Google ‘Dr Andrew Huberman stress’ and you’ll come across a flurry of articles, podcasts and video interviews from the past couple of months.
Dr Huberman, based at Stanford University School of Medicine, is at the cutting edge of neuroscientific research into stress, and recently he has been sharing his lab’s findings with the wider public. This is great news. Not only is his research helpful on a practical level, he’s a great communicator too.
So what’s he been saying about the subject?
The arousal continuum
Dr. Huberman describes stress as one position along what is called the arousal continuum. At one end you would find someone having a panic attack and at the other end would be someone in a coma. In between these extremes are such physiological states as highly alert, alert and calm, drowsy and deeply asleep. Here’s what the continuum looks like:
For as long as we are alive, at any given moment we are somewhere along this continuum. We are either pulled towards alertness by our sympathetic nervous system or towards calmness by our parasympathetic nervous system. And when there’s balance between the two systems, we are both alert and calm, which is the optimal state for most waking activities.
At one extreme, deep sleep is vital for restoring mental and physical wellbeing, healing wounds and consolidating learning that has happened during the day. And towards the other extreme, high levels of alertness are also often essential and well-matched to the situation – for example, if you’re trying to avoid being involved in a road traffic accident. However, too much stress is harmful and will result in poor mental and physical outcomes such as impulsivity and an impaired immune system.
Vision and breathing: two levers for controlling stress
Dr Huberman and his team at Stanford have for some time been building a science-based framework for combating stress. Their aim has been to create tools which anyone can use to decrease alertness and increase calmness.
Rather than investigate practices such as meditation or massage, their focus has been on more immediate approaches which allow individuals to voluntarily make ‘real-time’ changes to their autonomic arousal, or in other words their position along the arousal continuum.
What Huberman’s laboratory has discovered is that making changes to vision and breathing are the fastest ways an individual can combat stress. When you see something exciting or stressful, your pupils dilate and your visual system goes into what could be described as the equivalent of portrait mode on a smartphone. Your field of vision narrows, the one thing in front of you is brought into sharp relief, and everything else in the background becomes blurred.
Conversely, the stress response can also be dampened by changing the way you view your environment. That is, by widening your gaze and seeing much further into the periphery – above, below and to the sides of you.
Changing your breathing also has immediate effects on stress because it influences your heart rate. When you exhale, your diaphragm rises and creates less space for the heart. This causes the blood to flow more quickly through the heart, and as a result the brain sends a signal to slow down the heart rate. The opposite is true for the inhale.
In short, extending your outbreath will slow down your heart rate and reduce your autonomic arousal.
One further insight into how breathing can reduce stress is the ‘physiological sigh’ which describes a double inhale followed by an exhale. This is a natural breathing pattern (animals will also breathe like this) and it offloads the maximum amount of carbon dioxide from the lungs.
The Alexander Technique and Stress
Most people would recognize in themselves the connection between stress and muscle tension. Unconnected to Dr Huberman’s work, scientists have established that the Alexander Technique improves both the adaptability and distribution of postural muscle tone in the body. These scientists also postulate that the modification of postural muscle tone is the likely mechanism through which the Alexander Technique can regulate the emotions. They give three possible explanations:
- adaptable or reduced tension in the chest, abdomen and back leads to deeper, slower breaths, which in turn downregulates the sympathetic nervous system;
- based on an embodied cognition model, activating postural patterns associated with being calm, alert, and confident facilitates these feelings;
- axial motor regions, central to the Alexander Technique, may have a strong influence on the regulation of the adrenal response to stress.
Whatever the precise mechanisms, the Alexander Technique trains individuals to interact in real-time with postural muscle tone, and this seems to have a calming effect. The Alexander Technique may therefore be of interest to Dr. Huberman’s lab in its quest for tools that help individuals combat stress in real time by changing their autonomic arousal.
