Mindfulness to Deal With Extreme Stress

Extreme stress 

People whose bodies respond rapidly to a threat – with a surge of the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol – but who then recover quickly seem to cope better with stressful situations and jobs, such as working in the military.
- having a moral compass
- drawing on faith
- using social support
- having good role models
- being physically fit
- making sure your brain is challenged
- having ‘cognitive and emotional flexibility’
- having ‘meaning, purpose and growth’ in life
- ‘realistic’ optimism.
Lantieri believes that mindfulness and other fundamental stress-reducing strategies are vital foundations for the kinds of changes Charney talks about. “Many of the factors he mentions are internal strengths that can be cultivated through mindfulness – such as cognitive and emotional flexibility or facing fear. We can’t just tell people that it’s better to face their fear without helping them figure out how,” she says.

More resilient people also seem to be better at using the hormone dopamine – which has a role in the brain’s reward system – to help keep them positive during stress. Charney’s team, along with colleagues from the National Institutes of Health, studied a group of US Special Forces soldiers. They found that the amount of activity in the reward systems of the soldiers’ brains remained high when they lost money in an experimental game, unlike in the brains of regular civilian volunteers. This suggests the system in resilient people’s brains may be less affected by stress or adversity. Each of the soldiers’ brains also featured a healthily large hippocampus (which as well as enabling the formation of new memories also helps regulate the release of the fight-or-flight hormone adrenalin) and a strongly active prefrontal cortex, the brain region dubbed ‘the seat of rational thinking’. This in turn helps inhibit the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes negative emotions such as fear and anger, allowing the prefrontal cortex to come up with a sensible plan to cope with a threat.

Charney and Southwick have also investigated the psychological attitudes and mental strategies linked to resilience. Their interviewees include former US prisoners of war in Vietnam, victims of sexual abuse in Washington DC, survivors of an earthquake in Pakistan, and later people who were hit hard by 9/11. “We started out with a blank slate,” Charney says. To the people who recovered well, they asked: “Tell us how you made it? What were the factors?”

Through their research, Charney and Southwick have identified 10 psychological and social factors that they think make for stronger resilience, either alone or ideally in combination:

- facing fear
- having a moral compass
- drawing on faith
- using social support
- having good role models
- being physically fit
- making sure your brain is challenged
- having ‘cognitive and emotional flexibility’
- having ‘meaning, purpose and growth’ in life
- ‘realistic’ optimism.

Charney and Southwick are convinced that it is possible to develop these 10 factors, and that this can lead to a positive change for generally healthy people in their ability to cope not just with a major trauma, but also with the day-to-day stresses of life. One technique, in particular, might help people with this development. Until recently this technique was relatively obscure. Now it’s everywhere: mindfulness.

Mindful practice

In September 2001, as New Yorkers began to clear away the physical debris of the terrorist attacks, Lantieri developed her Inner Resilience Programme for teachers. Working with them, she developed a suite of tools to promote mindfulness in the classroom, to help children cope not only with serious traumas, like the terrorist attacks, but also with more everyday stressors, from exams to poverty to conflict in the home. The tools include deep breathing exercises designed to improve conscious awareness of the body and how to calm it down, in part to tackle stress and anxiety, and in theory to boost long-term psychological resilience.

Lantieri’s is one of the longest-running ‘resilience-building’ programmes for schools, but it isn’t the only one out there. The concept of resilience – both in schools and beyond the classroom – is a hot one. In February 2014 a UK cross-party government group produced a report calling for schools to promote “character and resilience”. May 2014 saw the launch of an all-party group to explore the potential for mindfulness in education, as well as in health and criminal justice.