120: Stress is Just Adaptation: The Impact of the Human Stress Response with Mary Wingo

Robert Plank: Today's guest is Dr. Mary Wingo. She's the author of the impact of the human stress response and in her book she talks about the root causes of stress and how to manage it effectively, why the stress response is essential for helping to adapt to one's environment, the fascinating biology of human stress, the 5 major causes of stress in modernized society, and how to protect your health. Learn how to avoid overloading one body's stress response.

Lots of cool stuff. Welcome to the show Mary.

Mary Wingo: Thank you. Thank you for having me Robert.

Robert Plank: I understand that you talk about stress and stuff like that.

Mary Wingo: Yes. Absolutely. That is what I'm about.

Robert Plank: Cool. I work from home. I don't know about you but I get stressed about stuff all the time and I think it might feel like as I'm getting older either the stress is more, or maybe I'm just more aware of it. What's the answer? Is stress of thing that we need to manage, or minimize, or ignore, or can we direct it into something good? What's the answer to this whole stress problem?

Mary Wingo: First off is understanding the actual definition of stress Robert. The definition of stress, and it took a very long time to actually come up with a workable definition, but the definition is this. It's the rate of adjustment that you undergo in order to adapt to whatever an environment that you happen to find yourself in. The key is here, is that there's 2 aspects. There's 2 sides of stress. There's the actual, since we're talking about people, the human being, and the second component is the environment. It can actually be a matter of personal will or it can actually be something that's out of your reach, and that's a problem with the environment, and you just have to alter or change your environment.

Robert Plank: Okay. For example, if someone transitions from a day job to being a full-time entrepreneur, or they had a big life change or something like that. That is, I guess what stress is, so if someone goes through that stress and overcomes it versus the stress kind of hangs around or gets worse, what's happening there versus someone who's actually dealing with it?

Mary Wingo: Okay. You've touched on a really important point. Yes. Ultimately organisms, you are only supposed to be subjected to stress periodically, sporadically, but the way that modernized society is structured, a lot of us have, not necessarily horrible life-threatening stressors, it's not like a bear is chasing us every second of the day, but for most of us these nagging somewhat smaller stress, well there are some large stresses too, but that just go on day after day after day, and it's relentless.

Stress mechanisms are just that. They are how we adapt. They are our adaptive mechanisms. It's not just the adrenaline. It's not just cortisol. It is a whole cascade of physical responses. The key is to be able to do what you can call to try to resolve the stress and not keep a nagging, incessant exposure day after day after day to it because when that happens that is when we get stress related mental illness and physical disease. In fact it's an exploding phenomenon in our society.

Robert Plank: Could you walk us through an example or a case study of someone who you dealt with who had just a really bad problem with stress and you changed their ways and it fixed it up a little bit?

Mary Wingo: Oh, I can use myself.

Robert Plank: Perfect.

Mary Wingo: I'll use myself because ultimately, when I was researching, this was decades in the making. This isn't a book that I just came up with. This is something that I have cultivated over 20 years and because there's really not a lot of hardcore really good stuff out there I had to practice on myself a little and see how that worked just for me, and see if this was in relation to human beings in general.

For me it was all about simplicity. It was following probably the greatest American philosopher of our time, Henry David Thoreau, who was the guy who actually coined simplicity, or simple living., literally eliminating details and complications from one's life one, by one, by one, by one, by one. Ultimately, out of trial and error I found myself, especially when I left the US because I realized that my country, my culture, was causing me a lot of stress personally. I'm a very sensitive person. A lot of thinking nerdy types are.

I couldn't have finished this book living in the US, in the environment in the US. I had to get to a less stressful environment and that's here in Ecuador. Basically it was like another person wrote it. It just literally flowed out.

Robert Plank: Why Ecuador? Was this the kind of situation where, I'm just kind of wondering, you're from the US. You were in Texas. You're saying that moving to Ecuador was a result of your stress, you just didn't like the environment here and the environment there was better?

