive rules of thumb, we don’t need to. 


Yet these hard-wired shortcuts, mental wonders though they may be, can also be perilous. They can distort our thinking in ways that are often invisible to us, leading us to make poor decisions, to be easy targets for manipulators…and they can even cost us our lives. 


The truth is, despite all the buzz about the power of gut-instinct decision-making in recent years, sometimes it’s better to stop and say, “On second thought . . .”


The trick, of course, lies in knowing when to trust that instant response, and when to question it. In On Second Thought, acclaimed science writer Wray Herbert provides the first guide to achieving that balance. Drawing on real-world examples and cutting-edge research, he takes us on a fascinating, wide-ranging journey through our innate cognitive traps and tools, exposing the hidden dangers lurking in familiarity and consistency; the obstacles that keep us from accurately evaluating risk and value; the delusions that make it hard for us to accurately predict the future; the perils of the human yearning for order and simplicity; the ways our fears can color our very perceptions , and much more. 


Along the way, Herbert reveals the often-bizarre cross-connections these shortcuts have secretly ingrained in our brains, answering such questions as why jury decisions may be shaped by our ancient need for cleanliness; what the state of your desk has to do with your political preferences; why loneliness can literally make us shiver; how drawing two dots on a piece of paper can desensitize us to violence, and how the very typeface on this page is affecting your decision about whether or not to buy this book.   


Ultimately, On Second Thought is both a captivating exploration of the workings of the mind and an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to learn how to make smarter, better judgments every day."