Stress has always been a fact of life, for humans and animals alike. Looking out for predators while foraging for food, or while defending one’s territory, is just as stressful as dealing with a difficult boss, making ends meet, or having relationship problems. Stress is simply a reality that has to be dealt with. However, modern life has created its own brand of stressors that requires a constant expansion of the resources of the human brain and nervous system simply to keep up with everyday life.

What is stress?

Stress arises when the demands of a task or situation strain the internal resources—physical, emotional, and cognitive—that a person can deploy to meet those demands. When demands persistently exceed those resources, in kind or quantity, the result is burnout. This is a form of physical and psychological decompensation that can manifest itself in a variety of ways—from simple fatigue, to irritability and anger management problems, to impulsive behavior, to anxiety and depression, or physical illness. Which form burnout will take depends on the person’s preexisting self-concept, and on that individual’s customary ways of protecting his or her sense of competence and self-esteem.

Modern stressors

There are three stressors unique to modern life. One of these is the exponential acceleration of the rate of change. Another is the sheer quantity of the tasks we are routinely expected to do, whether in work, family care, or leisure activities. Together, these two stressors give rise to the third—a sense of the acceleration and compression of time.

Change, like stress, is a given of living. After all, evolution is change, and change is both necessary and beneficial. It refreshes our sensibility, creates excitement, and protects us from boredom. But to remain beneficial, change needs to be in balance with the familiar. The predictable rhythms and patterns of a familiar environment are the necessary base for comfort. This familiarity allows us to rely on automatic responses when we have to deal with the tasks required by everyday life, like driving a car, or paying monthly bills. Change suspends the usefulness of our automatic responses, and forces us to devise new ways of dealing with the challenge. This is good, because it forces us to use our brain in new ways, creating new neural pathways that make our brain more powerful. However, this focused attention expends a much higher level of energy than automatic responses. A moderate amount of change refreshes us, but a consistently high level of change exhausts us.

In short, change itself is not the problem. The rate of change is. It has been said that human comfort depends on living in a world we perceive as functioning on a human scale. That means that, at least with regard to human affairs and activity, a people feel that they have some choice in whether to bring about, or at least take on, a given change. As a result, they can deal with the requirements of daily life at his or her own pace. In the 21st century, that is not a prevalent experience. Almost everything we do—from making a phone call, to depositing our paycheck, to working out at the gym—is paced according to the rhythms of some machine. As a TV ad has been announcing for some years now, today’s implicit demand is that humans adjust to “moving at the speed of business.”

But “moving at the speed of business” alters the scale. From the time frame of comfortable human functioning, it thrusts us into the time frame of technology, and of our profit-driven business world. Now, having worked for several centuries to reduce to 40 hours the amount of time a person is required to work in order to earn a family’s living, we find that keeping a middle-class family often requires two workers expected to spend an average of 50 to 60 hours a week at work.

The quantity issue—the sheer magnitude of the load we take on in the running of our daily lives—can be summarized by four characteristics of modern living: the nuclear family, two-wage households, the do-it-yourself approach, and the constant injunction to get more, do more, be more. Clearly, each of these characteristics yields its own benefits, but it also creates pressure to spread oneself thinner and thinner in the attempt to do single-handedly a variety of tasks that in less pressured times used to be spread around among a number of people.

For instance, day-care centers are a useful alternative to stay-at-home moms or live-in grandparents, but they compress family life, and do not relieve parents of the additional demand to fit drop-off and pickup of children into an already tight schedule. While I fully endorse the expansion of a woman’s world beyond the confines of the family home, or the pursuit of fitness and mental expansion through extracurricular activities, these activities also contribute to the acceleration and compression of time that results in people always feeling both scrunched and stretched. Time has become modern man’s torture rack.

Stress and self-esteem

Sustained stress undermines a person’s confidence that his or her resources are sufficient to deal effectively with the world, and therefore adequate to ensure survival—be it economic, psychological, or even physical. Under these conditions, a person begins to feel first ineffective, then at risk, then helpless. The loss of a sense of agency—of being in charge of one’s own life—undermines one’s self-trust. That in turn erodes the possibility of initiative and considered risk-taking, and eventually leads to self-devaluation, paralysis, and self-contempt. Time and again, I hear depressed people declare with profound shame: “I despise myself.”