Mary Wingo: Yes. This is like 10, 12 years ago. I knew as a scientist back then that the structure of our environment was killing a lot of people early, and causing a lot of disability, taking a lot of breadwinners from families, causing a lot of family impoverishment. I saw this and I couldn't really put my finger on it. Like I said, this is been many, many years in the cultivation of this meta-analytic concept, but I realized that my country, for my particular sensitive constitution, was very, very toxic for me. I realized that it was stunting my growth.

10, 12 years ago I had ultimately made the decision to leave. I didn't know how or where but I had basically changed my life up to facilitate an easy transition. When a friend of mine retired down here, she's an older lady, about 3 years ago, I asked if I could come visit her over Christmas and I stayed for a month, and I realized that it was a very, very different place and I packed up, left Texas, came back 3 months later.

Robert Plank: Cool. It sounds like an exciting adventure. You have this book and I understand that you have a way of defining the type of stress. I guess there are 5 major causes of stress you say?

Mary Wingo: Yes. Absolutely. When you're talking about stress for yourself, you had mentioned that as you get older you felt like you were experiencing more and more stress. Basically our modernized society, and you don't see this to near the extent here in Ecuador, and this is where I was able to really formulate and crystalize some of my concepts, but there are 5 major causes of stress that come from living in a westernized society.

Number 1, and this is probably what affects you and your listeners a lot, it is simply complexity. Let me elaborate. It's undue pressure and taxation on our executive mental functioning, on our frontal lobes, on our ability to plan. It's called working memory and it's our frontal lobes, which is the part of the brain behind your forehead and your eyeballs, it's the newest part of our cortex, and it's very fragile, but it is our primary stress response organ believe it or not. How that's so is that it allows us to plan,strategize, and attenuate and eliminate stressors and our environment. It also allows us to alter our environment.

For instance, if we are cold and we have a cold stressor, we're in freezing temperatures, we don't sit there and freeze. We've created clothing. We've created fires. We've created elaborate shelters, stuff that other animals, to an extent, are limited in doing. With that, it's a very, very precious resource we have as people but unfortunately as we subject ourselves to increased levels of stressor over long periods of time, so high cortisol levels, a different set of receptors get activated in our frontal lobes, and basically it starts to shut everything down.

This is why stress, when we subject ourselves to stress, it's very, very bad for our emotional and mental regulation, our problem-solving ability. It's very important to take very good care of our cognitive resources because this is how all mental illness starts. This is how it all begins, when our frontal lobes start crapping out.

Robert Plank: In this case would this be like if, for example, if I'm so overwhelmed with putting out all the fires, have so many things going on, spread so thin that I can't even think, is that with this is describing?

Mary Wingo: Yes, and we Americans especially wear this type of overburden as a badge of honor, and honestly the thing is, ultimately what happens, and if you just want to look at it from an economic standpoint, this type of habit, which of course I was a typical overachiever, I got my PhD very young so I know all this, it ultimately costs you more. It's ultimately going to put a huge financial strain, well, other types of strains as well, on you, as well as on your health. This is not a good way to approach problem solving and adaptation.

Robert Plank: What is the good way? Is there a way to have my cake and eat it too? Is there a way to be a productivity machine, be an over achiever, but still be relaxed and not be overwhelmed all the time?

Mary Wingo: Let me tell you what has worked for me. Again, this is all extremely new developments that a plethora of stress researchers, scientists, investigators, social scientists, have come up collectively over the last 50, 60 years, but really over the last maybe, 5 or 10 years. For me, what works is if you're going to be an over achiever, if you're going to consume yourself with an activity like I do, like you do, of high-performance, you've got to treat yourself as an athlete preparing for the Olympics or a marathon.

Ultimately sports, we exercise stress on the body, and this has been very, very well studied and looked at. If you want to maintain high performance you've got to simplify other parts of your life, so you've got to watch what you eat like an athlete would. You've got to watch your sleeping. If you've got various toxic relationships you've got to do whatever you can to attenuate this.

