The length of your shoelaces

Approaching difficult things

I want you to imagine that you are going to do a skydive and this is your first time. Full disclosure here, I've never done a skydive. But let us imagine, we are preparing for our first skydive, we have experienced skydivers and other first timers.  We might expect our stress levels to be higher than the experienced skydivers.

Now, there are a few things as a scientist that you're just not allowed to do, deliberately scaring people to try and understand stress is a little bit problematic when it comes to getting ethical approval. This skydiving example is an innovative way in which the psychologist Professor Mark Wetherell and colleagues tested a hypothesis around cortisol levels. Cortisol is a stress hormone, he found willing participants already doing something a bit scary who agreed to take a saliva swab.

Interestingly, both groups, the experienced and novice skydivers, had equally raised cortisol levels prior to the jump. Understandable really, jumping out of a plane is a stressful thing to do. This experiment shows that our bodies are designed to cope with stress. Momentary stress, like flinging ourselves out of an aeroplane is something that our body can cope with, the stress response kicks in to help us. The level of cortisol temporarily rises, setting off a cascade or events, heart rate increases, you become more alert, (this is sometimes noticeable in the eyes) and you quickly figure out escape routes in case you need them. This is a quick response, about 20 minutes later a signal goes back to the brain to stop supplying cortisol and send glucose to organs for energy.

Why am I telling you this? We sometimes assume that experts and people who have done things many, many times find difficult things less stressful. We are told that practice makes perfect, so it can feel like we are failing when we experience a physical stress reaction to something that scares us a little bit.  Psychologically speaking, we know that doing things that are a bit difficult and tricky is where the real magic happens. It leads to growth.

Under normal circumstances we get stressed and our body helps us to deal with it. But what about sustained stress? What happens when you jump out of the metaphorical plane every day?  You’ve probably heard of chromosomes, they have an ‘X’ like appearance, one thread crossing over another, they also contain our DNA. I want you to imagine that each end of the chromosome is like a shoelace, with the plastic wrapper to stop it fraying. These plastic wrappers are telomeres and they protect the chromosomes from degrading, we also know that these get shorter as we age, a sign of ageing.

Photo by Colton Jones on Unsplash

Two scientists Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Epel wanted to know how sustained stress affected telomeres, and they did this by studying mothers who were also caregivers for their children, broadly speaking we could say these mothers experienced difficult situations on a daily basis. They asked those mothers how stressed they felt, a self-report using a questionnaire, and then they looked at the length of their telomeres in the lab.

They found mixed results, some caregivers had shorter telomeres, and others had longer telomeres. The length of the telomeres was linked to the perception of stress rather than the actual stress that the person was experiencing. This study demonstrates that stress can accelerate the ageing process, however it is not the size or intensity of the stress that is the main factor. How we perceive and then deal with stress plays a major role.

The ability to change our thoughts when we are presented with difficult situations, can improve our response (reframing and mindfulness), and I hope that it helps to know that experienced people, on a biological level respond to stress in the same way as inexperienced people. The difference between an experienced skydiver and a novice is absolutely a lot of practice, but also mindset. Some things don’t get physically easier, but our mental coping can and dies shift.