Building resilience: The two-brain dialogue

Resilience to stress has to do with cultivating internal resources to keep them ahead—or at least abreast of—life’s demands.

Our psychological resources fall into two categories, both of which need to be cultivated. The two categories correspond to the functions of our two brains—our “survival brain” and our “cognitive brain.” Our survival brain—the various structures of the limbic system—is shared with most of vertebrate life. It is often referred to as the reptilian brain. Of course, in humans, it is far more than that. More accurately, it is described as the “emotional brain.” It is here that the input from our senses—our take on the reality around us—is first assessed and assigned an emotional value, such as “friend or foe,” “safe or dangerous,” or “pleasure or pain.” As a result of each decision, a “fight or flight” reaction is triggered. Interestingly, our survival brain is also the seat of empathy: our ability to sense another person’s inner state, and to care for others.

Our cognitive brain—located in the neo-cortex—is the seat of our language centers, of evaluating and planning, of anticipating consequences, of organizing chosen actions towards chosen goals, including emotional goals. In short, the cognitive brain is what allows us to put into words our first reactions so that we can evaluate them and make sure that we choose the considered action most likely to result in our long-term best interest.

What builds resilience is a sustained dialogue between our two brains. Therefore, it is essential that we learn to attend to both of them all the time. The habitual practice of attending to the signals from both our brains, and of sustaining a dialogue between them, yields reflective awareness. This kind of awareness guides us toward considered decisions and actions. It fosters confidence in our inner resources, and ultimately leads to feeling satisfied with ourselves and with our life. Above all, it guards us against “emotional hijackings,” those devastating emotional storms, which, in the presence of a perceived threat, can lead to impulsive reactions.

Tools to strengthen our internal resources

There are many ways to develop reflective awareness. It is sometimes useful to think of our psychological resources as mental muscle. Like physical muscle, it can be developed through training, but it takes practice and patience to develop the new mental posture that can help one to be and function at one’s best. Commitment and persistence will yield the desired results. Here are some exercises anyone can begin to experiment with.

Assume mastery: mastery means trusting one’s ability to deal with life’s challenges. One assumes the feeling of mastery by refusing to fall into a defensive attitude. Defensiveness, and feeling inadequate, inevitably leads to aggression—be it open or passive. Mastery, that is, self-trust, arises from paying attention to the signals from both our brains. That is what “being centered” is all about. Following are some practices that help develop mastery.

• Tune in to your emotional brain.
• Name the feeling: when any comfort or discomfort stirs in you, practice trying to find the word or words that best describe it. Be prepared to proceed by approximation.
• Describe your emotional experience: what you feel about something or someone, and, if you can get in touch with it, what makes you feel that way.
• Trust your gut feeling. Store away your first impressions. They often embody the wisdom of the emotional brain. At the very least they provide a link to the analogues in our stored memory on which our gut reactions—and prejudices—are based.

Using your cognitive functions, think about the following: a description of the problem; alternative interpretations of it; possible solutions; ways and means to implement those solutions; and their feasibility. Then anticipate and evaluate consequences of the solutions; assess long-term benefits and costs to you; choose a course of action and pursue it with determination, but without rigidity and without desperate investment.

Circle of success

When practicing mastery, cultivate flexibility: most problems can be tackled in more than one way. Treat every undertaking as an experiment. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, try another approach. If that doesn’t work, define the problem in a different way and consider what new approaches the redefinition suggests.

Maintain agency: above all, stay in the driver’s seat. Tell yourself that you haven’t failed. Some of your experiments haven’t worked, that’s all. You can always devise others. Some of them will work. Persistence will get you there. Disappointments are inevitable in life, but they do not need to demoralize you, or to erode your self-esteem.

Dr. Francesca von Broembsen is a psychologist in private practice in Concord.She specializes in self-development and life coaching. 