The book that I wrote is basically, it's a meta-analysis of around 100 years of work. When I wrote this I knew it was going to take a big chunk out of me. I knew it was going to be a pound of flesh, so to speak, so yes, I had to be very, very immaculate in my habits in my other parts of my life in order to subsidize the adaptation of the very big demanding part.

Does that sound clear?

Robert Plank: Yeah. It does, and I like the whole analogy of the athlete and the marathon. I haven't been able to run for a few months because I broke my ankle a few months ago, but every morning I'd wake up and I'd go for a run, and I was almost like looking forward to it. I think back to, I only played sports for a few years as a kid but it was always the next game that we were leading up to and practicing for an stuff, it was this stressful event coming up, but it was good stress. There was always that element of nervousness and anticipation, but it was the good kind and not the dread kind, not like something that I was like, "Oh no. Only 4 days left, only 3 days left." It was almost like Christmas morning coming up. It was like it's a few days away, I wish it was right now.

Mary Wingo: Actually surprising, and this is something that I don't know, kind of flies in the face of what we've all been told about stress for the last 20, 30 years, is that stress is just adaptation. It's just a mechanism, just like breathing is a mechanism, or heart rate is a mechanism. It is a set of mechanisms that help us adapt, period. The difference is that often times good stressors are, like I said before, limited in scope. They're not chronic. It's not a grinding activity that you do all the time. It is sporadic so yes, okay, you're looking forward to getting a real good workout this Saturday, and you look forward to it, and it's good, and it ends. You're able to read the benefits of adaptation hopefully without the wear and tear of overuse from your mind and from the rest of your physiology.

Robert Plank: Would you say the secret is to do these things in short bursts? It's not like we're working out all day long. It's not a constant thing. It's like I'm looking forward to this little thing, now it comes up, now it's over, and then, I guess, the next event or the next milestone, I guess is what you're saying.

Mary Wingo: Yes, and like I said before, for me it was writing basically the benchmark book of medicine and physiology. That's ultimately what this book is. For me, it was again, treating it like a marathon, treating it like you're an elite athlete and really doing immaculate self-care, self-care that an athlete would do, and then just doing it periodically. With that you develop adaptation. You become stronger. It's like a muscle.

Robert Plank: Are you seeing a universal way that this is going wrong, or are you seeing a mistake that just everyone you come across who doesn't have your techniques, is there just a big mistake everyone's making as far as dealing with stress?

Mary Wingo: Yes, and we haven't gone over the other 4. I'm not sure if we have time in this episode. I might have to come back again.

Robert Plank: Might have to. You may come back one time per item, 5 times coming back.

Mary Wingo: Yes. Okay. This is the reason I ended up writing the book. I actually quit science 10 years ago. I mean I was still an academic. I fully kept up with every single major development, and this is a huge field. There's probably at minimum 100,000 refereed papers that have been published over the last 50, 75 years. This is a very, very well studied topic but it's not well understood.

I actually didn't want to write it but the way things are getting in our society, in westernized society, modernized society in general, with how we are in this point in history and basically are watching many, many folks in our culture die premature deaths, become disabled from preventable stress related diseases, become bankrupt from dealing with stress related diseases, nobody else was doing this and I figured, "God, is no one else going to, fine. Okay. I'll just do it."

That's what sort of propelled me to do this but yes, people don't have the vocabulary and with these 5 major causes of stress in modernized society, what it is, I wanted to nail down in a very easy to understand way that almost anybody in the world can understand. You don't have to have formal education. You don't have to be a medical professional. You don't even have to be all that's literate to be able to understand what stress actually is, and then when you understand what it is, and what the major classifications of stress that kill people, and make people sick and bankrupt people are, then you can actually make an itemized list and pick out, just like you would a food diary or a money spending diary if you're on a budget, and then just one by one pluck them out, just pick them out. That's the only way to do it. That's the only way to do it.

Robert Plank: What you're saying is instead of trying to conquer this huge giant problem of stress you instead break down the problem and then attack the little pieces that are left.