Stress has always been a fact of life, for humans and animals alike. Looking out for predators while foraging for food, or while defending one’s territory, is just as stressful as dealing with a difficult boss, making ends meet, or having relationship problems. Stress is simply a reality that has to be dealt with. However, modern life has created its own brand of stressors that requires a constant expansion of the resources of the human brain and nervous system simply to keep up with everyday life.

What Is Stress?

Stress arises when the demands of a task or situation strain the internal resources—physical, emotional, and cognitive—that a person can deploy to meet those demands. When demands persistently exceed those resources, in kind or quantity, the result is burnout. This is a form of physical and psychological decompensation that can manifest itself in a variety of ways—from simple fatigue, to irritability and anger management problems, to impulsive behavior, to anxiety and depression, or physical illness. Which form burnout will take depends on the person’s preexisting self-concept, and on that individual’s customary ways of protecting his or her sense of competence and self-esteem.

Modern Stressors

There are three stressors unique to modern life. One of these is the exponential acceleration of the rate of change. Another is the sheer quantity of the tasks we are routinely expected to do, whether in work, family care, or leisure activities. Together, these two stressors give rise to the third—a sense of the acceleration and compression of time.

Change, like stress, is a given of living. After all, evolution is change, and change is both necessary and beneficial. It refreshes our sensibility, creates excitement, and protects us from boredom. But to remain beneficial, change needs to be in balance with the familiar. The predictable rhythms and patterns of a familiar environment are the necessary base for comfort. This familiarity allows us to rely on automatic responses when we have to deal with the tasks required by everyday life, like driving a car, or paying monthly bills. Change suspends the usefulness of our automatic responses, and forces us to devise new ways of dealing with the challenge. This is good, because it forces us to use our brain in new ways, creating new neural pathways that make our brain more powerful. However, this focused attention expends a much higher level of energy than automatic responses. A moderate amount of change refreshes us, but a consistently high level of change exhausts us.

In short, change itself is not the problem. The rate of change is. It has been said that human comfort depends on living in a world we perceive as functioning on a human scale. That means that, at least with regard to human affairs and activity, a people feel that they have some choice in whether to bring about, or at least take on, a given change. As a result, they can deal with the requirements of daily life at his or her own pace. In the 21st century, that is not a prevalent experience. Almost everything we do—from making a phone call, to depositing our paycheck, to working out at the gym—is paced according to the rhythms of some machine. As a TV ad has been announcing for some years now, today’s implicit demand is that humans adjust to “moving at the speed of business.”

But “moving at the speed of business” alters the scale. From the time frame of comfortable human functioning, it thrusts us into the time frame of technology, and of our profit-driven business world. Now, having worked for several centuries to reduce to 40 hours the amount of time a person is required to work in order to earn a family’s living, we find that keeping a middle-class family often requires two workers expected to spend an average of 50 to 60 hours a week at work.

The quantity issue—the sheer magnitude of the load we take on in the running of our daily lives—can be summarized by four characteristics of modern living: the nuclear family, two-wage households, the do-it-yourself approach, and the constant injunction to get more, do more, be more. Clearly, each of these characteristics yields its own benefits, but it also creates pressure to spread oneself thinner and thinner in the attempt to do single-handedly a variety of tasks that in less pressured times used to be spread around among a number of people.

For instance, day-care centers are a useful alternative to stay-at-home moms or live-in grandparents, but they compress family life, and do not relieve parents of the additional demand to fit drop-off and pickup of children into an already tight schedule. While I fully endorse the expansion of a woman’s world beyond the confines of the family home, or the pursuit of fitness and mental expansion through extracurricular activities, these activities also contribute to the acceleration and compression of time that results in people always feeling both scrunched and stretched. Time has become modern man’s torture rack.

Stress and Self-Esteem

Sustained stress undermines a person’s confidence that his or her resources are sufficient to deal effectively with the world, and therefore adequate to ensure survival—be it economic, psychological, or even physical. Under these conditions, a person begins to feel first ineffective, then at risk, then helpless. The loss of a sense of agency—of being in charge of one’s own life—undermines one’s self-trust. That in turn erodes the possibility of initiative and considered risk-taking, and eventually leads to self-devaluation, paralysis, and self-contempt. Time and again, I hear depressed people declare with profound shame: “I despise myself.”

Building Resilience: The Two-Brain Dialogue

Resilience to stress has to do with cultivating internal resources to keep them ahead—or at least abreast of—life’s demands.

Our psychological resources fall into two categories, both of which need to be cultivated. The two categories correspond to the functions of our two brains—our “survival brain” and our “cognitive brain.” Our survival brain—the various structures of the limbic system—is shared with most of vertebrate life. It is often referred to as the reptilian brain. Of course, in humans, it is far more than that. More accurately, it is described as the “emotional brain.” It is here that the input from our senses—our take on the reality around us—is first assessed and assigned an emotional value, such as “friend or foe,” “safe or dangerous,” or “pleasure or pain.” As a result of each decision, a “fight or flight” reaction is triggered. Interestingly, our survival brain is also the seat of empathy: our ability to sense another person’s inner state, and to care for others.

Our cognitive brain—located in the neo-cortex—is the seat of our language centers, of evaluating and planning, of anticipating consequences, of organizing chosen actions towards chosen goals, including emotional goals. In short, the cognitive brain is what allows us to put into words our first reactions so that we can evaluate them and make sure that we choose the considered action most likely to result in our long-term best interest.

What builds resilience is a sustained dialogue between our two brains. Therefore, it is essential that we learn to attend to both of them all the time. The habitual practice of attending to the signals from both our brains, and of sustaining a dialogue between them, yields reflective awareness. This kind of awareness guides us toward considered decisions and actions. It fosters confidence in our inner resources, and ultimately leads to feeling satisfied with ourselves and with our life. Above all, it guards us against “emotional hijackings,” those devastating emotional storms, which, in the presence of a perceived threat, can lead to impulsive reactions.

Tools to Strengthen Our Internal Resources

There are many ways to develop reflective awareness. It is sometimes useful to think of our psychological resources as mental muscle. Like physical muscle, it can be developed through training, but it takes practice and patience to develop the new mental posture that can help one to be and function at one’s best. Commitment and persistence will yield the desired results. Here are some exercises anyone can begin to experiment with.

Assume mastery: mastery means trusting one’s ability to deal with life’s challenges. One assumes the feeling of mastery by refusing to fall into a defensive attitude. Defensiveness, and feeling inadequate, inevitably leads to aggression—be it open or passive. Mastery, that is, self-trust, arises from paying attention to the signals from both our brains. That is what “being centered” is all about. Following are some practices that help develop mastery.

• Tune in to your emotional brain.

• Name the feeling: when any comfort or discomfort stirs in you, practice trying to find the word or words that best describe it. Be prepared to proceed by approximation.

• Describe your emotional experience: what you feel about something or someone, and, if you can get in touch with it, what makes you feel that way.

• Trust your gut feeling. Store away your first impressions. They often embody the wisdom of the emotional brain. At the very least they provide a link to the analogues in our stored memory on which our gut reactions—and prejudices—are based.

Using your cognitive functions, think about the following: a description of the problem; alternative interpretations of it; possible solutions; ways and means to implement those solutions; and their feasibility. Then anticipate and evaluate consequences of the solutions; assess long-term benefits and costs to you; choose a course of action and pursue it with determination, but without rigidity and without desperate investment.

Circle of Success

When practicing mastery, cultivate flexibility: most problems can be tackled in more than one way. Treat every undertaking as an experiment. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, try another approach. If that doesn’t work, define the problem in a different way and consider what new approaches the redefinition suggests.

Maintain agency: above all, stay in the driver’s seat. Tell yourself that you haven’t failed. Some of your experiments haven’t worked, that’s all. You can always devise others. Some of them will work. Persistence will get you there. Disappointments are inevitable in life, but they do not need to demoralize you, or to erode your self-esteem.

Dr. Francesca von Broembsen is a psychologist in private practice in Concord.She specializes in self-development and life coaching. Readers can ask Dr. von Broembsen a question for a later column by sending an email to features@harvardpress.com.