Mary Wingo: Yes, and for the average person living in modernized society this might be several hundred items. It might take several weeks. If you're really serious about this you might need to have help from your close family and friends because you may not even be fully aware of what you're doing.

Robert Plank: Interesting.

Mary Wingo: Yeah.

Robert Plank: We're starting to wind down. We're starting to run out of time but I want to make sure that we get the 5 major causes listed. I know that we don't have a lot of time to unpack them but I would feel bad if we left before you were able to explain all 5 of these really quick.

Mary Wingo: Okay. I'm going to try to run to these as fast as I can Robert.

Robert Plank: Awesome.

Mary Wingo: Okay, so number 1 is overloading our cognitive resources, overtaxing of working of memory. We already went over that one. Number 2 is living in an unequal society, the very, very strong correlation between living in a society that is unequal, and the proliferation of stress related diseases, especially in men. Again, where we have the .1% grabbing up all the resources and the rest of us are literally scrambling for breadcrumbs, in history this is basically the recipe for revolution. I mean this is just how human beings are put together socially.

Number 3 is loss of social capital, which that's social support. Actually since the industrial revolution our participation in social groups, whether it's religious, social, political, or just hanging out, family and friends, the actual time spent doing that has basically shriveled down to nothing, and because we are meant to be social creatures, and because when we deal in packs and herds, and in groups, we are less vulnerable individually to the ravages of society, so that's a very big one as well.

Changing gears a little bit, 4 is the derangement or loss of the human biome, which are all those little critters, little micro organisms of many, many different sorts that exist in our gut, on our skin, and in our orifices. What they do, they're actually extensions, functional extensions of our organ systems. They helped create vitamins. They function in cellular growth, in endocrine, in immune signaling, and they're implicated in many, many types of disease when these critters get deranged and they're not able to do their job. Basically you lose some of your functioning bodily systems when the biome gets deranged and a lot of us have this problem.

Then number 5, in general, is chemical stressors. 4 kind of segues into 5, so understand that a lot of just the chemicals that we have in our household, at our work, the processed food that we eat, the pharmaceuticals we take, a lot of these didn't exist 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, so we don't have the metabolic machinery, especially in our liver, to be able to break these things down efficiently. What happens is we're exposed to it and we go into a stress response to try to deal with it. We have that and then the other part of the chemical stress aspect is actual exposure to pollution, to the air, soil, and water. That's a very, very potent stressor as well and results in many, many deaths.

Those are the major 5 and a lot of people don't think of these. They may think of reason 1 as stress, but reasons 2, 3, 4, and 5, a lot of people, they just don't know. They don't have the vocabulary, and so that's one thing I'm really trying to set out to do is be able to give people some real actionable vocabulary to work with.

Robert Plank: Dang. It sounds like there's all these different sources of stress that I had no idea that they were coming from. I like the idea of your book and the things you have to say in it so could you tell everyone about your book, what it is, where to get it, and any other websites where people can find out about you?

Mary Wingo: Absolutely. Your listeners can go to my website, MaryWingo.com. They can download some actionable steps for free with the training video to just get started. They don't have to buy anything, and then there's tons of free learning materials and information. My book is the first book, basically, I guess in modern history, that is a meta-analysis, it's an analysis of the biological, psychological, sociological, and political, and economic aspects regarding the human stress experience.

If people want to pick up a copy, and it's a very inexpensive book, I've priced it to where all most anybody in the world can afford this, so this isn't something that if someone doesn't have a lot that they're going to be cut off from. They can get lots of information from me. They can pick it up off my website, MaryWingo.com, or from Amazon.com.

Robert Plank: One more time, what is the title of the book so everyone knows to get it?

Mary Wingo: The Impact of the Human Stress Response.

Robert Plank: Awesome. This whole subject of stress, I think at least for me, it's one of those things where I forget it's there, and the times that I forget it's there, then I end up having problems. I think this is a really important subject. I think you have a lot of good things to say and I'm really glad that you came on the show today Mary.

Mary Wingo: Totally my pleasure. I look forward to talking to you again Robert.